For much of the first decade of its India presence, Equiniti’s growth followed a familiar GCC trajectory. Functions moved in, headcount expanded and an operation that began with transactional work gradually accumulated technology and corporate responsibilities. That model is now beginning to change.
Equiniti India has grown from zero to about 2,500 employees over the past decade, with India accounting for roughly 42 to 43 percent of the company’s global workforce. But Dan Kramer, CEO of Equiniti, says the next phase will not necessarily be defined by more employees, it will be defined by how much more work those employees can take on.
“We’re not necessarily going to have more people in India, but we’re having more work being done in India,” Kramer says.
That distinction captures a broader shift underway inside the India GCC. The question is no longer simply how much of a company’s work can be moved to India, but how much additional output can be generated from an increasingly mature workforce using technology, automation and AI.
From operations hub to a broader mandate
Equiniti’s India operation began with operational and call centre functions before expanding into technology and other corporate functions. Today, operations still account for more than half of the workforce, followed by IT and a range of support functions including finance, HR and marketing.
The evolution, however, is less about the individual functions that have moved to India and more about the role the centre now plays in the global organisation. “The entire global organisation is supported by the teams in India,” Kramer says.
India now supports both the company’s US and UK operations across technology and operations. The centre also includes a financial services organisation and significant HR and support teams.
Kramer describes the current moment as an “important inflection point”. The company may not need a proportionate increase in headcount as its operations become more automated and efficient, but the volume of work handled from India can continue to rise.
“If you look at the amount of work being done at EQI versus what was done last year, it’s probably 20 or 30 percent more,” he says. “But it’s the same number of people.”
For GCCs that have historically used headcount as one of their clearest measures of expansion, that is a consequential change.
AI is compressing the delivery cycle
The impact of AI is already visible in how Equiniti builds and delivers technology, according to Kramer. Its engineering teams are using AI tools as part of coding, while AI-assisted testing is being used to make testing more efficient.
The consequence is not simply fewer hours spent on individual tasks. Kramer points to a fundamental compression in delivery timelines.
“We have examples of meeting with customers, discussing a solution, and literally the next day delivering a solution that would have taken three, six, nine months just a couple of years ago,” he points out.
Some solutions can now be tested the following day and moved into operation within a week, he says. That changes the expectations placed on technology teams as much as it changes their productivity.
AI is also altering the way Equiniti expects customers to interact with it. Instead of relying exclusively on forms, websites or call centres, the company is moving towards natural-language interaction, where customers can ask questions and receive answers in a manner closer to a human conversation.
The underlying business has not changed. Equiniti remains responsible for maintaining records of ownership for thousands of companies and helping issuers communicate with shareholders and the wider public. What is changing is the way that work is delivered.
The ROI question is becoming more complicated
Kramer is notably cautious about reducing the AI discussion to an immediate return-on-investment calculation.
Equiniti has trained all 5,000 employees in its core business on AI and deployed Microsoft Co-pilot across the organisation. Those initiatives come with an identifiable cost, but Kramer believes their full value cannot yet be captured through a single financial calculation. “If you get hung up on ROI, you’re not going to get the advantages,” he says.
That does not mean financial discipline disappears. Once AI is applied to specific functions, the company can begin measuring whether those functions are becoming more efficient and calculating the resulting return.
But Kramer sees the first measure differently. For him, success is ultimately about the amount and quality of work the organisation can deliver.
“At the end of the day, it’s about how many widgets we can process, how much we can do for our customers every day, and how accurately we do that on their behalf,” he adds.
The same principle applies to technology. If software that once required several months can be developed in weeks using large language models for coding and specification, delivery speed becomes an operational measure of AI’s value.
The workforce is changing before it shrinks
That approach also offers a different reading of AI’s impact on jobs. Kramer does not frame the technology primarily as a headcount-reduction exercise. Instead, he describes it as a way of increasing the capacity of existing employees.
“AI is going to make us a better organisation,” he says. “Having our people able to use AI is going to make our organisation better.”
The distinction matters in a GCC environment where increasing automation could otherwise appear to undermine the traditional proposition of moving more work to India.
At Equiniti, the emerging model is more work, higher productivity and greater technological capability without a corresponding increase in headcount.
Security remains a significant constraint on how far that model can go. Equiniti handles sensitive financial information on behalf of its clients, and Kramer says the company takes a highly controlled approach to what AI systems can access. New agents are subject to security checks before deployment.
The company also operates across the US, UK and India, each with different regulatory requirements. Its response is to hold itself to the highest applicable standard rather than create separate thresholds for different markets.
Preparing for a market that is moving on chain
The next transformation for Equiniti may extend beyond AI. Kramer says the company is preparing for the growing tokenisation of assets, including real estate, fixed income and equities. That outlook is one reason Equiniti has agreed to be acquired by crypto trading platform Bullish, with the transaction expected to close in early January.
Equiniti is expected to continue operating as a business serving issuers, while becoming part of Bullish. The precise organisational structure and leadership arrangements had not yet been finalised at the time of the conversation.
For India, Kramer expects greater alignment in both technology and operations as the businesses come together. It is another shift in the evolution of the India operation. What began as an operations centre has become a substantial part of Equiniti’s global workforce and delivery engine. Its next test is whether technology can allow that same workforce to absorb significantly more complexity.
Kramer sees AI as different from previous technology cycles because its impact is not confined to corporate systems. “It truly empowers the best people to be better,” he says. “If you’re great at what you do, and you leverage AI, you can become better.”
For an India GCC whose growth was once measured largely in people, that may prove to be the more important measure of what comes next.