By Rohit Gore, Chief Digital Officer, Anaptyss
Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India have emerged from cost centres into strategic innovation hubs, and this change is prominent in financial services. Technological advancements, such as AI-enabled automation, cloud-first architectures, and regulatory technologies are turning the GCCs into ecosystems for product innovation, risk management, and regulatory transformation.
At the centre of this evolution is an accelerated push to advance AI. GCCs have begun embedding AI-led workflows across key functions such as credit underwriting, fraud detection, and compliance operations. For instance, in credit underwriting, AI models ingest real-time income signals, bureau data, and spending patterns to generate risk scores and automate credit-decision workflows. Similarly, machine learning is being used to enhance fraud detection systems using behavioural biometrics, graph analytics, and real-time anomaly detection.
A recent example from the large enterprises segment is J.P. Morgan, which has reported to have approx. 400 AI applications in production globally, spanning applications such as fraud detection and risk assessment. A significant share of these digital innovations is originating out of its Indian technology hubs based in cities such as Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Pune. Likewise, Citi has noted the growing contribution of its India GCCs in delivering production analytics, payments tooling, and platform engineering, with their core responsibilities expanding into AI, risk analytics, and automation to enable global operations.
Recent industry research shows that a majority of GCC leaders are investing in agentic AI and generative AI capabilities and creating innovation teams to develop AI-based solutions for their parent organisations. A recent EY GCC Pulse Survey informs that 58% of India GCCs are investing in agentic AI, while 83% are investing in generative AI, and about two-thirds have set up dedicated innovation teams.
Global ecosystem challenges
While GCCs are steadily evolving into creators of IP and differentiated capabilities, the broader industry shift toward AI-native financial operations brings universal challenges that also affect GCCs.
Responsible AI governance, model explainability, and auditability remain difficult across regulated domains worldwide. Institutions everywhere also face constraints around scalable compute, high-quality data flows, and real-time analytics.
As AI systems process more sensitive financial data, cybersecurity risks are rising across the industry, prompting greater investment in zero-trust architectures, model-security testing, and stronger third-party controls.
Growth drivers: Technology innovation, resilience, and domain talent
Despite the challenges, Indian GCCs are shifting from service delivery to value creation, delivering cost benefits and strategic capabilities that global banks and insurers increasingly depend on.
The growing adoption of cloud is creating a strong foundation for the AI-first solution ecosystem by delivering the scale, elasticity, and global reach to support requirements such as real-time risk scoring, transaction monitoring, and personalised customer experiences. Cloud platforms work by decoupling compute, storage, and analytics through services that scale independently, allowing risk models and data pipelines to handle workload spikes instantly.
For example, HSBC used Google Cloud to develop a Risk Advisory Tool to run “what-if” scenario modelling for its traders and risk management teams, illustrating strategic cloud adoption among global players.
GCCs in India have been instrumental in orchestrating cloud migrations for complex banking systems, allowing banks and insurers to transition from monolithic legacy systems toward microservices and API-led platforms. This modular architecture has enabled financial institutions to launch products rapidly and build disaster resilience.
Additionally, regulatory complexity and rising compliance costs have created a fertile ground for RegTech innovation. Indian GCCs are helping global enterprises build AI-powered KYC and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) solutions, compliance dashboards, and automated regulatory reporting pipelines that reduce manual work and false positives and make audits more efficient. The rapid growth of the RegTech market reflects demand and investment momentum, wherein GCCs are increasingly becoming the R&D hubs.
Intelligent process orchestration remains foundational, wherein automation powered by ML-driven decisioning is improving loan processing, claims adjudication, and reconciliations, delivering measurable cycle-time reductions and accuracy gains. However, this evolution has been subtle; GCCs are layering orchestration, human-in-the-loop ML, and explainability features so these automations meet the governance and auditability standards required by global BFSI clients.
Security, observability, and governance have also become board-level priorities. According to industry insights, as GCCs ingest more sensitive financial data and run mission-critical AI models, investments in cyber-resilience, third-party access monitoring, and federated data controls have surged. This trend is being matched by a national infrastructure buildout: India’s data centre investments and regional capacity expansion are creating the physical infrastructure that enables low-latency, compliant deployments for regulated financial workloads.
Talent and domain depth are also enabling technology innovation. GCCs are not only hiring engineers but also embedding chartered accountants, risk analysts, and compliance specialists alongside data scientists. This combination is speeding up domain-led model building and increasing trust with business stakeholders. This hybrid skill mix is why GCCs now handle advanced workflows such as model risk management, capital planning analytics, and stress testing for their global organisations.
The way forward
The commercial implications are clear. Financial firms that centralise innovation in GCCs benefit from faster product cycles, lower cost-per-innovation, and the ability to run 24×7 centres of excellence that improve time-to-market for regulatory reporting and new financial products. For GCC-hosting regions such as Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Pune, forward-looking state policies and investment incentives are further fuelling fintech clustering, talent pipelines, and startup-GCC collaboration models that accelerate productisation.
There are a few challenges and issues that remain, such as responsible AI governance, model explainability, resource constraints for large-scale data centres, and the need for stronger cybersecurity postures. Yet the trajectory is unambiguous; Indian GCCs are shifting from “service delivery” to “value creation” for BFSI, delivering cost benefits as well as strategic capabilities that global banks and insurers increasingly depend on.
For leaders in the financial services industry, the takeaway is strategic: partner with GCCs to co-own product roadmaps, invest in secure cloud and data footprints, and prioritise RegTech and explainable AI. Those who do will find India’s GCCs are not merely outsourcing partners; they are innovation powerhouses that will define the next decade of BFSI transformation.