Four Nominees on One Bank Account: What the 2025 Banking Amendment Changes for NRIs With Heirs in Two Countries

If your money sits in India but your heirs do not, the single-nominee rule has quietly been a problem for years. An NRI in Toronto with two children, one in Canada and one still in India, could name only one of them on an NRO fixed deposit. An NRI couple in Dubai with an NRE account and a Mumbai locker faced the same wall: one nominee per account, one per locker, take it or leave it. The workaround was to scatter money across multiple accounts so each child could be the nominee on one, which is administratively absurd, or to name a single nominee and trust them to share, which is exactly the kind of trust that fails when the money lands.

The 30-second answer: The Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025 amended Section 45ZA of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, changing "one person" to "one or more persons not exceeding four, either successively or simultaneously". The nomination provisions (Sections 10 to 13) took effect on 1 November 2025. You can now name up to four nominees on a deposit account: simultaneously, with a percentage share for each that totals 100, or successively, ranked so the next takes effect only on the prior nominee's death. Lockers and safe-custody articles allow successive only. This applies to NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts. Critically, it changes nothing about ownership: a nominee is still a custodian, and your will still governs who finally inherits.

This is a banking news change, not a tax change, so I will keep the law tight and spend the words on what actually matters to you: why the old single-nominee rule hurt NRIs more than residents, what the four-nominee facility fixes and what it deliberately does not, the trap of mistaking a nomination for a will, and the concrete steps to set this up on accounts you hold from abroad. If you only remember one thing, make it this: adding four nominees is worth doing, but it is a convenience tool for your bank, not a substitute for an estate plan.

What actually changed in the law, in one read

The Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025 is Act No. 16 of 2025. It received the President's assent on 15 April 2025 and carries nineteen amendments across five statutes, including the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 and the Banking Regulation Act, 1949. Most of it is governance plumbing, director tenures, reporting uniformity, audit quality in public sector banks. The part that touches your accounts is narrow and was switched on separately.

The government notified that Sections 10, 11, 12 and 13 of the amending Act would come into force on 1 November 2025. Those four sections deal only with nomination: Section 10 amends Section 45ZA of the Banking Regulation Act (deposit accounts), and the others extend the same logic to articles in safe custody and to safety lockers. The operative change in Section 45ZA is a few words. Where the old text let a depositor "nominate one person", it now reads "one or more persons not exceeding four, either successively or simultaneously". That is the whole reform, and it is enough.

Two structural rules sit on top of the four-nominee cap, and they are where people get tripped up. First, deposit accounts (your savings account, current account, recurring deposit and fixed deposit) let you choose between the two forms. Second, lockers and articles in safe custody allow successive nomination only, no percentage split, because you cannot hand four people simultaneous percentage rights to the physical contents of one locker on the day it is opened.

One more practical point on timing. The Act sets the framework, but the operational detail, the actual forms you fill in and the procedure to add, change or cancel nominees, comes through the Banking Companies (Nomination) Rules, 2025, which the Ministry of Finance said would follow to standardise this across every bank. As banks roll out the revised forms through their branches and net-banking portals, expect some unevenness in early 2026 over what the online interface supports versus what you can still only do on paper. None of that changes your rights under the section; it only changes the queue you stand in.

Simultaneous versus successive, and which one an NRI usually wants

This is the choice that matters, so be deliberate about it rather than letting a branch officer tick a default box.

Simultaneous nomination means up to four people are nominees at the same moment, and you assign each a percentage that must add to 100. On your death the bank divides the balance in those exact proportions and pays each nominee directly. If you name your spouse at 50%, and two children at 25% each, the bank settles in that split without anyone having to negotiate. This is the form that finally fixes the NRI multi-heir problem, because it lets one NRO fixed deposit reach three or four people in defined shares without you fragmenting the deposit across accounts.

Successive nomination is a queue, not a split. You rank up to four people. Only the first is the live nominee. The second becomes the nominee only if the first has predeceased you, the third only if the first two have, and so on. At any given moment exactly one person is the nominee. This is the right tool when you want a clear single line of succession with built-in backups, for example an elderly NRI who names a spouse first, then an adult child as the fallback if the spouse dies first, then a sibling behind that.

Put the difference in concrete terms. Anil, an NRI in London, holds an NRO fixed deposit of Rs 80,00,000. He has two daughters, one settled in Manchester and one in Pune, and he wants each to receive half. Under the old single-nominee rule he could name only one daughter; on his death she would receive the entire Rs 80,00,000 as nominee and would be legally obliged to hand Rs 40,00,000 to her sister, a transfer that itself raises questions about gift, remittance and proof, and that depends entirely on her honouring it. Under simultaneous nomination he now names both daughters at 50% each. On his death the bank pays Rs 40,00,000 to each directly, no inter-sibling transfer, no trust required, no cross-border gift to explain. That is the entire point of the reform for someone in his position.

Contrast that with Meera, an NRI in Abu Dhabi who holds an NRE account she funds from her UAE salary and wants her husband to inherit, with her son as a backstop only if her husband dies first. She does not want a split; she wants a clean single line. She chooses successive nomination: husband first, son second. While both are alive, only the husband is the nominee. If the husband predeceases her, the son moves up automatically and the account does not revert to having no nominee, which is the silent failure the old rule left you exposed to the moment your sole nominee died before you and you forgot to re-nominate.

The honest framing: for most NRIs with more than one intended beneficiary, simultaneous nomination with percentages is the better default, because it does the splitting at the bank and removes the human risk of one nominee being trusted to pass money on. Reserve successive nomination for the case where you genuinely want one heir with named backups, typically a spouse-first arrangement.

Why this lands harder for NRIs than for residents

A resident with one nominee and a frozen account has a problem too, but an NRI's version is worse on three counts, and naming four nominees with shares attacks all three.

The first is distance and friction. When a resident dies with a sole-nominee account and the real heirs are different people, the heirs are usually in India, can visit the branch, can produce documents, and can fight it out under one succession law. When an NRI dies, the heirs are frequently spread across two or three countries. Getting a Canadian-resident child and a UK-resident child to jointly chase a Mumbai branch, with apostilled documents and notarised affidavits flying across time zones, is the kind of process that drags for a year. A clean simultaneous nomination with percentages lets the bank pay each heir in their share without that choreography.

The second is the cross-border money trail. The old workaround, name one nominee and let them share, creates a remittance and gift problem that does not exist for a purely domestic family. If the sole nominee daughter in Pune receives the whole Rs 80,00,000 and then sends Rs 40,00,000 to her sister in Manchester, that is now a cross-border transfer with its own documentation, FEMA and possible tax-residence questions in the receiving country. Paying each heir directly as a named nominee sidesteps the whole chain.

The third is the dormancy and re-nomination gap. NRIs are, by definition, not walking into their Indian branch every few months. A sole nominee who dies before you leaves the account effectively un-nominated, and an NRI is the least likely person to notice and re-file. Successive nomination builds the backup into the original instruction, so the line of succession survives one nominee's death without you having to act from abroad.

The reform does not touch the rules that make NRI accounts distinctive in the first place. Your NRO balance is still repatriable only up to the USD 1 million per financial year ceiling with the usual Form 15CA and 15CB process, and your NRE balance is still freely repatriable. Nomination decides who collects; it does not change what they can take out of India once they collect it. If your heirs will themselves be non-residents, factor that repatriation reality into the plan, and read the dedicated guide on NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts for how those caps work in practice.

The trap that no number of nominees fixes: a nominee is not an owner

Here is where I have to be blunt, because the headlines around this change have blurred it. Allowing four nominees with percentage shares makes it tempting to treat the nomination form as a do-it-yourself will. It is not, and believing it is can hand your money to the wrong person.

A bank nominee is a trustee, a custodian. On your death the bank pays the nominee so it can close out its own liability without waiting for a succession certificate or probate. But the nominee does not become the owner of the money by virtue of being the nominee. Ownership passes to whoever inherits under your will, or, if you left no will, under the intestate succession law that applies to you, which for most Hindus is the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 and for Muslims is personal law. The Supreme Court has held this consistently, that nomination is a mode of payment and not a mode of inheritance. The 2025 amendment did nothing to disturb that principle; it only multiplied how many custodians you can name and let you pre-split the custody.

So the danger is precise. Suppose Anil, from the example above, names his two daughters as simultaneous nominees at 50% each, but his will leaves a third of his estate to a son he did not name on the account, because he assumed the bank account was "handled" by the nomination. On his death the bank pays Rs 40,00,000 to each daughter. The son can still claim his one-third share under the will, and the daughters are legally obliged to account for it. The nomination did not defeat the will; it just created a mess, because the bank paid money to people who are not, in full, the rightful owners, and now the family has to unwind it among themselves. The four-nominee facility made it easier to get this wrong at scale.

The fix is unglamorous and unavoidable: align your nominations with your will, and write the will. Nomination and will are not alternatives; they are two layers that should say the same thing. Use the nomination to make the bank pay quickly and to the right hands; use the will to make sure those hands are the rightful owners so nobody has to litigate. Where they disagree, the will wins on ownership and the nomination only wins on who got paid first, which is the worst of both worlds. The detail of how this interacts with succession law sits in the Supreme Court nominee-as-trustee ruling and in the broader NRI estate planning and wills guide, and if you hold Indian assets and live abroad you should read both before you decide your nominations are "done".

What an NRI should actually do, account by account

The mechanics are not hard, but they differ by what you hold and by the fact that you are doing them from another country.

For your NRE, NRO and FCNR deposit accounts, decide first whether you want a split or a line. If you have multiple intended heirs in defined proportions, choose simultaneous nomination and write out the percentages so they total exactly 100; a split that does not add to 100 will be rejected or will leave a gap the bank cannot settle. If you want one heir with backups, choose successive and rank up to four names in order. Then file the nomination on the bank's revised form, either through net banking if your bank's NRI portal supports the new four-nominee fields, or on paper. Most large banks (SBI, HDFC, ICICI, Axis) allow nomination changes by an NRI through internet banking or by a signed and, where required, attested physical form couriered to the branch or home branch. Expect that early in the rollout some portals will still show only the single-nominee field; if so, the paper form is your route and your right under Section 45ZA is unaffected.

For your safe-deposit locker and any articles in safe custody, your only option is successive nomination, up to four names in order of priority. There is no percentage split here. If you have a Mumbai locker holding jewellery you intend for two children equally, the nomination cannot do the splitting; it only decides who gets access. The equal split has to be done in your will, which makes the will even more important for physical assets than for cash.

A few execution points that bite NRIs specifically. Get the attestation right: a nomination form signed abroad often needs to be signed before a notary or the Indian consulate, and banks vary on what they accept, so confirm with your branch before you courier paper across continents, because a rejected form sent back from Mumbai costs you weeks. Keep your KYC current, because banks will not process a nomination change on an account flagged for re-KYC, and NRI re-KYC is the single most common reason a routine instruction stalls. And do not assume a joint account removes the need: on a joint NRE or NRO account the survivor takes the balance, but you should still nominate for the scenario where both holders die, and the four-nominee rule applies there too.

There is no statutory deadline forcing you to add nominees, and no penalty for the existing single nomination continuing to stand. But the cost of not acting is the old problem unchanged: one heir, or a frozen account, or a cross-border transfer your family has to engineer after you are gone. The reform handed you a better tool; using it is a thirty-minute job that you can do once and revisit only when your family changes.

Edge cases

Your existing single nominee does not vanish. If you nominated one person years ago, that nomination stands until you change it. The four-nominee facility is an option you opt into, not an automatic upgrade. To use it you must file a fresh nomination; doing so replaces the old one, so re-state the person you already had if you still want them included.

A minor as a nominee. You can name a minor, but you must appoint a person to receive the money on the minor's behalf until majority, exactly as before. With percentage shares this gets fiddly fast if more than one nominee is a minor, so for NRI families with young children abroad, naming the surviving parent and using the will to direct the children's shares is usually cleaner than loading minors onto the nomination.

Lockers cannot be percentage-split, so the will has to do it. Because lockers and safe custody allow successive nomination only, four heirs who are each meant to get a quarter of the locker's contents cannot be set up that way at the bank. The nominee gets access; the will decides ownership of the gold inside. Treat the locker nomination as "who can open it", not "who owns what is in it".

Different succession laws for different heirs. If your heirs are split across jurisdictions, the share they finally own is governed by the succession law applicable to you and to the asset, not by where the heir lives. Naming a Canada-resident and an India-resident child as 50-50 nominees gets the bank to pay each half, but their ownership and their tax in their own country are separate questions. See NRI inheritance and estate tax for the receiving-country exposure, which India does not levy but the US and UK can.

Rules and forms still settling. The Banking Companies (Nomination) Rules, 2025 standardise the procedure and forms. Until your bank has fully adopted them in its NRI channels, you may hit inconsistency between branches and the app. If a branch tells you four nominees "are not allowed yet", that is an implementation lag, not the law; escalate to the home branch or relationship manager rather than accepting it.

The closing read

The honest read is that this is a genuinely useful, narrowly scoped reform that NRIs should act on, while keeping its limits firmly in mind. The four-nominee facility, especially simultaneous nomination with percentage shares, solves a real and NRI-specific pain: getting one Indian deposit to several heirs in defined proportions without fragmenting accounts, without trusting one sibling to share, and without engineering cross-border transfers after a death. For most NRIs with more than one intended beneficiary, the recommendation is straightforward. Use simultaneous nomination with clean percentages on your NRE, NRO and FCNR deposits, set up successive nomination with ranked backups on your locker, and do it from abroad now while you are thinking about it rather than leaving the decade-old single nominee in place.

But do not let the convenience seduce you into thinking the job is finished. A nominee is still a custodian, your will still decides who owns the money, and the surest way to create a family dispute is to set four nominees, skip the will, and assume the bank has handled your estate. It has not. The four-nominee rule is the easy half. The estate plan, a will that names the same people in the same shares and covers everything the nomination cannot, is the half that actually protects your family. Do both, or the first one will quietly undermine you. If your estate spans real property, multiple jurisdictions, or heirs who are themselves non-residents, that is the point to sit with a lawyer who handles cross-border succession, not to rely on a nomination form or on this article.

Related guides

• NRI bank account nomination and succession
• The Supreme Court nominee-as-trustee ruling, explained
• NRI estate planning and wills
• NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts compared
• NRI inheritance and estate tax exposure
• All News and analysis
• All Banking guides
• All Investments guides

This guide is educational and general in nature and is not legal or financial advice. Nomination, succession and the cross-border treatment of inherited assets depend on your exact accounts, your will, the succession law that applies to you, and the law of the country where each heir lives. The nomination provisions of the Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 2025 took effect on 1 November 2025 and the implementing Banking Companies (Nomination) Rules, 2025 and bank-level forms were still being rolled out at the time of writing, so confirm the current procedure with your bank and a qualified lawyer before you finalise your nominations and will.