GIFT City - India’s first operational smart city and International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) - has announced that it signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with YES BANK to strengthen the fintech ecosystem in GIFT City.
The MoU was signed by GIFT City’s Managing Director and Group CEO Mr. Tapan Ray and YES BANK’s MD and CEO Mr. Prashant Kumar in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.
As part of the MoU, GIFT City and YES BANK 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.
GIFT City and YES BANK will collaborate to organise roadshows, seminars, knowledge series, webinars and/or conferences for creating awareness on the GIFT City fintech regime and promoting GIFT City as the fintech hub of India to house fintech startups and new market participants.
GIFT City and YES BANK will also join hands to design and execute innovation and entrepreneurial programmes like boot camps, hackathons, and incubation and acceleration in the fintech domain, focused on areas such as payments, lending, financial planning, insurance technology, regulatory technology, wealth management and trade processing among others.
Following the signing of the MoU, Mr. Tapan Ray, Managing Director and Group CEO, GIFT City, said, “GIFT City is fast emerging as the fintech hub of India and we are delighted to join hands with YES BANK, one of the pioneers in the fintech space. India has a high fintech adoption rate globally. Through this MoU, we aim to provide a robust ecosystem to encourage and support fintech startups at GIFT City.”
Commenting on the development, Mr. Prashant Kumar, MD & CEO, YES BANK said “YES BANK IFSC banking unit (IBU) is extremely pleased to further strengthen its strategic partnership with GIFT City. Having been the first Bank to go live at GIFT IFSC in October 2015, the Bank has continuously invested in expanding its IBU franchise with considerable balance sheet and intellectual capital. We are now extremely delighted to collaborate with GIFT City on this highly strategic initiative to enable the start-up ecosystem to leverage the world-class infrastructure, fiscal and other incentives provided by GIFT City. YES BANK has been a leader in the digital payment space, powering one of every third digital payment in the country and we would like to leverage this leadership status and our preferred banking partner status to the Indian start-up ecosystem, its unicorns and soonicorns, and help attract global as well as local associated companies into GIFT City. We are confident that with such a focused approach, we will witness significant momentum in building GIFT City as a preferred domicile for the highly strategic Indian start-up ecosystem”