Wiring The Future: Cross-Border Investments Infrastructure at GIFT IFSC

Rakshatha Murching

• 4 min read
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Wiring the Future: Cross-Border Investments Infrastructure at GIFT IFSC

On the 17th of April, 2026, Glomo started its new quarterly webinar series, Wiring the Future, at the Queen's University Belfast GIFT City campus. The first edition focused on a segment theme critical to the ecosystem's growth, Cross-Border Investment Infrastructure at GIFT IFSC.

The panel brought together four practitioners who are actively building in this ecosystem:

  • Ronit Kar, CEO, ViewTrade IFSC
  • Nirmal Bari, Principal Officer, PPFAS Alternate Asset Managers IFSC
  • Mihir Shirgoankar, CFA, VP – Alternative Investments, Phillip Ventures IFSC
  • Akash Arun, Founder & CEO, Glomo

The conversation was moderated by Anand Chandramouli, Head of Business and Partnerships at Glomo. Juhilatha Puntambekar, Glomo's Head of Legal & Regulatory Affairs, alongside Professor M. Satish Kumar, Dean of QUB's GIFT City campus welcomed the participants to the webinar setting up the tone for the evening.

We are pleased to share some interesting insights from this freewheeling conversation in case you missed to catch this in person or online.

1. Globalisation is no longer a luxury, it is an allocation decision

The panel's shared view is that the question has moved from "should Indian investors consider global allocation?" to "how much should they allocate?"

The panel framed it with one statistic: the Indian rupee has depreciated more than 20% against the US dollar in the last five years alone. Compounded over a lifetime of investing, that is not a footnote, it is a structural case for dollar-denominated exposure.

The additional input on this was a comparative - Every major global financial centre, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, DIFC(Dubai International Financial Centre), ADGM(Abu Dhabi Global Market), was built to be a booking centre, not a pass-through. GIFT, it was noted, cannot stop at being a pass-through. With 200 million+ demat accounts growing at 20–25% CAGR(Compound Annual Growth Rate), the country has both the volume and the reason to host its own cross-border infrastructure on home soil for interested investors

2. Progress - The numbers now speak for themselves

GIFT City is no longer a concept stage story. The panel cited heartening statistics from the latest IFSCA bulletin:

  • 200+ fund management entities and 300+ registered schemes
  • $32B committed and $17B raised across funds
  • ~$91B average monthly exchange turnover
  • $106B in banking assets as of December 2025
  • Resident Indian global investment via LRS crossed $1.6B in FY24-25, and is still climbing

3. Why GIFT, and not Singapore, Mauritius or Luxembourg

The panel highlighted the $7B mutual fund cap and the $1B ETF cap that were exhausted back in February 2022, and consequently the primary retail route for global diversification had been effectively closed for almost four years. The 2025 FME regulations at GIFT filled that gap at the right moment thereby permitting retail fund launches.

This led the panel to a deeper point: most mass retail investors in India may not be comfortable sending money into Singapore, Mauritius or Luxembourg vehicles, and access to those structures is restricted in any case. GIFT, by contrast, is India. The law of the land is Indian, the service providers are Indian, but the jurisdiction is globally accessible. Further for NRIs, it offers the regulatory familiarity of home with the product flexibility of an offshore centre, without needing a double-taxation treaty workaround.

4. The infrastructure gaps that still matter

  • KYC and onboarding are still largely physical and repetitive. Every new scheme often means fresh documentation. A GIFT-level KRA is on the horizon and is expected to streamline operations.
  • Distribution has no common certification equivalent to AMFI(association of Mutual Funds India). Each FME onboards its own distributors, which has impeded scale. The IFA framework was called out to drive the growth of distribution infrastructure.
  • Payment rails have not historically supported LRS capital-account transactions at the speed Indian investors expect from UPI. SWIFT-based flows with 2–3 day settlement windows create real friction at the first conversation with retail investors given their lack of familiarity with prevailing cross border remittance processes.
  • While the ecosystem was built for AIFs, retail funds need different handling and setups, closer to onshore mutual-fund best practice, and the whole chain of partners is still unlearning the old pattern.

5. Partnership is the operating model

Every panelist converged on the same point: none of this gets built by one player.

Ronit described moving from the old referral model, where Indian clients were handed off to overseas brokers with zero oversight, to a carrying-broker model that keeps accounts, books and trades at GIFT. Nirmal walked through the unlearning curve PPFAS GIFT went through with its partners to gear up for a high volume low ticket size product and open 1,000+ folios during its recent NFO. Mihir emphasised that IFSCA is now viewed as an independent regulator, a perception shift that global institutions are finally internalising.

Akash closed with Glomo's own view: the ecosystem grows only when regulators, banks, RTAs, KRAs, custodians, FMEs and fintechs move in the same direction. In 2024, internet banking at IFSC banks barely existed. In 2026, the conversation is already about APIs.

What Glomo is building in this ecosystem

At Glomo, we are building a compliance-first payments native layer the ecosystem has been waiting for. That means embedding industry and segment specific requirements within user journeys, developing digital native workflows where none exist and corridor expansion to access global payment rails amongst other initiatives.

The webinar closed with a sneak peek of an upcoming Glomo launch, an instant IFSC-to-IFSC payouts and a Pay-with-Glomo checkout to support merchant collections. A UPI-like experience, purpose-built for GIFT.

The takeaway

India is building its own global financial centre on its own soil, compliance-first, dollar-denominated and open to the world.

Wiring the Future will run quarterly. If you are building, investing or regulating at GIFT IFSC, we would be glad to have you in the next conversation. If you have any questions or suggestions please write to us at marketing@glomopay.com