India-Switzerland Corridor: The Digital Finance Convergence

The India-Switzerland investment corridor is accelerating. After the EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA), Swiss firms' interest in India has more than doubled - not just in volume, but in the sophistication of engagement. We are seeing more structured market-entry, more investment enquiries, and more long-term commitment from both sides.

India's Asset Reserve Certificate (ARC) concept deserves close attention. If ARC lands as described - INR-pegged, fully collateralised by Government of India T-bills, G-Secs and deposits, with RBI oversight and private issuance - it represents a credible regulated rupee rail for programmable finance. Sitting alongside the digital rupee in a two-tier model (settlement layer plus application layer), ARC could fundamentally change how institutional capital interacts with Indian markets.

The asset servicing capabilities this infrastructure can unlock are significant: atomic subscription and redemption flows, whitelisted investor transfers, auditable fee waterfalls, near-real-time positions and NAV evidence trails, standardised reserve attestations, and redemption SLAs. For fund managers and administrators operating across borders, these are not incremental improvements - they represent a step change in operational transparency.

This convergence matters for cross-border fund structures. A Swiss-domiciled fund manager investing in Indian assets currently navigates fragmented settlement, opaque reporting chains, and manual reconciliation. With programmable finance rails on the Indian side and Switzerland's DLT Act framework on the Swiss side, the operational architecture can be fundamentally simplified.

On-chain fund administration platforms like Fume are built precisely for this moment. Fund managers and administrators can run workflows end-to-end on-chain with compliance by design - from investor onboarding through capital calls to NAV calculation and distribution. When both ends of a cross-border corridor support programmable, auditable rails, the middle layer of manual reconciliation becomes redundant.

The institutional opportunity is clear. India's digital infrastructure (UPI, NPCI, and now potentially ARC) combined with Switzerland's regulatory framework for digital assets creates a corridor where capital can flow with unprecedented transparency and efficiency. The question for institutional investors is not whether this corridor will mature, but how quickly to position for it.

From fund structuring to day-to-day operations, the infrastructure exists to enable institutional investors to focus on what matters: generating returns. The India-Switzerland corridor is becoming a template for how cross-border digital finance should work.