India

India operates one of the world's most layered financial regulatory architectures, built around sectoral regulators with statutory independence and coordinated through the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC). The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) anchors the system as the central bank and regulator of banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), payment systems, and, since 2019, housing finance companies. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) governs capital markets, listed companies, and market intermediaries; the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) and the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) cover their respective sectors. Corporate law sits with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) under the Companies Act, 2013, administered in the field through Registrars of Companies, with the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) regulating the insolvency ecosystem created by the 2016 Code. India's anti-money-laundering framework rests on the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA), with the Financial Intelligence Unit – India (FIU-IND) as the national FIU receiving suspicious transaction and cash transaction reports, and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) investigating money laundering and foreign-exchange violations under PMLA and FEMA. India's 2024 FATF mutual evaluation placed the country in the "regular follow-up" category, the strongest outcome band, while identifying areas for improvement in prosecution outcomes and supervision of designated non-financial businesses and professions. The regulatory perimeter has expanded rapidly into technology and data. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, India's first comprehensive data protection statute, moved into implementation with rules notified in late 2025, creating the Data Protection Board of India as the adjudicatory body. CERT-In's 2022 directions impose some of the world's tightest cyber-incident reporting windows (six hours), layered beneath sector-specific cyber rules from RBI, SEBI, and IRDAI. Fintech regulation is dense and fast-moving: digital lending, payment aggregators, and prepaid instruments are governed by consolidated RBI directions, while virtual digital assets are taxed and brought under PMLA reporting obligations, though a full licensing regime remains under deliberation. The International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) operates a separate unified regulatory regime for GIFT City, India's offshore financial centre. Enforcement is active and public. RBI publishes monetary penalties typically for KYC, exposure-norm, and reporting failures on a near-weekly cycle, and has shown willingness to impose business restrictions on large institutions for supervisory concerns. SEBI runs a high-volume adjudication and settlement docket, and the ED's PMLA caseload has grown sharply. For compliance officers, India is a high-frequency jurisdiction: master directions are amended continuously, and the compliance calendar is dense with monthly, quarterly, and annual filings across regulators. This profile tracks the principal regulators, instruments, obligations, and deadlines, with enforcement actions updated on a rolling basis.