GIFT City's Global Ambition Meets Its Biggest Operational Challenge

On June 19, 2026, IFSCA published a KYC FAQ that most people in financial services have never heard of. No press conference. No headlines. But for anyone trying to get global investors into GIFT City, it changed everything.

For the first time, IFSCA formally recognised digital e-notarisation, electronic apostilles, and verifiable electronic signatures as valid methods of document authentication for overseas investors. In plain terms: an NRI in Dubai or Toronto could now complete their entire onboarding journey without visiting a notary, an embassy, or a branch. Entirely digitally. Entirely compliant.

To understand why that matters, you need to understand what GIFT City has become, and why its growth has hit a ceiling it wasn't supposed to hit.

Growth of GIFT City

GIFT City was established as India's first IFSC in December 2015. For the first few years it was largely aspirational - a regulatory framework in search of participants.

That changed decisively when IFSCA was set up in 2020 as a unified regulator, replacing the fragmented oversight that had slowed early growth. The institutional wave followed. 

By 2022, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Mitsubishi UFJ had opened offices. Fund managers arrived. Aircraft leasing took off. Insurance and reinsurance volumes grew from USD 102 million in 2020 to USD 1.2 billion by 2025. 

By 2025, GIFT City ranked 46th in the Global Financial Centres Index - the first time an Indian financial centre had appeared in that ranking at all. 

By March 2026, the numbers told the full story.

1,213 regulated entities. 217 fund managers. USD 111 billion in banking assets across 37 banks, including 20 foreign institutions. USD 39.09 billion in cumulative fund commitments.

A decade of policy reform had produced something real: a functioning international financial centre with genuine depth across banking, capital markets, fund management, insurance and leasing.

And yet the number of investors actually participating in this ecosystem is remarkably small relative to its scale.

The Participation Problem

Out of nearly $39 billion in total fund commitments, retail schemes account for just $12.74 million across nine funds. Institutional investors continue to dominate the ecosystem, with approximately $32 billion in commitments and $15.5 billion already deployed.

That isn't to say retail demand doesn't exist.
The retail investor base has grown fast: from 255 in September 2025 to 3,438 by March 2026. 

BUT those are the participation numbers for an ENTIRE international financial centre.
Against 35 million addressable NRIs, they are a rounding error.

GIFT City was designed, in large part, to serve the 32 million Non-Resident Indians spread across the world's major financial centres. The US, UK, UAE, Singapore, Canada, Australia - these are the markets GIFT City has explicitly prioritised. The diaspora is wealthy, financially sophisticated, and deeply connected to India. 

The appetite for Indian financial products structured through a tax-efficient international centre should be enormous. And it actually is. 

Then Why Can’t the Investors Get In?

Opening an account in GIFT City from outside India is not like opening a brokerage account online. An NRI needs to complete video-based identity verification, then produce supporting documents: powers of attorney, address proofs, declarations. 

All the documents need to be executed in their country of residence. They need to be authenticated to meet the legal standards of both their home jurisdiction and India's regulatory framework.

Depending on where the investor lives, that means notarisation, apostille, certified translation, or some combination of all three. Every step involves a different authority. An embassy appointment or a notary visit. Documents couriered to GIFT Operation Center of the institutions, always. 

The process wasn't designed to be difficult. It was just too operational for the digital, cross-border reality of the investors GIFT City was trying to reach.

50 to 60% of NRI account opening applications were stalling at the document authentication step alone.

The consequences showed up publicly. XED Executive Education attempted GIFT City's first-ever IPO, listed on NSE International Exchange and India INX. Strong retail interest. But NRI and foreign investors couldn't complete verification within the bidding window. The deadline was extended. It didn't help. The IPO closed at roughly 5% subscribed and was withdrawn.

GIFT City's most visible milestone had been derailed by a broken onboarding process.

The V-CIP Fix

IFSCA saw the problem and addressed it in layers: each regulatory change targeting a specific point of friction as it became visible. 

The 2022 AML and KYC Guidelines introduced V-CIP as a remote identity verification option. It was a start, but built around Indian customers. An NRI calling in from Dubai or Toronto still fell outside what the framework could handle.

By mid-2025, that gap was impossible to ignore. IFSCA published a consultation paper in July seeking feedback on extending V-CIP to NRIs. The October 31 circular formalised it. V-CIP now covers NRI onboarding across 11 jurisdictions: the USA, UK, UAE, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and EU countries. Four-month pilot, low-risk customers only.

Remote identity verification, at scale, across the markets that matter. A real step forward.

But it only solved half the problem. An investor who passed video KYC still needed to authenticate supporting documents from outside India. That bottleneck remained. 

How Rupeeflo Changed That

We had been building directly into this gap. 

Our product: a digital e-notarisation solution that lets NRIs complete document authentication without visiting a notary or Indian embassy. No physical visits. No couriering. No two-week embassy appointments.

In early June 2026, we brought the solution to IFSCA at a Chintan Shivir 3.0 convened around GIFT City's 2031 vision. Onboarding came up as one of the central barriers to participation. 

We pitched our existing solution that was built for the same audience, same purpose: 

• a way to verify someone you've never met, 

• from a country you've never been to, 

• with documents you can't physically inspect.

Our pitch was simple: we'd already solved it for 50 countries, which is already being utilized by all the leading Banks and Brokers and multiple financial institutions on the India side. GIFT City had the same problem with a different flag on it.

Nine days later, on June 19, IFSCA published its KYC FAQ. 

Question 30 now recognises electronically notarised documents, provided the notarisation is legally valid in the jurisdiction where the document was executed. 

Question 31 recognises electronic apostilles under the Hague Apostille Convention - around 40 countries now issue these electronically. Question 33 covers verifiable electronic signatures.

As of June 2026, we're the only platform whose digital onboarding workflow is explicitly recognised within IFSCA's KYC framework. 

Those 32 million NRIs aren't waiting for a better product. The framework is ready. The digital path exists. The only question left is whether the institutions serving them have the infrastructure to deliver it.

If you're a bank, broker, or fund manager building in GIFT City, that's the conversation worth having. Reach out, and let's talk about how Nuvanta can close the onboarding gap for your investors.