Razorpay wins final IFSCA licence to run payments from GIFT City. Razorpay has received IFSCA's final payment service provider licence for GIFT City, enabling multi-currency accounts and faster global investing. By BFSI Network · 02 November 2026 · News Razorpay, the Bengaluru-based payments company, has received the final Payment Service Provider (PSP) licence from the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) to operate from Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City). The approval, announced by the company on 2 November 2026 and first reported by CNBC-TV18, lets Razorpay move money in foreign currencies, offer multi-currency accounts and power global investing for Indian residents. The licence comes about six months after IFSCA gave the company in-principle approval in April 2026. It also makes Razorpay one of the more prominent names among the payment firms that have chosen GIFT City as a base for cross-border business, a group that recently added exporter-focused Skydo, which secured its final IFSCA nod in October. What the Razorpay GIFT City licence allows. According to the company, the PSP licence lets its GIFT City unit support a wider set of cross-border flows under a single regulatory framework: * Global investing: infrastructure for investment platforms that let Indian residents buy overseas stocks and other assets * International collections and settlements: receiving and settling payments across borders * Multi-currency accounts: holding funds in foreign currencies * Foreign currency transfers: moving money to and from India in line with the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and GIFT City rules Razorpay said it has already completed banking integrations with RBL Bank and ICICI Bank, and that integrations with investment platforms are expected to go live in the coming weeks. Rahul Kothari, Chief Operating Officer of Razorpay, said the licence allows the company to handle foreign currency transactions, including holding funds in multi-currency accounts, and to support cross-border financial flows. Why global investing platforms are the first target. Today, a platform that offers overseas investing must coordinate with several banks, remittance partners and compliance systems, which can stretch onboarding to several months. Razorpay's pitch is a single integration: a platform connects once to its GIFT City stack and can offer global investing to Indian residents, with integration timelines cut to two to three weeks, the company said. Demand is growing. Citing industry data, Razorpay said Indians invested $2.65 billion in overseas stocks and debt in FY26, up 56% from the previous year. Brokers are already moving in this direction, with Groww, Zerodha and Angel One opening US stock investing via GIFT City. GIFT City becomes a payments hub. IFSCA has been building out its rulebook for payment companies in the international financial services centre. In October it set net-worth norms for payment system operators in GIFT City, giving existing players six months to comply. Under the IFSC framework, licensed PSPs can offer services such as account services, cross-border money transfers, merchant acquisition and escrow. For Razorpay, the licence adds a regulated cross-border leg to a business that is also preparing for the public markets. The company filed draft IPO papers through the confidential route in June 2026, and has been widening its product range, including the Vulcan AI foundation model for payments. It said it plans to extend the GIFT City infrastructure to more financial flows, including services for non-resident Indians (NRIs). Key takeaways. * Razorpay has received IFSCA's final PSP licence for GIFT City, following in-principle approval in April 2026. * The licence covers global investing, international collections and settlements, multi-currency accounts and foreign currency transfers. * RBL Bank and ICICI Bank are integrated, and investment platforms are expected to go live in the coming weeks. Frequently asked questions. What licence has Razorpay received in GIFT City? Razorpay has received the final Payment Service Provider licence from IFSCA, the unified regulator for India's international financial services centre in GIFT City, Gujarat. How will the licence help Indian investors? Investment platforms can plug into Razorpay's GIFT City infrastructure to offer global investing to Indian residents, with integration timelines of two to three weeks instead of several months, the company said. Featured image: Rahul Kothari, Chief Operating Officer, Razorpay. Photo: Razorpay (company newsroom media kit). Elets The Banking and Finance Post Magazine has carved out a niche for itself in the crowded market with exclusive & unique content. Get in-depth insights on trend-setting innovations & transformation in the BFSI sector. Best offers for Print + Digital issues! Subscribe here | www.eletsonline.com/subscription/ Get a chance to meet the Who's who of the Banking & Finance industry. 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BFSI Insight Summit 2026: 'Real-time fraud check key in digital payments' At the BFSI Insight Summit 2026, payments leaders called for AI-driven fraud detection, real-time risk scoring and greater industry collaboration to tackle rising digital payment scams. (From left) Arif Khan, Razorpay; Karan Sapra, Google Pay; K Satyanarayana Raju, IDPIC; and Lalit Chowdhary, Mindgate Solutions at the Business Standard BFSI Insight Summit in Mumbai on Tuesday | Photos: Kamlesh Pednekar At a discussion on India's digital payments ecosystem, 'Payments at Scale, Can Security Match It?' during the Business Standard BFSI Insight Summit, industry leaders Karan Sapra, head of payments and financial services, India, at Google Pay; Lalit Chowdhary, senior vice-president, implementation and delivery at Mindgate Solutions; Arif Khan, Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) of Razorpay; and K Satyanarayana Raju, chief executive officer (CEO), India Digital Payment Intelligence Corporation (IDPIC), elaborated on the need to go beyond conventional checks and adopt an intelligence-driven approach to tackle increasingly sophisticated fraud. A central theme of the discussion was the changing nature of digital payments fraud. According to Khan, conventional safeguards such as one-time passwords, PINs and authentication protocols are no longer sufficient to address the full range of risks. "The bigger challenge that we are seeing is context in the intent of the payment," Khan said, explaining that a transaction may be technically secure even when a customer is being manipulated into transferring money. Fraudsters increasingly exploit fear, urgency and impersonation, posing as law enforcement officials or other trusted authorities, to persuade victims to make payments voluntarily. The challenge, therefore, is no longer just to ensure that a payment is authorised, but to establish whether the person making it understands the transaction and its consequences. Khan said Razorpay was working to analyse multiple signals to understand the context and intent behind payments. He also pointed to the growing sophistication of fraud networks, which can move money rapidly through mule accounts, while payment companies often operate with limited visibility into one another's systems. Sapra highlighted a similar shift, describing the evolution from hacking technical processes to manipulating human behaviour. He said Google Pay was focusing on user education, contextual warnings and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify suspicious patterns. Such warnings could be delivered in English, Hindi/English or regional languages, depending on what users understand best. The company has also introduced haptic alerts - gentle phone vibrations intended to interrupt routine payment behaviour and prompt users to reconsider a potentially risky transaction. The objective, Sapra said, is to combine intelligence drawn from multiple signals with timely interventions that help customers recognise a threat before the money is transferred. The need for greater cooperation across the payments ecosystem emerged as another key issue. Chowdhary said Mindgate Solutions, which processes a significant share of payment transactions, had observed that although larger banks had strengthened their fraud-detection frameworks, vulnerabilities often persisted at the edges of the system. Money can pass through mule accounts quickly, making detection and recovery difficult. He emphasised that the industry needed to improve its ability to identify suspicious activity and recover funds promptly. Raju outlined the role of the Digital Payment Intelligence Platform (DPIP), developed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Innovation Hub with the support of the RBI, in strengthening the ecosystem's response to fraud. The initiative is being implemented in phases. The first phase focuses on creating a smart registry of suspicious identifiers and enabling participating institutions to screen their records against the registry. The platform aims to onboard 120 regulated banking entities and 69 payment aggregators. At the time of the discussion, 16 banks had gone live, contributing nearly 3.2 million reports and around 6.4 million identifiers, Raju said. He added that nearly 70 million records had been screened, identifying around 230,000 suspected identifiers and 70,000 alert identifiers. Around 92,000 identifiers had been reported by multiple channels, including more than one bank. The registry is intended to help institutions identify potentially suspicious accounts during customer onboarding and beneficiary addition, as well as through periodic screening of existing records. This could help detect mule accounts before a formal complaint is filed, shifting the emphasis from responding to fraud to preventing it. Raju said the platform could eventually be extended to other sectors, including cooperative banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), insurance companies and e-commerce businesses, although stabilising the initial phases remains the immediate priority. Participants said the next step would be to move beyond periodic screening towards real-time risk assessment. Raju added that the platform's planned second phase would use transaction histories and behavioural patterns to generate risk scores for individual digital payments. These scores would be shared with both the sending and receiving banks, helping them decide whether a transaction should proceed or whether a credit to the beneficiary's account should be held pending further checks. The proposed approach would use data relating to both the payment initiator and the beneficiary, along with the reporting institution's history, to assess risk. Models developed using data from larger banks could also help smaller institutions strengthen their fraud-detection capabilities. Khan argued that the value of such a system would depend on how effectively participants combine their intelligence. A payment service provider may detect a compromised device, while another institution might identify the receiving account as a potential mule. Taken together, these signals could provide a much stronger indication of fraud than either signal alone. The challenge, he said, is to analyse device information, transaction patterns, merchant behaviour and the destination account's history in less than a second, before a suspicious payment is completed. He also stressed the importance of predictive modelling, arguing that fraud prevention cannot rely entirely on historical data. Fraudsters continually change their methods, requiring the ecosystem to anticipate emerging threats rather than merely react to known ones. Sapra said Google Pay was using an AI-powered conversational agent to interview users after fraud incidents, helping identify new methods used by scammers and develop patterns that could inform future defences. The discussion also examined whether India's enormous payment volumes were making the system more vulnerable. Chowdhary said the rapid growth of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) had pushed payment infrastructure providers to adopt newer technologies, reduce pressure on core systems and improve reliability. He added that person-to-merchant payments had been a major driver of growth, requiring infrastructure to evolve alongside transaction volumes. He said technology upgrades and collaboration with ecosystem partners had helped providers manage scale, but stressed that the overall system was only as strong as its weakest link. Khan offered a more measured view, arguing that scale itself should not be seen as the principal obstacle. Improvements in computing power, chips, networks and bandwidth had made it possible to handle large transaction volumes. The more persistent concern, he said, was the uneven security maturity of institutions. Established organisations may continue to rely on legacy systems and older databases, while newer technology companies often operate on more modern Cloud-based infrastructure. Both types of institutions need strong safeguards, but their vulnerabilities may differ. Chowdhary also highlighted the importance of addressing emerging software vulnerabilities, strengthening application programming interface (API) security and improving mobile verification during customer registration. A key intervention during the session was the argument that the industry's existing measures of fraud do not fully capture its social and financial impact. Khan said commonly used indicators, such as chargeback ratios and fraud as a proportion of sales, offered only a partial picture. A low fraud ratio across billions of transactions might appear reassuring, but it could obscure the severe consequences for an individual who loses a substantial portion of his income. He urged the industry to develop measures that reflect how long a mule account remains active, how quickly it is identified and shut down, and how much times it takes for victims to obtain relief. Sapra added that fraud is frequently under reported. Victims may not immediately realise they have been deceived, particularly in investment scams, while others may hesitate to report an incident because of social stigma. The speakers said better measurement would help the industry understand not just the number of reported cases, but also the extent of the harm caused and the effectiveness of its response. The panel concluded that technology alone would not eliminate payment fraud. Social engineering increasingly relies on psychological pressure, pushing victims to act quickly before they have time to verify a request. Khan suggested that certain high-risk situations could warrant a deliberate waiting period, giving customers time to reconsider urgent or emotionally charged requests. He also called for greater scrutiny of incoming payments, particularly where suspicious funds may be moving through beneficiary accounts. Sapra emphasised the need to combine AI-driven detection with user education and timely warnings. Raju said the planned risk-scoring system could strengthen checks on both the sending and receiving sides of a transaction.