GIFT City Climbs the Global Financial Centres Index

There is a particular satisfaction in watching a young city prove its worth on an old, exacting scale. Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, India's maiden International Financial Services Centre and a project of national importance, has further strengthened its position on the global stage, climbing three places to 43rd in the thirty-eighth edition of the Global Financial Centres Index rankings. For a financial district that opened its first towers barely a decade ago, sharing company with New York, London, and Hong Kong on the same index is no small matter.

The most telling gains, however, sit beneath the headline number. GIFT City made a significant gain in the FinTech Index, where it rose five positions from 40th to 35th, reaffirming its growing strength as a centre for innovation and technology-driven financial services. This is the metric analysts watch most closely, since fintech momentum tends to precede broader capital inflows and, eventually, demand for office and residential space around a financial district.

Regionally, the story is even more distinctive. In regional terms, GIFT City continues to feature among the top 15 financial centres in the Asia-Pacific region, and is the only Indian city to be part of this group. Mumbai and Delhi, despite their scale, sit outside this bracket, which underscores how deliberately GIFT City has been built as a purpose-designed financial enclave rather than a spillover of an existing metropolis.

The index itself carries considerable institutional weight. The Global Financial Centres Index, compiled by the Z/Yen Group, evaluated 135 financial centres worldwide using more than 140 instrumental factors provided by third-party organisations including the World Bank, the OECD, and the United Nations, and out of these 135 centres, 120 made it to the main index. Being ranked at all, let alone rising steadily, places GIFT City in conversation with financial capitals many times its age.

The rankings are not a one-time snapshot but a recurring report card. The thirty-ninth edition of the Global Financial Centres Index was published on 26 March 2026, providing evaluations of future competitiveness and rankings for 120 financial centres around the world, and the GFCI is updated and published every March and September, receiving considerable attention from the global financial community. That biannual rhythm gives GIFT City two fresh opportunities each year to demonstrate whether its momentum is a trend or a blip, and so far the trajectory has held.

Behind the ranking sits a genuine build-out of institutional infrastructure. India's Economic Survey noted that as of November 30, 2025, 1,034 domestic and international entities were registered at GIFT City, while managed assets exceeding $100 billion as of November 2025 indicated rising confidence among global and Indian banks operating within the IFSC framework. On the ground, this translates into recognisable names: several multinational banks including JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, HSBC, Barclays Bank, Bank of America, DFCC Bank, and Qatar National Bank have set up IFSC Banking Units here.

For anyone tracking Gujarat's property story, this is where the numbers stop being abstract. A financial centre that keeps climbing a globally respected index tends to pull working professionals, expatriate bankers, and ancillary businesses along with it, and each of those groups eventually needs a home nearby. GIFT City was also featured among 'The 15 Centres Likely to Become More Significant' globally, a forward-looking designation that matters as much to homebuyers weighing long-term appreciation as it does to the bankers reading the report over their morning coffee.