Ja Bank signs MoU with GIFT City to strengthen Fintech Ecosystem

GIFT City – India’s first operational smart city and International Financial Services Center (IFSC) – has announced that it signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with YES BANK to strengthen the fintech ecosystem in GIFT City. The agreement was signed by GIFT City’s Managing Director and CEO Tapan Ray and YES BANK’s Managing Director and CEO Prashant Kumar in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

As part of the MoU, GIFT City and YES BANK plan to promote fintech innovation and a fintech accelerator to encourage, promote and support fintech startups. The MoU also entails implementing programs 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 organize roadshows, seminars, knowledge series, webinars and/or conferences to create awareness about the GIFT City fintech regime and promote GIFT City as the fintech hub in India to house fintech startups and new market entrants .

GIFT City and YES BANK will also join forces to design and execute innovation and entrepreneurship programs such as boot camps, hackathons and incubation and acceleration in the fintech domain, focused on areas such as payments, lending, financial planning, insurance technology, regulatory technology, among others asset management and trade processing.

After 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 in 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, Prashant Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, YES BANK said “YES BANK IFSC Banking Unit (IBU) is extremely pleased to further strengthen its strategic partnership with GIFT City. After being the first bank to go live on GIFT IFSC in October 2015, the bank has continuously invested in expanding its IBU franchise with significant balance and intellectual capital.We are now extremely excited to partner with GIFT City on this highly strategic initiative to enable the startup ecosystem to leverage its infrastructure world-class, tax and other incentives provided by GIFT City.YES BANK has been a leader in the digital payments space, driving one in three digital payments in the country, and we want to leverage this leadership status and our preferred banking partner status to the Indian startup ecosystem, its unicorns and soonicorns, and help attract global as well as local affiliates t il GIFT City. We are confident that with such a focused approach, we will witness significant momentum in building GIFT City as a preferred home for the highly strategic Indian startup ecosystem.”