For years, the Indian retail investor who wanted a slice of Apple, Nvidia or Tesla had to navigate a patchwork of workarounds — fintech apps fronting foreign brokerages, fractional-share schemes, and the annual headache of the Liberalised Remittance Scheme. Now the plumbing is being rebuilt. Four of the country’s largest discount brokers have won regulatory clearance to offer international and US equities directly from GIFT City, India’s home-grown financial hub. It is a quiet but consequential shift: global investing is moving from a grey-zone hack to a regulated, domestic on-ramp.
The approval
According to a report by Inc42 citing Moneycontrol, Zerodha, Groww, Angel One and Upstox have received approval from the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) to enable Indian investors to buy international and US stocks from GIFT City. The four firms are not all playing the same role. Zerodha and Upstox will operate as broker-dealers, routing orders through established international partners such as Interactive Brokers, ViewTrade and Alpaca. Groww and Angel One, meanwhile, will function as Global Access Providers — a lighter-touch model that connects Indian users to global markets without the broker carrying the full dealer infrastructure itself.
The practical upshot for users is similar: a path to global equities sitting inside a regulated wrapper rather than a third-party app. The report says services are expected to launch within two to three months. That timeline matters. The regulatory milestone is the hard part; once the rails are live, the competitive race to onboard investors will move fast.
Why demand is surging
The timing is not accidental. Two forces are pushing Indian money toward foreign shores. The first is the rupee, which has stayed soft against the dollar — meaning a portfolio denominated in US assets gains simply from currency movement, before any stock even ticks up. The second is the return gap. Domestic markets have been muted, while the Nasdaq has run hot; Inc42 reports the index is up roughly 40% over the past year. For an investor watching Indian indices tread water, that contrast is hard to ignore.
Layered on top is a wave of marquee US listings generating genuine excitement. Inc42 reports that the roughly $75 billion SpaceX IPO triggered a 20-25% surge in trading volumes on platforms already offering US stocks — a clear signal that retail appetite spikes around brand-name events. Anticipated public-market debuts from AI heavyweights like Anthropic and OpenAI are drawing similar attention. These are companies Indian investors read about daily but have had no clean way to own. The brokers know it. The convergence of a depreciating rupee, a buoyant US market and a pipeline of headline IPOs is precisely the kind of demand backdrop that turns a regulatory permission into a product launch.
How it works
Under the new structure, orders placed by Indian investors are routed through international clearing partners — the likes of Interactive Brokers, ViewTrade and Alpaca named in the report — who handle execution and settlement in the underlying US markets. The broker-dealers (Zerodha, Upstox) sit closer to that clearing layer; the Global Access Providers (Groww, Angel One) bridge users to it. Either way, the investor interacts with a familiar Indian brand rather than signing up directly with a foreign entity.
The real change is regulatory architecture. Today’s options for buying US stocks rely on a mix of LRS remittances, partnerships with offshore brokers, and fractional-share products that, while legal, leave investors juggling multiple intermediaries and unclear recourse. A unified framework anchored in GIFT City — overseen by IFSCA — promises a single, coherent regime: one set of rules, one regulated venue, clearer accountability.
Costs, taxes and compliance remain the details that will decide whether this catches on. Investors should still expect currency-conversion costs, brokerage and platform fees, and the tax treatment that comes with foreign holdings — capital gains, dividend withholding, and the disclosure obligations that overseas assets carry in Indian tax filings. Remittances continue to operate within India’s foreign-exchange rules. None of this is prohibitive, but it is not frictionless either. The win here is consolidation and legitimacy, not the elimination of paperwork. Prospective investors would be wise to read the fine print on fees and tax reporting before treating a US portfolio as a casual add-on.
The India read
Step back, and this is a story about GIFT City finally doing the job it was built for. India’s International Financial Services Centre was conceived as a gateway — a place to keep financial activity that would otherwise leak to Singapore or Dubai onshore, under Indian oversight but with global-facing rules. Channelling retail demand for foreign equities through GIFT City is exactly that thesis in action: instead of Indian capital flowing through opaque offshore arrangements, it routes through a regulated domestic hub. That is good for the regulator, good for the ecosystem, and arguably good for the investor.
For retail, the headline benefit is diversification. Indian portfolios are overwhelmingly concentrated in domestic equities and real estate. Easy, regulated access to global names — and to sectors like advanced semiconductors and frontier AI that simply do not exist at scale on Indian exchanges — gives investors a genuine tool to spread risk across geographies and currencies. In a year where the rupee is soft and the Nasdaq is hot, that diversification doubles as a return story. The caution, of course, is that the same logic cuts both ways: a recovering rupee or a US correction can erase the currency and momentum tailwinds just as quickly as they appeared. Chasing a 40% rally after the fact is rarely a strategy.
Then there is the competitive scramble. With all four major discount brokers cleared at roughly the same time, expect an aggressive race on fees, fractional access, onboarding speed and product polish. Zerodha and Upstox, as broker-dealers, may push deeper integrations and lower per-trade economics; Groww and Angel One, as Global Access Providers, will lean on distribution and the sheer size of their user bases. The first movers to a clean, low-friction launch within that two-to-three-month window stand to capture mindshare during exactly the moment — SpaceX, and potentially Anthropic and OpenAI — when retail curiosity peaks.
The bigger picture: Indian retail investing is maturing from a single-market habit into a global one, and the infrastructure is finally catching up to the ambition. GIFT City is the conduit. Whether investors use it wisely — as a diversification tool rather than a momentum chase — is the question the brokers can’t answer for them.
