GICs in India expanding digital business

GICs, also known as global capability centres (GCCs) or captives, emerged in the early 1990s as offshore units of large multinationals such as General Electric, Texas Instruments Inc., Citigroup Inc. and American Express Co., performing various technology operations.

The pandemic has spurred the growth of GICs as companies accelerated investments in digital transformation, data analytics and other emerging technologies.

“Post pandemic, the work being undertaken at GCCs is significantly more core, strategic, impactful and aimed at future-proofing the enterprise workforce. Covid has also highlighted the importance of distributed, collaborative teams thereby validating the GCC model," said Lalit Ahuja, founder and CEO of ANSR, a GIC consulting firm.

According to ANSR research, over 100 GICs are expected to open in India this year compared to only about 40 in 2020. Also, in the next three years, more than 200 new GICs are likely to be set up in the country. New GICs and expansions by existing ones are expected to create additional 300,000-350,000 jobs.

The key growth segments are banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), retail/consumer packaged goods (CPG), manufacturing, healthcare and technology product companies.

Since March last year, Target India, which serves as the GIC for American retailer Target Corp., has hired 583 people to take its total headcount to more than 3,400 in Bengaluru.

Half of the new hires were for latest capabilities in areas such as vision computing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), vendor security and platform engineering.

“Our Target India technology team works on some of our most important strategies such as building tech for the future, pricing, enabling digital business, computer-generated imagery and others," said Gorur Shrinivas, vice president, data sciences, Target in India.

The India team at Target has built Kelsa, a data pipeline framework that enables the development of certified data sets in a standardized and easily accessible manner. “Before Kelsa was built, developing clean data sets out of volumes of data was time-consuming. The platform accelerates the development of certified data sets by eliminating silos… Kelsa was built in-house and from the ground up by Target in India’s engineers," said Shrinivas.

Sun Life Asia Service Centre (ASC) India, the GIC of Canadian financial services company Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada, expects its workforce to grow 40% by 2022.