Gandhinagar:  GIFT City—India’s first operational smart city and International Financial Services Centre (IFSC)— on Thursday announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Fintech Association of Japan (FAJ) to strengthen the fintech ecosystem in GIFT City and Japan’s fintech community.

As part of the MoU, GIFT City and FAJ plan to promote fintech innovation and a fintech accelerator for encouraging, promoting and supporting fintech startups. Also, the MoU entails conducting programmes related to international financial services, promoting GIFT City as a fintech hub in India and exposing young innovators in the fintech domain to opportunities in India and Japan.

GIFT City and FAJ will also collaborate to design and execute innovation and entrepreneurial programmes like bootcamps, hackathons, and incubation and acceleration in the fintech domain focussed on areas such as payments, lending, financial planning, insurance technology, regulatory technology, wealth management and trade processing among others. The entrepreneurial programmes will also focus on financial inclusion, cyber security, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and human augmentation.

Following the signing of the MoU, GIFT City’s Managing Director and Group CEO Mr Tapan Ray said, “GIFT City provides one of the best fintech ecosystems, at par with other global fintech hubs. The association with FAJ aims to strengthen and create more value for the entities in GIFT City that will further spread awareness, knowledge and empowerment in the fintech domain.”

FAJ’s vice-chair Takeshi Kito said, “Japan and India have been building strategic partnerships in various fields, and in the financial sector, Japan-India Financial Cooperation Dialogue had been held and it was upgraded to higher level called Japan-India Finance Dialogue this year. This shows our bilateral financial cooperation becomes ever more important in the recent years and I believe fintech will take an important part in it. The signing of this MoU further strengthens ties between fintech ecosystems of both countries, and we will proactively contribute to the development of GIFT City.”

GIFT SEZ is an operational multi-services special economic zone within GIFT City and also houses India’s first IFSC. GIFT IFSC provides services related to capital markets, offshore insurance, offshore banking and asset management, aircraft and ship leasing, and ancillary services. It houses two international stock exchanges with a combined average daily trading volume of over US$11 billion.

DeshGujarat