GIFT City & IFSC structures — where does doing it myself start to cost money?
Some of it, yes — and we will say so on the call if that is the honest answer. The parts that are worth paying for are the ones where a missed election, a missed deadline or an unverified threshold costs more than the fee: units established there access specified exemptions and concessions subject to conditions, and fund and treasury structures are the common use cases.
What if I have already filed and got it wrong?
That is a common starting point. We re-derive the position, identify whether an amendment or a disclosure route is the right vehicle, and tell you which one preserves the relief that is still available. The order matters more than the speed.
How long will it take?
It depends on the documents rather than on us. Once the pack is complete most filings turn around inside a fortnight; anything that needs a certificate from a tax authority runs on that authority's timetable, which we tell you at the start rather than at the end.
What is GIFT City and why do cross-border investors use it?
GIFT City is India's international financial services centre, a designated zone where entities can be set up under a distinct regulatory and tax framework aimed at cross-border financial activity. Investors and fund managers use it to hold or route international investments through an Indian-linked structure without being subject to the same domestic rules that apply outside the zone. We assess whether an investor's specific activity fits the kind of business the zone is designed for before recommending it.
How does an IFSC entity differ from an ordinary Indian company?
An entity set up within the international financial services centre operates under a separate regulatory regime from a company incorporated in the rest of India, with different rules on currency, permitted activities, and how its income is taxed. It is still an Indian-linked entity for some purposes, so its interaction with Indian residency and reporting rules has to be worked through rather than assumed away. We compare the two structures against the client's actual activity before choosing one.
Who typically benefits from a GIFT City structure?
The structure tends to suit fund managers, family offices, and businesses that want to route or hold international investments through an India-linked vehicle without becoming subject to the ordinary domestic tax and currency rules that apply elsewhere in the country. It is less useful for someone whose activity is genuinely local or who has no meaningful cross-border investment flow to route through it. We evaluate the underlying activity first, before the structure.
How does cross-border tax planning work?
It starts with facts rather than structures: which countries have a claim on you, what each one taxes, and where the two overlap. From there the decisions are about order and timing — which country taxes first, where relief is claimed, and whether a filing or a certificate has to be in place before money moves rather than after. Most of the value is in the sequencing, because relief claimed late is usually relief recovered slowly. See international tax planning.
Is "fund transfer pricing" the same thing as transfer pricing?
No — and if you came here to calculate FTP, this is not it. Fund transfer pricing is a bank's internal allocation of funding costs and benefits between its own business units, a treasury and asset-liability management discipline used to measure branch or product profitability. Tax transfer pricing is about prices between legally separate related parties across borders, and about which country taxes the resulting profit. The words overlap; the fields do not. See our transfer pricing work.
