With nearly three decades across BFSI, IT, digital businesses and global capability centers, Nagarajan V has helped steer organisations through transformation, scaling and capability building. His vantage point spans legacy enterprises and new-age operating models, giving him a rare perspective on what India’s GCC ecosystem must prepare for next.
- Many GCCs treat culture as rituals or engagement scores. What does a culture that actually drives business outcomes look like?
- Across industries, what capability separates high-performing GCCs from the rest?
- What structural shift is quietly reshaping the GCC landscape today?
- Hiring for GCCs has changed sharply. What signals show whether a GCC will succeed in attracting digital, engineering and analytics talent?
- With AI reshaping workflows, what cultural capability becomes non-negotiable?
In this exclusive StrongYes Media interview, he breaks down the foundations of high-performing GCCs, the capability most leaders underestimate, and the structural shift that will redefine the India advantage.
Many GCCs treat culture as rituals or engagement scores. What does a culture that actually drives business outcomes look like?
Nagarajan: A culture that delivers outcomes rests on two fundamentals.
First, employees must feel they are being set up for success. Most GCC talent enters early in their careers without domain experience. They need a clear, transparent development path and managers who act as coaches, not just task owners.
Second, GCCs must build a culture of proactivity and value creation. Headquarters want teams who anticipate needs and add context, not just follow instructions. Exposure to global ways of working accelerates maturity, and using Transactional Analysis to train people in adult-to-adult communication is particularly powerful in the Indian context.
If these two pieces are in place, traditional engagement activities can continue, but they no longer define culture. Real culture becomes a competitive engine.
Across industries, what capability separates high-performing GCCs from the rest?
Nagarajan: The most underrated capability is domain knowledge.
GCCs started with process-oriented work, so process excellence dominated. But as India becomes a hub for high-value work, domain depth has become the real differentiator. The challenge is that domain experts often hesitate to join GCCs because of outdated perceptions.
But if you ask me what truly separates an average GCC from a great one, it is the depth of functional and domain expertise.
What structural shift is quietly reshaping the GCC landscape today?
Nagarajan: The biggest shift is the offshoring of judgement-based, application-heavy work, not just transactional tasks.
As a practical illustration, finance teams are moving planning, budgeting, reporting and controlling to India. Insurance GCCs are offshoring underwriting, actuarial science and advanced analytics. Work that was once considered “too strategic” to move is now being relocated.
A second shift is the rise of the co-location model, where India and global hubs jointly execute the same high-value processes as equal partners. This shift is underway but not yet fully matured.
Preparing Indian teams to operate at the same strategic level as headquarters talent will define the next phase of GCC evolution.
Hiring for GCCs has changed sharply. What signals show whether a GCC will succeed in attracting digital, engineering and analytics talent?
Nagarajan: The clearest signal is a GCC’s ability to attract domain leaders.
If you cannot bring in strong specialists from domain-intensive industries, you will struggle to build engineering and analytics depth. Success requires a distinctive employer brand, a profit-centre mindset in rewards, and genuine developmental opportunities for specialists.
A data scientist must believe they will grow just as fast in a financial services GCC as they would in a tech firm. Changing that perception needs both strong internal systems and strong external messaging.
With AI reshaping workflows, what cultural capability becomes non-negotiable?
Nagarajan: The must-have capability is meta learning, the ability to learn how to learn.
AI-driven work needs employees who can upskill continuously and independently. We can no longer rely on scheduled training calendars. Teams need curiosity, adaptability and the confidence to self-learn.
To support this, GCCs must build:
• an innovation culture, focused on adding value to outsourced processes
• an insight culture, focused on deriving meaning from data
If a GCC builds a workforce with meta-learning habits, it is ready not just for AI, but for every future disruption.
