Fintech hub in GIFT City to be operational by January 2025

The International Fintech Innovation Hub — being set up at GIFT City with the support of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) — will be operational by January 2025 after a startup accelerator and an institute designed to build a fintech talent pool become operational, officials said on Wednesday. “Today, there are more than 100 fintech companies in GIFT City. The total number of employees has now crossed 25,000 and in the next five years, we plan to reach 1.5 lakh employees. About 90 percent of this required talent pool will be in finance or technology,” said Saurabh Singhal, Chief Commercial Officer & Chief FinTech Officer, GIFT City Business area on the sidelines of the Global Fintech Fest 2024. “To encourage more fintech companies to come to GIFT City, we have partnered with ADB to create an international fintech innovation hub. This hub will have three different pillars. We will set up an international fintech institute and are in the process of recruiting an institute with an international reputation with an Indian partner to train people in fintech and build a talent pool,” he added. In February 2024, ADB had approved a loan of Rs 23 million for fintech education, research and innovation in GIFT City.

Research & Development

Singhal said the innovation centre will also have a fintech incubator and an accelerator to nurture new startups in the fintech space from GIFT City. The third pillar of the centre will be a research centre to nurture fintech research and development. “So we can produce talent, new startups and research, all of which will feed into this financial ecosystem at GIFT City,” he added. GIFT City is in the process of finalising the RFP for the accelerator and expects to award it by September. “We hope to launch both the institute and the startup accelerator in January next year,” Singhal added. On the possible fintech courses that the new institute will offer, he said, “GIFT is quite unique because of the cross-border use cases. We found that the talent trained in the current university system was not meeting the need. The courses that the new institute will offer will focus on cross-border use cases of financial services. There will be courses on data analytics and artificial intelligence, which are the future of the fintech industry. These are topics that we will work on while selecting the partner. The GIFT City representative also said that the courses offered in GIFT City will be unique and will not be a copy of the courses offered in campuses in India.