What Is GIFT City and Why Digital Onboarding Matters?
The Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) is India’s first operational International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), located between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar. Regulated by the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA), it is designed as a global hub offering tax incentives, regulatory flexibility, and cross-border transaction capabilities for banks, insurers, and capital markets.
As of June 2025, GIFT City hosts 939 registered entities with banking assets of USD 94 billion (INR 7.8 lakh crores). In Q2 2025 alone, it processed USD 121 billion (INR 10 lakh crores) in banking volumes and USD 87 billion (INR 7.2 lakh crores) in derivatives. With this scale, traditional manual Know Your Customer (KYC) methods are no longer sufficient.
IFSCA’s AML/CFT/KYC Guidelines (2022) and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA, 2023) mandate digital-first onboarding, powered by UIDAI e-KYC (electronic KYC) and Video-based Customer Identification Process (V-CIP). BFSI firms adopting these approaches see 30% faster onboarding and up to 18% lower abandonment rates, enabling them to stay competitive globally.
What Challenges Do BFSI Institutions Face in GIFT City?
Despite unified regulation, BFSI participants face four major barriers:
- Fragmented onboarding systems: Document collection and verification remain manual and email-driven, lacking a unified digital onboarding solution
- Evolving regulation: As digital ecosystems grow, outdated checks disrupt onboarding and lag behind evolving compliance needs
- Technology integration gaps: Limited API connectivity to global systems
- Scale constraints: With fewer than 1,000 entities, shared infrastructure remains underdeveloped
What Strategic Framework Can Drive Results?
A 12-month phased roadmap enables BFSI institutions to balance compliance with operational efficiency:
Phase 1: Regulatory Alignment (Months 0–3)
- Map IFSCA AML/CFT/KYC Guidelines (2022) into workflows
- Implement data safeguards: consent, privacy notices, and retention policies
- Appoint a Principal Officer and Compliance Officer for oversight
Phase 2: Core Technology Enablement (Months 4–6)
- Adopt e-KYC in both online and paperless offline modes, complemented by V-CIP with liveness detection
- Add sanctions/PEP checks and tamper-evident audit logs
- Target full deployment within 60 days
Phase 3: Experience & Compliance Scaling (Months 7–12)
- Launch mobile-first onboarding with real-time analytics
- Conduct quarterly reviews aligned with IFSCA/KRA updates
- Optimize KPIs: 30% lower turnaround time and 10–15 percentage points less abandonment
What Should the Ideal Onboarding Architecture Include?
A modern onboarding stack must integrate compliance, fraud controls, and customer experience:
- Identity & Trust: UIDAI e-KYC, V-CIP, biometrics, OCR, and risk scoring.
- Risk & Fraud Controls: AI-driven anomaly detection, synthetic ID alerts, and AML/CFT checks strengthen digital onboarding security.
- Audit & Evidence: Immutable logs, encrypted V-CIP recordings, audit trails for IFSCA.
- Privacy & Security: Consent-based workflows, encryption, and role-based access.
- Operational Resilience: API-first, cloud-native design, observability, and zero-downtime upgrades.
This architecture ensures regulatory resilience, scalability, and customer trust.
Where Is the Market Heading in GIFT City?
By 2027, over 70% of BFSI firms in GIFT City are expected to embed DPDPA driven consent systems and adopt IFSCA compliant digital platforms.
Cloud reconciliation, real-time compliance monitoring, and audit-ready records will soon become baseline requirements. If institutions in GIFT City adopt these, they can move beyond cost based competition toward trust based differentiation.
Landmark Systems & Solutions: Turning Compliance into Advantage
For BFSI firms, digital onboarding is no longer a compliance checkbox, it defines growth potential.
Landmark Systems & Solutions delivers the dKYC platform, purpose-built for IFSCA and DPDPA compliance:
- Instant Digital Onboarding (online and offline)
- Secure video KYC with liveness detection
- KRA/CKYC readiness, fraud checks, sanctions screening
- Immutable audit logs and compliance trails
- Implementation in 6-8 weeks, aligned with the 12-month roadmap
With Landmark, institutions achieve:
- ~ 90% reduction in customer drop outs
- Audit-ready compliance from day one
Act now to transform onboarding from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage. Contact Landmark Systems & Solutions for a tailored compliance walkthrough and live demo.
Official References:
- GIFT IFSC set to cross 1k registrations, $100 billion assets — The Times of India
- IFSCA issued a Consultation Paper on proposed modifications to the IFSCA (AML, CFT & KYC) Guidelines 2022, including V-CIP for onboarding Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) — ifsca.gov.in
