A decade ago, building a diversified portfolio often meant juggling separate relationships: one account for stocks, another route for bonds, a mutual fund folio somewhere else, and paper certificates for anything that hadn't gone digital yet. That fragmented setup is quietly disappearing. A growing share of Indian investors now manage most of their portfolio through a single account, and the demat account sits at the centre of that shift.

Understanding why this consolidation is happening also means understanding what a demat account technically does, since not every asset an investor holds through it works the same way behind the scenes.