Five ways banks can scale Global Capability Centers for AI value

Despite growing maturity, most GCCs still have limited leadership presence in India, with nearly 80% reporting less than 10% of leadership roles based locally, underscoring the need to accelerate leadership localization for greater strategic influence. Some, mainly regional, banks still view GCCs purely as a way of reducing costs, improving operational and building functional experience (payments being one good example) or accessing scalable and affordable labor. Other larger national banks are taking a more strategic approach to GCCs by embracing right shoring to develop proprietary IP, diversifying critical capabilities such as cybersecurity and data analytics and creating new revenue streams (embedded finance being one example).

The true potential for right-shored GCCs as they scale and mature, however, is far more exciting, ambitious and achievable. The banks that fully embrace GCCs — using them as hubs to industrialize AI at scale and creating the frameworks and processes for them to operate with near-total autonomy (empowering agentic AI to make real-time decisions, for example) will reinvent their business models, unlock new streams of self-generating revenue and elevate GCCs to strategic partners — perhaps even acting as second headquarters. In one instance, a major US bank embraced an AI-first operational model at its India-based GCC that drives enterprise-wide innovation and leads on cybersecurity and risk management. Another global bank invested most of its AI talent pool in its GCC rather than its UK headquarters.

Navigating a growing but complex GCC landscape

The GCC sector is booming. It has experienced rapid double-digit growth over the past decade — enabled by an expanding financial services (FS) right shoring market that is currently valued at US$150b. Most GCCs are based in India but other nations are starting to play a growing role as the sector expands — notably the Philippines, Poland and China. This global diversification is propelled by encouraging trends, including increasing emerging marketing economic stability, a broader-skilled talent pool in right shoring locales, rapid technological innovation and new supportive government policies on inward investment and regulation.

To best navigate this potentially game-changing yet complex landscape, executives need to consider if their current GCCs are truly positioned to drive strategic growth or still just focused on operational efficiency. They need to have plans to scale their GCCs so they deliver innovation, transformation and enterprise-wide impact. They also need to embed the right leadership, skills and governance to drive strategy and manage compliance and integration as GCCs become more autonomous and influential in the larger business.

Five ways to prepare for GCC transformation

To navigate the complexity and take advantage of the opportunities, here are five concrete ways that executives can establish the foundations of successful GCC strategy.

1. Anchor GCC design to value creation by focusing on long-term innovation, transformation and resilience objectives. This involves continually reviewing GCC opportunities to drive competitive advantage, cost optimization and revenue generation, in alignment with the banks’ overall strategy. One global bank, for example, recently shifted digital product management and platform enhancement responsibilities into its India GCC. As a result, the GCC reports directly into the enterprise product leadership and influences cross-region rollouts. It also requires smart risk management — establishing a clear framework to assess trade-offs around concentration risks, geopolitical risk, operational and cybersecurity risks, and third-party dependencies.
   
   
2. Build transformation capabilities early by embedding AI, product ownership and cross-functional autonomy into your GCC mandates. That requires identifying capability gaps, defining a fulfilment strategy and assessing long-term policies around their technology infrastructure. In Bengaluru, a UK bank scaled its GCC from simply performing operational tasks to co-building AI-driven risk analytics and payment platform features that are leveraged across its global markets.
   
   
3. Invest in mature talent and leadership to elevate decision-making, capability depth and enterprise-wide integration. This will also require bridging critical skills gaps in the wider workforce through targeted training and acquisition strategies and third-party partnerships. A number of leading banks have located senior strategic leadership roles in Indian GCCs over the past five years.1
   
   
4. Adopt a calibrated multilocation strategy that balances talent access and cost benefits with strong governance, operational readiness and the need for business continuity. One major US bank now houses its large-scale technology engineering and platform development in India, while retaining proximity-sensitive risk, regulatory and market-facing capabilities in Europe and the US. Doing so involves considering the legal entity setup and regulatory authorization, establishing transfer pricing policies and advanced pricing arrangements, implementing automated compliance tools and fostering a culture of accountability.
   
   
5. Future-proof GCC investments by building agility into operations so that you can respond quickly to the new growth opportunities that are guaranteed to arise. One global bank has created a multilocation GCC model that places large‑scale engineering and operational teams in India while retaining proximity‑sensitive risk, regulatory and market‑facing functions across Europe and the US. This distributed setup allows it to balance critical workloads, scale specialist operations rapidly and maintain continuity as new business opportunities or regulatory shifts emerge.

Summary

Enabled by new technologies, expanding capabilities and maturing talent, GCCs are poised to play an important role in the future growth of financial services. To achieve success, banks will need to identify and embrace the strategic opportunities offered by GCCs — especially as AI transforms operational outposts into drivers of innovation and leadership. The key will be to identify how GCCs can deliver real value, and the technologies and talent that will unlock it, while balancing the risks of regulatory compliance and resilience in our increasingly complex world.