Your Broker Doesn't Hold Your Shares. Here's Who Does, and What Happens If Your Broker Collapses
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5 min read
Imagine you wake up to a news alert: OJK, Indonesia's financial regulator, has just revoked your broker's business license. Your first thought is probably about the shares sitting in your account. Are they gone? The honest answer is that your broker was never actually holding them in the first place. A separate institution was, the whole time, and that is exactly why a broker collapsing does not usually mean an investor's shares disappear with it.
The institution is called KSEI, short for Kustodian Sentral Efek Indonesia, Indonesia's central securities depository. Every OJK-licensed brokerage in the country is required to record its clients' shares inside KSEI, not on the broker's own books. This is called custody: someone other than the owner physically or electronically holds an asset on the owner's behalf.
Each investor gets an individually segregated account inside KSEI called a Sub-Rekening Efek (Sub-Securities Account, SRE), tied to a personal identifier called an SID (Single Investor Identification). Your shares sit under your own SID, not blended into a pool with everyone else's or with the broker's own holdings. Because the shares are legally yours and recorded that way at KSEI, they are not part of the broker's assets. If the broker fails, its creditors cannot claim them, and OJK cannot freeze them as company property.
Say you hold shares of Bank Central Asia through your brokerage app. You can check its price on its NetWort asset page any time you like, but the shares themselves live in your own KSEI sub-account no matter which licensed broker's app you used to buy them. Switching brokers, or losing your broker entirely, does not touch that underlying record.
This is not a hypothetical. The Indonesia Stock Exchange revoked PT Kresna Sekuritas's exchange membership approval effective 28 July 2021, after the broker had been suspended for more than 90 consecutive trading days (CNBC Indonesia, Tribunnews). Kresna Sekuritas itself told customers at the time that their securities remained recorded in KSEI accounts and their cash remained in individually named client fund accounts (RDN) at the settlement bank, both untouched by the company's own troubles, a point independent financial analysts confirmed in the same coverage. Customers were given a window to transfer their holdings to a broker of their choice, with anything left over defaulting to a straightforward transfer process through KSEI.
Kresna Sekuritas was not an isolated case. OJK revoked PT Corpus Sekuritas Indonesia's license on 8 November 2023, after the firm had stopped operating and filing reports for two straight years and failed to meet its minimum capital requirement (OJK announcement PENG-9/PM.1/2023, reported by CNBC Indonesia and Katadata). OJK revoked PT Indo Mitra Sekuritas's license in April 2025 after separate violations. In none of these cases did investors' KSEI-recorded shares get absorbed into the failed broker's estate. The custody structure is what made that possible, not a one-time exception.
Your cash sits in a Rekening Dana Nasabah (RDN), a bank account opened in your own name at a payment bank, separate from the broker's own operating account, the same structure Kresna Sekuritas's customers relied on. On top of that, Indonesia has a dedicated backstop fund called SIPF (Securities Investor Protection Fund), which administers the Dana Perlindungan Pemodal, the Investor Protection Fund, under OJK supervision.
It is worth being precise about what SIPF actually pays for, because it is easy to assume it covers more than it does. SIPF only compensates investors when a broker or custodian commits fraud or misappropriates client assets, current cap Rp200 million per investor and Rp100 billion per custodian per incident (raised from a lower cap in a 2021 update, per Bareksa and Antara News). It does not cover a stock's price falling, a company getting delisted, or any ordinary market loss. Those are investment risks you take on regardless of custody, and no protection fund anywhere insures against them.
You do not have to take a broker's word for what KSEI shows under your own SID. KSEI runs a free portal called AKSes (Acuan Kepemilikan Sekuritas, at akses.ksei.co.id) where any investor can log in and see exactly what is recorded in their own Sub-Rekening Efek, independent of what any single broker's own app displays. It is the most direct proof that the custody record and the broker's own interface are two separate things.
KSEI's structure protects the legal ownership of your shares. It does not give you a single, day-to-day view of everything you hold if your positions are spread across more than one broker, or across shares, crypto and other assets at once. That is a different, more practical problem worth solving on your own. Log your holdings in NetWort's Dashboard and you get one place that tracks your total portfolio value, profit and loss, and holdings count over time, independent of any single broker's own app. It will not verify your KSEI custody record for you, but it gives you an independent, at-a-glance record of what you believe you own, which is worth having no matter how many brokers you use.