Gandhinagar, Oct 20 (KNN) GIFT City in Gandhinagar, Gujarat on Thursday announced that it has signed a MoU with the Fintech Association of Japan (FAJ) to strengthen the fintech ecosystem in GIFT City and Japan’s fintech community. 

The pact is an indication of the growing significance of GIFT City in the international arena. 

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, said a press release.

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. 

Commenting on the partnership, GIFT City’s Managing Director and Group CEO Tapan Ray said, “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.”

“India has a history of adopting disruptive financial technologies at a much faster rate than several developed nations and I am sure the coming years will be dominated by fintech firms operating from GIFT City,” Ray said.

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,” said Kito.

GIFT SEZ is an operational multi-services special economic zone within GIFT City and also houses India’s first IFSC.  (KNN Bureau)