Lighthouse Canton, a Singapore-headquartered investment institution with roughly six billion dollars in assets under management, has launched Global Indian, a dedicated wealth management platform aimed at non-resident Indians and overseas investors whose financial affairs span multiple jurisdictions. The platform is live as of 29 July 2026 and integrates the firm’s regulated entities across Singapore, Dubai, India and the United Kingdom into a single advisory offering.
The launch is accompanied by a new Systematic Global Equities Fund domiciled at GIFT City in Gujarat, which Lighthouse Canton says gives Indian resident investors a tax-efficient, regulated route into global equity markets through the International Financial Services Centres Authority framework.
The structural problem being addressed
The commercial logic rests on a well-documented structural inefficiency. India’s diaspora numbers approximately 35 million individuals, and Reserve Bank of India data cited in the release put inward remittances at a record 135 billion dollars in the 2024-25 financial year, with NRI deposits exceeding 164 billion dollars as of March 2025. Despite that capital base, most NRI families manage banking in their country of residence, custody across multiple markets and India-focused investment advice through a separate set of advisors, with no single institution responsible for the consolidated picture.
Sumegh Bhatia, managing director and chief executive for India and Global Indian at Lighthouse Canton, captured the problem plainly: “NRI families frequently hold substantial wealth that is diminished in practice by fragmentation, as no single institution is accountable for the complete picture.” The platform offers consolidated multi-jurisdictional reporting, cross-border wealth structuring and unified management of tax and regulatory obligations across geographies.
The offering is underpinned by Keenai, Lighthouse Canton’s proprietary wealth technology platform, which provides portfolio analytics, lifecycle management and multi-market consolidated reporting. Group chief executive Shilpi Chowdhary described the platform as the first public expression of infrastructure built over a decade, citing regulated entities in five jurisdictions and a city presence across India’s key financial centres.
Market context and regulatory landscape
The NRI wealth management segment has attracted growing institutional attention, but it remains structurally served by a patchwork of domestic Indian private banks, international private banks with limited India-facing capabilities and specialist boutiques. Few institutions have assembled regulatory permissions across SEBI, the MAS, the DFSA and the FCA simultaneously, which gives genuinely multi-jurisdictional operators a meaningful compliance moat, though it also concentrates operational complexity.
GIFT City’s IFSC framework is central to Lighthouse Canton’s proposition. The IFSCA has progressively expanded its permissioning landscape, making GIFT City a credible hub for cross-border fund structuring, particularly for India-linked global investment. The new Systematic Global Equities Fund uses this framework to allow Indian resident investors to deploy capital internationally within the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, a structure that several asset managers have recently adopted as a complement to direct overseas listings.
On the investment thesis, Abhay Laijawala, managing director and chief investment officer for India, said the firm sees alpha opportunities in mid-cap companies exposed to defence, artificial intelligence infrastructure and financial formalisation themes, a view shared broadly across the India-focused asset management community but one that implies active stock selection rather than index exposure.
The forward markers are whether Global Indian signs named family office or ultra-high-net-worth mandates that demonstrate the consolidated model in practice, and whether GIFT City fund inflows validate the tax-efficient structuring argument at scale. Lighthouse Canton has the regulatory infrastructure; the commercial test is client acquisition in a segment where trust and referral networks matter more than product specification.