Echo Re opens in GIFT City

Echo Re, a Zurich-based reinsurer owned by Germany’s DEVK Group, has received approval to open a reinsurance branch in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, better known as GIFT City. The approval came from India’s International Financial Services Centres Authority on March 12, 2026. It is Echo Re’s first branch office anywhere outside Zurich, which makes the move more than a routine expansion. It is a statement about where the company thinks reinsurance business is shifting next. (echore.com) That matters because reinsurance is a business of distance until it suddenly is not. A reinsurer can support Indian insurers from abroad, and Echo Re has done exactly that for more than a decade. But a local branch changes the mechanics. It puts underwriters, pricing decisions, and relationship management inside the same regulatory and commercial orbit as the cedants they serve. Echo Re says India is already a central pillar of its portfolio, with business across property and casualty and specialty lines. The new office is meant to add operating capacity, not just a mailing address. (echore.com) The choice of GIFT City is the real story. India built the zone as an offshore-style financial center inside its own borders, with a separate regulator and a lighter framework for international business. For insurers and reinsurers, that structure is designed to pull India-linked risk back from Dubai, Singapore, and London. The pitch is simple: underwrite Indian and regional risks from India, but do it in a jurisdiction built for cross-border finance. IFSCA now oversees more than 1,000 registrations and authorizations across the wider center, and insurance has become one of its fastest-growing pieces. (ifsca.gov.in) The growth has been abrupt. Insurance and reinsurance premium volumes in GIFT City rose from $102 million in 2020 to more than $1.2 billion in 2025, according to recent official figures reported across Indian business outlets. The number of insurance offices in the hub has climbed from eight in the early years to about 24. That is not just more logos on office doors. It means more underwriting is being done closer to the risks themselves, with less dependence on purely offshore capacity. (bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Echo Re is arriving in the middle of that build-out, not at the beginning of it. Other global reinsurers have also set up in GIFT City, including Peak Re and Korean Re, as the hub has started to look less like a policy experiment and more like a functioning market. Once a cluster forms, the logic becomes self-reinforcing. Brokers place more business there because capacity is there. Reinsurers add staff because business is there. Pricing gets sharper because more carriers are looking at the same risks from the same place. (peak-re.com) For Indian insurers, that can change access as much as price. Reinsurance is not only about finding the cheapest line on a spreadsheet. It is also about getting faster answers, local technical input, and counterparties that understand how Indian catastrophe, agriculture, marine, engineering, and specialty risks are actually written. Echo Re says its branch will combine local presence with the capabilities of its Zurich office and use GIFT City as a gateway to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. That is the concrete shift here: a reinsurer that spent years serving India cross-border has decided that being in the market now matters enough to plant its first foreign flag in Gandhinagar. (echore.com)