Almost 200 entities have registered under GIFT City’s Global Access model, and 60 to 70% of them are brokers, IFSCA Executive Director Pradeep Ramakrishnan said. This the first time IFSCA has given a breakdown of who is actually using the framework, that lets Indian residents invest abroad.
It gives resident Indians and NRIs a regulated way to invest overseas under the RBI’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which is capped at $250,000 a year per person.
Broker-dealers including SAMCO Securities and INDmoney have gone live on the framework this year, offering fractional access to US stocks and ETFs.
Ramakrishnan’s figures are the first official indication of how much of the registrant base consists of brokers versus other entity types. The model has seen rapid growth in the roughly 18 months since IFSCA revamped it. Many of the registered brokers are helping Indian investors access products across jurisdictions, including international ETFs.He added that IFSCA is in talks to bring international ETFs onto the IFSC exchanges themselves, which would allow Indian investors to buy overseas ETF units on domestic infrastructure rather than only through a foreign broker. This sits against the backdrop of ongoing product expansion already under way on the Global Access platforms.
Under this same approach, earlier in June, India INX and SAMCO had indicated plans to integrate Luxembourg- and Ireland-domiciled UCITS funds and ETFs, with a targeted rollout around September 2026. SAMCO’s GIFT City platform runs in partnership with India INX Global Access, offering products that it positions as the next expansion layer after US stocks and ETFs. Thus, offering investors broader diversification across global equities, emerging markets, thematic strategies, fixed income and multi-asset portfolios, while also providing a potential route to mitigate US estate tax exposure on direct holdings.
