Capability Centres Adapting To Changing Tech Landscape

2020 was the year of accelerated adoption of all things digital by customers and businesses both. The financial services sector underwent overnight iteration in their operations to deliver unaltered services that emphasized speed, convenience, scale, security, and an end-to-end digital experience. To that effect, Global Capability Centres (GCCs) altered their priorities to incorporate investments across collaborative tools, innovative technologies, cybersecurity, and a robust tech infrastructure.

Evolution of the GCC Model

GCCs have evolved over years. During the pandemic they played a vital role in shaping and streamlining business continuity plans for global enterprises. This has built confidence in India as a globalisation centre. With the pre-crisis location-based operating model being rendered obsolete, organisations had to transition to remote working. Adaptive measures were put in place early – like redefining security protocols, migrating to the cloud, and delivering laptops/desktops to employees at home.

Organisations created new work schedules for their employees that provided flexibility, allowing them to extend shifts to manage personal and professional responsibilities. Evolving into innovation hubs for multinational organisations, GCCs took on and strengthened capabilities across varied work in production, large-scale deployment, product development, web-based applications, and IT support.  They have emerged as assets to the enterprise by creating product and process ownership, building tech platforms, and developing incubation competencies.

Increased cloud adoption

With employees working remotely, cloud services fostered a collaborative environment, enabling sharing knowledge and information in real-time. The use of VDI to enable remote working for employees is on the rise. With an increasing focus on digital transformation, organisations are readily investing in the cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability. Cloud services such as IaaS and SaaS allow companies to subscribe to IT infrastructure and applications without the need set up on-premise data centres and workstations. This permits enhancing processing power and bandwidth as needed to support growth.

Cloud technology is a reality in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector. Large-scale adoption of cloud has enabled digital transformation of payments and banking with clear benefits in capabilities, scale, and cost efficiency. Financial institutions will continue to leverage the cloud ecosystem to mine and manage data remotely, enhance security, and ensure active provisioning and DevOps automation at reduced operational costs. Multicloud architectures are on the rise providing organisations an opportunity to reduce risks arising from central and single storages.

New Technologies Have Redefined Customer Experience

Tech solutions that automate processes to optimise costs and improve efficiency are the need of the hour. There is immense focus by GCCs towards developing and deploying AI/ML, IoT, RPA, blockchain, and data- analytics based solutions for talent acquisition and management, resolving customer queries, invoice processing, fraud detection, and business workflows. Not only do such technologies reduce error margin, they also help streamline business processes and obtain actionable insights.

Companies are extensively leveraging automation tools for touchless transaction processing across all functional areas of service delivery. As the pandemic prompted a shift in consumer behaviour and purchasing habits, organisations have made CX (Customer Experience) a top priority. With data insights being a primary tool for CX enhancement, GCCs are leveraging AI to organise large and complex datasets to derive insights such as customer history and preferences, in real time. Using AI to develop chatbots and virtual assistants has enabled companies to enhance customer experience and resolve incidents. Designed to simulate human interactions by providing customers with immediate and personalized responses, these technologies have helped eliminate delays and errors in managing customer queries.

Employee Experience

A significant portion of the GCC workforce is expected to continue working remotely for the next few quarters. Organisations are thinking about hybrid workplace models comprising digital and physical workspaces. In such complex workplaces of the future how will technology enable authentic connections and collaboration to ensure employee engagement?

Collaboration tools for remote and dispersed teams that are intuitive, live, scalable, customisable, and easy to integrate with existing systems will build an ecosystem of flexible communication and agile teams. To deliver continuous talent development and a good learning experience, tech-aided learning programs will make way with newer innovations in virtual classrooms.

Security-first Posture

In the digital landscape, the prime concerns for any business are data management and cybersecurity. With advancements in technology, cyber criminals are continuously looking to find loopholes in an organisation’s security infrastructure. Due to the ever-evolving cyber threat scenario, GCCs are adopting a security-first posture to enhance security systems.

There are two aspects here – first is within the organisation: fostering a security aware culture with employees, leveraging effective encryption, strong governance for business-critical systems, vulnerability identification and prevention. Second is external, building secure digital experiences for customers. With a myriad of technologies coming together creating varied digital products/solutions, movement of money and information is becoming seamless, easy, and very accessible. Beyond providing customers elevated experiences, scalability and security will play a huge role.

Technology has blurred boundaries between requirements of today and demands of the future. GCCs are now the bedrock of technology, engineering, and innovation for global organisations. This in turn has fuelled a culture of learning, innovating and client centricity in an ever-evolving tech landscape. GCCs will help drive the transformation agenda in digital with technology enablement and innovation as priority in their strategy.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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