The first operational smart city and International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) in India is GIFT City (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City). The GIFT City is a transpiring IT service and global financial hub, which is the first of its kind in India, specially designed to be at or above par with globally benchmarked business districts. It is assisted by state-of-the-art infrastructure incorporating all basic urban infrastructure constituents along with excellent external connectivity. A conducive business ecosystem is also provided by GIFT City, which helps the business operations, competitive tax regime, quality of life, and various other advantages.
The GIFT city recently signed an MoU with the Fintech Association of Japan (FAJ) to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the domain of fintech. On Thursday, October 20, 2022, they announced that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been inked for conducting programs related to the promotion of the GIFT City as a fintech hub in India, international financial services, and exposing young innovators in the domain of fintech to the upcoming opportunities in India and Japan.
GIFT City and FAJ will also cooperate to design and execute inventive and entrepreneurial programs for instance, boot camps, hackathons, incubation, and acceleration in the realm of fintech. They also focused on the areas of payments, lending, insurance technology, financial planning, wealth management, regulatory technology, and trade processing, among others. The programs for entrepreneurship will also focus on cyber security, financial inclusion, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and human augmentation.
In continuation to the signing of the MoU, Mr. Tapan Ray, the Managing Director and Group CEO of GIFT City, said that GIFT City provides one of the best fintech ecosystems, on par with various other global hubs in fintech. The collaboration with FAJ aims to create and strengthen more value for the entities in GIFT City, which will lead to the further spread of awareness, knowledge, and empowerment in the fintech domain. India, as a developing nation, has a history of disruptive financial technologies, which is at a faster rate as compared to several developed nations. Furthermore, Mr. Ray assures us that the coming years will be dominated by the fintech firms operating from GIFT City.
The Vice-Chair of the FAJ, Takeshi Kito, said that India and Japan have been building strategic partnerships in multiple fields. In the financial domain, the Japan-India Financial Cooperation dialogue has been held, which was upgraded to the Japan-India Finance Dialogue this year. This shows that bilateral cooperation between the two nations has become more important in recent years, and Mr. Kito believes that this fintech domain will play a significant part in it. Furthermore, this MoU strengthens ties between the fintech ecosystems of both India and Japan, which will proactively contribute towards the development of the GIFT City. In cooperation with GIFT City, Mr. Kito is looking forward to achieving concrete and significant outcomes in the international Fintech domain as well as strengthening bilateral economic relations.
