Cloud-first, AI-led GCC reimagines global banking

Global capability centres (GCCs) were once offshore delivery arms but are today being rebuilt as cloud-first, AI-led transformation engines that own platforms, capabilities and outcomes. That is the direction in which Cognizant and Citizens Bank are taking the bank’s GCC in Hyderabad. Citizens, one of the oldest financial institutions in the US – founded in 1828, and with $230 billion in total assets – has built the centre with Cognizant under a BOTT model: build, operate, transform and transfer. The emphasis is increasingly on transform.


“The GCC narrative has fundamentally shifted from a cost arbitrage story to a capability sovereignty story,” Sailaja Josyula, global head of the GCC service line at Cognizant, said in a discussion we had recently. “Enterprises are asking: can India be where we build our most critical capabilities for the next decade?”
Importantly, she said, the operating model is no longer about a hub executing headquarter decisions. “We are seeing outcome-based federated models, where GCC teams are contributing to the top line, to strategy, product innovation, risk reduction, etc,” she said.


Dhiraj Rattan, CIO of consumer banking technology at Citizens Bank, said the Hyderabad centre is a strategic asset for the bank. “It is about creating the capability and talent within the organisation so that it can be, one, aligned to the strategic goals of the organisation and, two, be a critical contributor in realising these strategic outcomes,” he said. The Hyderabad GCC now has about 1,000 people. Rattan said it is the bank’s largest hub globally in one location.
And the headquarter-GCC working model, Rattan said, is built around one team, one mission, one backlog, and one set of outcomes.


A big lesson he learnt from the Citizens-Cognizant engagement was that banks setting up GCCs must not only train the India team, but they must also retrain the headquarters team to work differently. “If I’m sitting in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, I now have to be conscious of time zones, maybe move my meetings to a different time of day. I have to build confidence and comfort in giving up ownership.”

The Citizens’ model offers a blueprint for other global banks in multiple ways: Start with a clear business and technology vision; treat the GCC as a strategic engineering capability; move decision rights to the GCC; think through common standards, common tooling, governance approaches, operating principles. “We cannot have different rules for headquarters, different rules for the GCC,” Rattan said.


The GCC is already handling critical work. Citizens Pay, the bank’s buy-nowpay-later capability, is fully run from the GCC. Several capabilities for Citizens’ private bank have been engineered from Hyderabad.


A big pillar is cloud. Anand Vijai, CIO of risk, finance and compliance technologies at Citizens Bank, said effective last year, all the bank’s business applications now run in the cloud. That cloud shift forms the foundation for AI adoption. But in banking, cloud and AI cannot be deployed without strong governance, explainability, security and human oversight. AI, Vijai said, will help transform this too. “We are looking at what we call continuous control monitoring, building explainable outcomes that are coded by AI for us. Humans then use that to provide the narrative quickly,” he said.


Nageswar Cherukupalli, head of the banking, capital markets & insurance business unit at Cognizant, said banking transformation is harder than most industries because banks carry decades of legacy systems, face moving regulatory targets, and depend heavily on trust. Cognizant’s decades of experience in the space, he said, allows them to build almost a digital twin of Citizens Bank in Hyderabad to then be able to transform it.