For years, India’s GCC story has been measured in people. The larger the centre, the greater its perceived strategic importance. Headcount became a proxy for scale, influence and success.
Mohua Sengupta, Country Head, The Standard India, is challenging that equation. The Standard India is being built around a different premise. Its success will not be determined by how quickly it can add people, how much outsourced work it can bring in or how closely it can replicate a conventional delivery centre.
“We are not playing the number game. It is not the number of people. In fact, our KRAs are not by the number of people, which is [usually] the very common indicator for any GCC head. Ours is value,” Sengupta says. That philosophy is being embedded from the beginning as The Standard builds its first India operation.
A decade in the making
The Standard had been considering an India GCC for more than seven years, but the idea remained largely on the drawing board. The merger with Allstate Employee Voluntary Benefits business provided the eventual impetus. The business already had a 175 member team across Bengaluru and Pune, while The Standard was simultaneously dealing with technology complexity arising from multiple mergers and acquisitions.
There was also a growing technology agenda around automation and other initiatives, but not enough bandwidth to execute it. “Plans were more than the people that they had,” Sengupta says.
Breaking the headquarters dependency
The more interesting part of The Standard India’s approach lies in how it intends to build leadership. Instead of hiring large numbers first and bringing in senior leadership later, the company has attempted to hire leaders early and allow them to build their teams.
“As much as possible, we hired the leaders first and let the leaders hire their next levels,” Sengupta says. The intention is to avoid reproducing a familiar GCC hierarchy in which India executes work designed and controlled elsewhere.
The Standard India is using what Sengupta describes as a two in a box model. India leaders and their global counterparts jointly own strategy and outcomes across functions such as technology, AI and data.
“The ownership of strategy and ownership of outcomes is both of them,” she says. The objective is to create a leadership pipeline in India rather than wait decades for global roles to eventually move to the country.
“We don’t need to wait 20 years to have the first global leader in India. We are creating that pool,” Sengupta says.
The service provider problem
Sengupta’s sharpest criticism is directed at the mindset that developed within the GCC industry itself. India became extremely good at taking instructions and executing them. But that success, she argues, also created a service provider culture that can work against strategic leadership.
“We became service providers, very good in order taking, and we would deliver to perfection and wait for the next order to come,” she says. That creates an uncomfortable contradiction. GCCs often complain that global headquarters do not give them enough empowerment, while continuing to operate as execution arms.
“If you have a service mindset, how will anybody entrust you with leadership?” Sengupta asks. The Standard India is attempting to address that problem at the design stage rather than trying to dismantle it after years of operating in the same manner.
Insourcing is not the growth strategy
The centre is also resisting another established GCC habit, bringing outsourced work back in-house simply to expand the operation. Sengupta says The Standard has no intention of insourcing work that is already functioning effectively with external providers.
“The only areas that we would insource consciously are areas which are core to us,” she says. Work will be considered for insourcing where the GCC can automate, improve or create something new. Transaction processing that is working well does not automatically qualify. That approach also explains why headcount is not the primary measure of the centre’s progress.
AI will make the old equation harder to sustain
Sengupta believes AI will have a much larger impact on technology roles than previous technology transitions. But she is cautious about claims that agentic AI will immediately create a new economic model for GCCs.
The industry has yet to establish consistent evidence of the return on investment from agents, she argues. Productivity will increase, but the relationship between people and output will change. That makes the traditional GCC obsession with headcount increasingly difficult to defend.
At the same time, Sengupta sees reskilling becoming unavoidable as technology cycles compress. “Everybody should own their own career,” she says. The Standard India is responding with mandatory technology training as well as organisation specific learning focused on the skills employees will need for the company’s future technology roadmap.
India’s GCC momentum is bigger than H1B
Sengupta also pushes back against the idea that India’s current GCC expansion is primarily a consequence of the latest H1B visa uncertainty. The policy changes may provide an additional impetus, but she does not see them as the fundamental driver of India’s GCC growth.
Her argument is that the scale of India’s GCC ecosystem predates the latest visa debate. More importantly, the issue for companies is not simply the headline cost attached to H1B visas, but the difficulty of planning when the policy environment itself remains unpredictable.
“It is not the $100,000. Yes, cost is a problem, but more than that, the uncertainty. You just don’t know which way it is going,” Sengupta says. For companies making technology and workforce decisions over several years, that unpredictability can be more disruptive than the cost itself. A stable operating base in India, by contrast, offers greater certainty around talent and long term planning.
Sengupta therefore sees the H1B changes as an impetus rather than the primary driver of India’s GCC momentum. Even if US immigration policies change again, she does not expect that to fundamentally alter the trajectory.
That makes the argument more interesting than the usual cost arbitrage narrative. India’s GCC opportunity, in her view, is increasingly about the ability to build and retain capability at scale without being dependent on a constantly shifting immigration environment.