How GCCs drive innovation, leadership and high RoIs

We had a discussion the other day, in partnership with the $20-billion global financial technology company Fiserv, on how India’s GCCs are emerging as engines of innovation and leadership. Fiserv itself has a massive GCC in India, which hosts half of its global tech and operations employee base. Our discussion was with Fiserv’s global services president, Sachin Kulkarni, and Nasscom’s chief strategy officer, Sangeeta Gupta.

Sachin noted that India’s GCCs are undergoing a major transition toward owning global roles, driven by capability, headquarters’ confidence in the India centre, and stronger collaboration. He said India’s capability in terms of scale is now matched by multidisciplinary strength across engineering, data, infrastructure and operations, enabling GCCs to lead automation, AI and end-to-end customer journeys. As a result, global roles in product, platform, technology and programme management have grown sharply. “In Fiserv, when we started in 2020, we had something like five or six global roles. But today, we have about 100 roles in product management where we co-own the product strategy, the teams collaborate on designing the roadmaps, and influence the go-to-market approach and pricing,” he said.

On headquarters’ confidence, he pointed out how many GCCs have become “microcosms” of their enterprises, hosting multiple business units and functions and serving many geographies, with some banks placing 6070% of their global tech and ops workforce in India. This growing trust means Indian centres now build trading platforms, risk models and other complex systems. On collaboration, he highlighted the increasing partnerships with local startups and universities, positioning GCCs as anchor tenants of India’s innovation ecosystem.

Sangeeta said a third of the GCCs in India are today driving end-to-end transformations for their parent enterprises, and that the ambition to do so is now widespread. “Every GCC’s ambition is really to say, ‘How am I becoming much more significant to the global enterprise? How am I mirroring more and more functions of the global enterprise back in India?’” she said, adding that GCCs have picked up pieces of work nobody in the enterprise was doing – and delivered them extremely well.

Big shift in global recognition

She also noted how global boards are taking their GCCs far more seriously. “When they visit India, they’re visiting their GCCs. Earlier, you would see them only going to their India-market businesses. They are talking to people like us, asking what they are not doing right or what more they need to do. There’s a big shift in global recognition,” she said.

Sachin said a key reason for Fiserv’s GCC success is its ability to work like a startup inside the enterprise and adopt an AI-first, product-centric approach. They incubate new digital products and revenue streams through internal venture-style programmes, including an innovation fund that finances a product incubator and automation lab where top employees take ideas from concept to MVP in a 13-week cycle. One AI-based product the GCC helped develop enables banks to get near real-time insights on small and medium businesses in the US.

Sachin said the returns from the incubator programme have been phenomenal – the investment is “in the order of 3-digit thousand dollars and the RoI is in 3-digit million dollars.” The only challenge, he said, is “stealing bandwidth from the subject matter experts” to brainstorm and ideate, because they are also responsible for keeping “the lights on securely, reliably, and delivering defect-free releases.” It’s a challenge every GCC will need to overcome.