Global Capability Centres (GCCs) are powerful vehicles for driving innovation and value for global businesses while optimizing costs. The vast, skilled talent pool in India offers significant potential for scaling, especially given the country’s 31% share of the world’s STEM graduates, making it an attractive hub for setting up strategic portfolio units focused on R&D, AI, Data, and Cloud. Global Capability Centers are no longer delivery centers focused on transactional activities; they are strategic innovation partners, owning entire product cycles from ideation to go-to-market.
For US companies, setting up GCCs in India helps drive innovation, scale without overhead, and globalize operations to offset concentration in limited geographies. They ensure parent companies can sustain innovation, leverage new and emerging technologies, and achieve strategic goals. GCCs offer more than cost arbitrage and are invested in the broader organizational initiatives, goals, and culture. Setting up similar facilities in the US or other compatible markets will significantly increase costs.
This blog explores why US companies prefer setting up GCCs in India, the primary value drivers, and how GCCs empower the US industry ecosystem.
Key Takeaways
- India has become a global innovation hub with a strong STEM talent pool.
- GCCs now drive product innovation, not just cost savings.
- GCC-as-a-Service helps US firms launch GCCs faster with lower risk.
- CoEs within GCCs create reusable IP, platforms, and real business value.
- US enterprises increasingly rely on India for high-impact, mission-critical work.
What Drives the Shift to India
India has long been known as the ‘world’s back-office’, a tag the country was not always pleased about. But this is what introduced Indians to global work culture, growth opportunities, and an innovative mindset that MNCs, especially the US-based leaders, are known for. As more young Indians aspired to global roles, invested in themselves by acquiring skills in demand, advanced their technical capabilities, and focused on continuous learning, they also made a vast, in-demand talent pool available to companies looking to scale operations and invest in future-focused capability centers.
Factors driving global enterprises to India include a high-quality talent pool, optimized setup costs, a favorable regulatory and policy framework with local governments competing to be the destination of choice, strong IP protection frameworks, and the increasing need to stay agile and innovative, while still keeping costs in check (especially post-pandemic and with an evolving AI landscape).
How US-Based Enterprises Can Optimize GCCs
The value that GCCs can deliver is transformative. But it is not easy to drive high-impact, value-multiplying projects across several time zones. This is where GCC-as-a-Service comes in. In this model, you partner with a trusted third-party provider that establishes and manages the GCC on your behalf, with services delivered virtually. You have complete control over the team, processes, IP, and core functions, while the partner will bear the operational control.
GCC-as-a-Service partners will be focused on realizing the full potential of your GCC. This becomes even more important in the light of a recent BCG report that says, “Only 8% of GCCs have advanced significantly across the three dimensions most critical to enterprise value: innovation, competitive differentiation, and operational efficiency.”
Going the GCC-as-a-Service route will help you work with a dedicated, highly experienced, compliant partner who is familiar with ground reality – laws, regulations, and cultural aspects of establishing a capability center in any part of India. They will also have a deep network helping drive collaboration with local startups and academia to drive IP creation.
You can also read: What is GCC as a Service? Everything You Need to Know
Select an element to maximize. Press ESC to cancel.Why Choose GCC-as-a-Service:
- Hit the ground running – When you work with established partners, you get direct access to thriving, established infrastructure (real estate with full compliance with legal and regulatory requirements), a highly skilled, business-ready talent pool, flexibility and scalability as per business needs, and, very notably, an accelerated maturity curve. With minimal upfront investment, even small and mid-market firms can access global talent through GCC-as-a-Service.
- Focus beyond headcount – Today, GCC success, or, for that matter, the success of any partnership, such as offshoring, depends on business outcomes. An experienced partner can ensure that the Global Capability Center is not focused solely on being a talent hub but on being a real value creator – building IP, product pipelines, and platforms that deliver cost savings across the enterprise.
- Centers of Excellence(CoE) that scale – Your GCC-as-a-Service provider will build and scale CoEs as your capability matures. The team working in these CoEs will be highly skilled across differentiated capabilities, focused on building and scaling solutions that can accelerate value, be reused and adopted across the enterprise, or licensed/sold, or spun off into new products or services directly, and truly optimize future business outcomes. They are not cost centers and will enable actual strategic value creation.
- Truly measurable impact – GCC-as-a-Service providers will measure their impact based on outcomes and business value, not activity or FTEs. This includes cost savings realized by tool adoption, IP reuse, and revenue unlocked by platform acceleration, etc. The defining mentality is treating GCC output as a product to ship or scale, ensuring long-term context in terms of savings, scale, or revenue, and generating actual value.
Benefits for US Enterprises for Setting up Global Capability Centers in India
The US has long had business relationships with the Indian IT industry. Companies like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro have been partners to US companies for decades, and there is an established, mutual environment of trust, familiarity, and reliability between the two economies.
What started in the 1990s as modest, low-cost back-office units has evolved into high-impact global hubs, with finance as a significant focus and growth area. Today, the vast campuses across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram, and Mumbai are home to thousands of quants, risk specialists, investment teams, and technologists. The scale is enormous—the top six US banks alone employ nearly 150,000 people in their India GCCs. In fact, for firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, India now hosts their largest workforce outside the US.
And the work happening here is anything but basic. These centres are driving complex, high-value initiatives and delivering some of the most innovative projects globally. Their strategic importance has grown so much that, as Bloomberg noted, a central European bank admitted that a severe disruption in its India hub—say an earthquake—would impact its operations more than a similar crisis at its own headquarters.
As government policies and regulations undergo major shifts, many US-based companies will continue to see GCCs as an optimal model to drive cost advantage by accessing skilled talent and accelerating innovation at lower cost.
Conclusion
A well-run GCC is no longer just a support engine—it’s a strategic growth driver. As global firms push for efficiency, resilience, and innovation at scale, India’s GCCs are stepping up with world-class talent and advanced capabilities. For US-based enterprises looking to stay competitive, the question is no longer whether to build a GCC, but how quickly they can unlock its full potential.
FAQs
1. What is a GCC?
A strategic offshore unit that handles innovation, tech, and business transformation.
2. What is GCC-as-a-Service?
A model where an expert partner sets up and manages your GCC while you retain full control.
3. Why India?
Skilled talent, lower costs, strong tech ecosystem, and proven trust with US companies.
4. What benefits can a GCC deliver?
Faster innovation, cost savings, IP creation, and operational efficiency.
5.Is this model suitable for mid-sized firms?
Yes—GCC-as-a-Service reduces setup costs, making it accessible for all company sizes.
Raajiv Sachdeva
