Gift City turns growth lever for cross-border digital payment firms — and the founders paying attention are the ones already filing their IFSCA applications.
The story starts with a number that's hard to argue with. India clocked $135.46 billion in remittance inflows in FY25, a 14% year-on-year rise, cementing its position as the world's top recipient of remittances — ahead of Mexico and China by a distance. That's not a fintech opportunity. That's a structural fact about the global economy that every cross-border payment operator has to reckon with. What's changed recently is where the infrastructure to serve that flow is being built.
Gujarat International Finance Tec-City — GIFT City — has existed since 2015, mostly as a policy ambition that outpaced its commercial reality. That's starting to change. In 2024, the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) notified the IFSCA (Payment Services) Regulations, 2024, permitting payment service providers to conduct a broad range of cross-border activities from within the IFSC — including account issuance, e-money account issuance, and merchant acquisition services. In practical terms, a payment firm can now structure its cross-border rails through GIFT City with the same statutory legitimacy it'd get from Singapore or Dubai, at a fraction of the operating cost.
The global cross-border payments market was valued at $212.55 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $320.73 billion by 2030. That trajectory — growing at a CAGR of 7.1% from 2025 to 2030 — is the canvas. GIFT City's pitch is that it can capture a meaningful slice of the India-linked portion of that market, which has historically been routed through Singapore, Mauritius, and the UAE. Grand View Research
What the IFSCA License Actually Gets You
The regulatory framework matters more than the tax breaks, though both are real. The IFSCA PSP Regulations are modelled after Singapore's Major Payment Institution license, the UK's Electronic Money Institution license, and Hong Kong's Stored Value Facility regime, making it legally compatible with global financial partners. That's not marketing copy — it's a deliberate architectural choice by IFSCA to make the GIFT City license legible to counterparties in London, Frankfurt, and New York who need to satisfy their own compliance teams before routing anything through India.
The tax structure is aggressive by any standard. IFSC units receive zero income tax for ten years out of fifteen, zero tax on capital gains from derivative transactions, and GST exemption on services offered to foreign clients. Compare that to Singapore's 17% corporate rate (with exemptions) or the UAE's newly introduced 9% corporate tax, and the math starts to look interesting — especially for a payment firm with thin margins on high-volume corridors.
Licensing timelines are among the fastest globally: a sandbox or limited-use authorization typically takes four to six weeks; full authorization comes within six to twelve weeks, depending on document completeness. A founder who's spent 18 months navigating a European EMI application will find that timeline remarkable, if slightly suspicious. It shouldn't be — IFSCA has consciously built for speed, with single-window clearance replacing the multi-regulator maze that covers RBI, SEBI, and FEMA domestically. Paycompliance
The most telling recent data point isn't a regulatory document. It's a company. Interpolitan Money, a UK-headquartered Electronic Money Institution, recently became the first British payments business to receive an IFSCA Certificate of Authorisation, positioning itself as a multi-currency bridge for funds, corporates, and family offices at the intersection of the UK, UAE, and India. FFNews
"Receiving our IFSCA Certificate of Authorisation is a defining milestone, not just for Interpolitan, but for the UK-India payments corridor. India's ambition is extraordinary, and GIFT-IFSC is the gateway through which global capital will increasingly flow." — Anoop Nair, COO, Interpolitan Money
What's notable about Interpolitan's move isn't the company size — it's the strategic logic. Historically, cross-border capital flows between the UK and India have been hindered by complex rupee conversion rules and fragmented banking layers. GIFT City, by treating IFSC entities as non-resident from a foreign exchange perspective, sidesteps the most painful parts of that plumbing. A payment firm operating from IFSC can transact in fifteen specified foreign currencies — from USD and EUR to AED and SGD — while still having access to Indian rupee for administrative expenses. That's a genuinely useful combination for anyone building a corridor product between India and the Gulf, UK, or Southeast Asia. FFNews
The Global Dimension
To understand why GIFT City matters right now, you have to look at what's happening to cross-border payment infrastructure globally. Real-time links such as UPI-PayNow and FedNow pilots are compressing settlement windows from several days to seconds, pulling high-frequency flows away from banks. The PayNow-UPI bridge moved $1.2 billion in 2025 transactions, while Gulf Cooperation Council to South Asia corridors processed $142 billion in remittances. The infrastructure layer is shifting. Legacy correspondent banking is losing ground to bilateral fast-payment integrations — and India is aggressively building those bilateral links. Mordor Intelligence
India's plans to extend UPI to more than 20 countries by March 2029 are set to transform cross-border remittances, according to an NPCI-BCG report. PayPal's CEO Alex Chriss said at the Global Fintech Fest in 2025 that India "comes up everywhere" he goes — and then UPI became the first payments system integrated on the PayPal World platform for international transactions. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when a country has simultaneously built world-class domestic rails, a massive diaspora with remittance needs, and a government treating payments as diplomatic infrastructure. CNBC
GIFT City is where the offshore architecture plugs into all of that. It's the layer that lets a UK fintech, a Singapore fund manager, or a Dubai-based payments startup access the India stack with global-standard regulatory treatment — without setting up a full domestic Indian entity subject to RBI's domestic licensing regime.
The Contrarian Case
Here's what nobody in the GIFT City promotional material will tell you: the infrastructure is still being built, and the substance requirements are tightening.
As the IFSCA moves to surrender inactive licenses and tighten oversight in 2026, firms must demonstrate genuine transactional activity to maintain their pioneer status. That means a founder who secures an IFSCA license and then runs a thin-staffed, low-activity presence for two years may find they've bought themselves a compliance problem rather than a growth platform. The regulator is explicitly moving away from the offshore-shell model it doesn't want GIFT City to become. FFNews
There's also the practical reality of operating from Gandhinagar, Gujarat, rather than Singapore's Raffles Place or DIFC's Gate district. By the end of Q1 2024, GIFT City facilitated over $500 million in cross-border transactions per day — impressive in absolute terms, but still a fraction of what flows through established hubs. The talent pool, while growing (the IFSC employs over 25,000 professionals today), doesn't yet match the depth of Singapore or London for specialist payments roles. Founders should factor in the real cost of building a team in Ahmedabad versus hiring from an established fintech hub.
The pitch that GIFT City is "Singapore but cheaper" is roughly accurate. The part they leave out is that Singapore is Singapore because it's been building trust with global counterparties for forty years. IFSCA is nine years old.
What to Watch
Three signals that'll tell you whether GIFT City's cross-border payments momentum is real or promotional:
License-to-revenue conversion rates. IFSCA processed 152 fintech license applications from 14 countries and onboarded 60+ fintech entities by late 2024. The number that matters is how many of those are generating meaningful transaction volume in 2025-26 versus holding licenses for optionality.
UK-India trade agreement progress. Interpolitan's move is strategically aligned with the 2026 UK-India Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. If that agreement advances financial services integration clauses, GIFT City becomes structurally more valuable almost overnight as a licensed gateway for British fintechs entering the India corridor.
IFSCA enforcement actions. The regulator's willingness to cancel inactive licenses isn't a warning sign — it's actually the most credible signal that GIFT City is serious about becoming a functioning hub rather than a letterbox jurisdiction. Watch for the first publicised revocations; they'll matter more than any new license announcement.
The framing that best explains GIFT City's current moment isn't "India's answer to Singapore." It's more specific than that. It's a jurisdictional product — a platform to "onshore the offshore," designed to allow entities to undertake offshore transactions from within India — that happens to land at precisely the moment when India's domestic payment infrastructure has become globally competitive and its diaspora corridors are carrying record volumes. For a cross-border payment firm building for the next decade of India-linked flows, the question isn't whether GIFT City is worth understanding. It's whether you can afford to wait until your competitors have already set up there to find out.
