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Informist, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025

 

--IFSCA chairperson: Working on streamlining KYC process 

--CONTEXT: IFSCA Chairperson Rajaraman speaking at Global Fintech Fest

 

MUMBAI – International Financial Services Centres Authority is working on streamlining the know your customer soon, Chairperson K. Rajaraman said Tuesday. "Few months back, we launched a consultation paper on video know your customer and assisted video know your customer. We are likely to notify that by November. Which means that paper-based applications for opening a deposit account or an investment account in the GIFT City would not be required," Rajaraman said at the Global Fintech Fest.

 

IFSCA is also working with the Unique Identification Authority of India and the Reserve Bank of India to launch the faceless authentication system. "UIDAI has already rolled out a faceless authentication system for domestic investors. We would like to do the same for a person sitting in San Francisco or Dubai a non-resident Indian to actually use faceless authentication to onboard himself in an unassisted manner," Rajaraman said.

 

"If we are able to do that over the next three to four months, I think a large portion of the Non-Resident Indians would find it very easy to open accounts, stay invested and maybe do all kinds of transactions over video KYC. So, we expect this KYC problem to be on top of our agenda the next few months till it is completely done," he said.

 

Chalking out the future roadmap for the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, Rajaraman said IFSCA is also looking at ways to boost commodity trading. "So, we also believe that the financial sector has got a very large nexus with commodity trading. Because India is now a manufacturing powerhouse and I think that the government of India now has a lot of plans to actually move into the higher end of manufacturing. So, this will require India to play a very important role in commodity trading as well," he said.

 

He said India's large economy can actually afford commodity trading to come back, and GIFT City has the opportunity. "An expert committee has given a report saying how commodity trading can be made possible in GIFT City. So, we are working on that," Rajaraman said.

 

The regulator is also working on the possibility of using tokenisation as a means to monetise real world assets like real estate and bullion. "A consultation paper was launched and we have received a lot of comments. We are working on a framework for that as well. This has got nothing to do with crypto assets or other kinds of assets where the government of India has certain views. So, therefore, we will be focusing on something which has got a strong real world underlying asset, it could be bullion as well. So, maybe you could tokenize gold and gold bullion as well. So, these are some of the possibilities that could happen in GIFT City," Rajaraman said.  End

 

Reported by Sagar Sen

Edited by Deepshikha Bhardwaj

 

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