FIU-IND

The Financial Intelligence Unit — India is the central national agency that receives, processes, analyses, and disseminates information relating to suspect financial transactions under India’s Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). For FintechPays, FIU-IND matters specifically as the registration authority for Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) — the regime that, since March 2023, brings crypto exchanges, crypto-wallet providers, and certain DeFi-adjacent services into India’s AML perimeter.

Editorially, FIU-IND registration is the regulatory floor for any crypto exchange serving Indian users — onshore or offshore. The December 2023 enforcement action against several major offshore exchanges (which then registered with FIU-IND in 2024–2025 after access blocks) made this concrete: an exchange that wants to serve Indian users must register, complete KYC to FIU-IND standards, and file Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) per the PMLA framework. FintechPays cites FIU-IND VASP registration in every India-targeting crypto-exchange review where the program holds it, and flags the absence prominently where it doesn’t.

FIU-IND registration is distinct from RBI authorisation (RBI doesn’t license crypto exchanges) and from SEBI registration (SEBI’s perimeter doesn’t cover crypto-asset trading in the current framework). The three regulators address different risk surfaces: FIU-IND for AML, RBI for fiat banking-rails to/from exchanges, and SEBI for any tokenised-securities adjacency. We surface the licence stack distinctly in every India crypto-exchange review.