MNCs to expand ops at GICs, hire more in India
BENGALURU: Large multinationals, led by banking, financial services and insurance companies are looking to hire local talent to set up global in-house centres (GICs) in India for critical roles such as strategy and planning.
Recently, Commonwealth Bank of Australia hired about 1,000 people for its technology centre in Bengaluru. Likewise, one of America’s largest banks is planning to recruit 15,000 Indians over the next two years, one person familiar with the development said, seeking anonymity. American investment bank Goldman Sachs, which operates a GIC in India, too, seeks to hire 2,500 people by 2023, as it expands its operations in Hyderabad.
In 2004, Goldman Sachs set up its first office in Bengaluru.
The Hyderabad centre is now the second largest technology hub globally with about 7,000 employees, and is part of its expansion plans for engineering and business innovation.
“The Hyderabad centre will be a centre of excellence for consumer banking services, business analytics and platform engineering, including application of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment our businesses,” said Gunjan Samtani, head of Goldman Sachs in India.
Sun Life Asia Service Centre (ASC) India, the GIC of Canadian financial services firm Sun Life is looking to increase its hiring by 40% in 2021-22. “Digital skills will continue to lead the hiring numbers as banking and insurance captives have seen growing trend owing to a business transformational push and virtual ways of doing business. One can anticipate that skills like full stack, DevOps, integration, cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and information security will remain in high demand,” Rajeev Bhardwaj, chief human resources officer, Sun Life ASC, said.
“The pandemic has enabled people to work from anywhere so multinationals are leveraging locations like India where skilled talent is available at a lower cost,” said Harish Pillai, director and country head, Randstad Sourceright. “Many banks prefer to have their captives in multiple locations such as South America, Eastern Europe and India so that in case of lockdowns, business is not disrupted,” he added.
GICs, also known as global capability centres or captives, emerged in the early 1990s as offshore units of large multinationals such as General Electric, Texas Instruments, Citigroup, and American Express, to perform designated technology operations. India is currently home to more than 1,200 GICs employing close to 10 lakh people, according to Nasscom.
According to consulting firm ANSR, over 100 GICs are expected to be established 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 India with an additional creation of 3-3.5 lakh jobs due to expansion of existing GICs and setting up of new ones.