Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:05]
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the first episode of the HFS GCC Advantage series. My name is Achyuta Ghosh, and I’m an executive research leader at HFS where I lead our GCC research and advisory practice. GCCs today are growing faster than ever, right? More centers, more talent, bigger mandates. On the surface, everything looks strong, but if you look a little closer, there are real questions around how sustainable this model is. At the same time, AI is fundamentally changing the GCC model — how work gets done, how value is delivered, what skills are in demand, how the pyramid changes, and what these centers are expected to do going forward. We are already seeing a shift, and what these centers are traditionally doing — traditionally shared services, scale-led models — they are shifting to far more outcome-driven and eventually to what HFS describes as being generative in nature. This is exactly what we are doing in this series: bringing in leaders and practitioners to talk about what needs to change, what’s not being said enough, and what it will take to make the model truly future ready. In this episode, we focus on leadership. Are GCC leaders really ready for what is to come next? And to explore that, I’m joined by Arindam Mukhopadhyay, managing director and global head of finance controller systems and data operations at Citi. Arindam has had a long and illustrious career on Wall Street, working for some of the largest global and most complex financial institutions in the world, and is an operator at heart and in practice. Welcome to HFS GCC Advantage, Arindam.
Arindam Mukhopadhyay — Managing Director, Global Head of Finance Controller Systems and Data Operations, Citi[01:46]
Achyuta, thank you, and you know it’s a real pleasure to be joining the inaugural episode, as I believe it is, with you and HFS. I mean, you guys have been doing terrific work, and I think you’re focusing on the right thing, because while there is a tremendous amount of growth, leadership is at the core of everything. So I’m glad to be part of this exercise. I’m glad to be contributing.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[02:10]
So, Arindam, you spent decades building and leading GCCs, and you’ve also been on the corporate side expecting outcomes from them. Can you briefly walk us through the journey and how it shapes the way you look at GCCs today?
Arindam Mukhopadhyay — Managing Director, Global Head of Finance Controller Systems and Data Operations, Citi[02:23]
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I have been in this space for a very long time, several decades, and I’ll probably focus more on where I had been at Citi for the last, you know, about 18 plus years I had spent time at Citi. And I have operated GCCs. I have built, I have scaled, transformed, and most importantly, ran or operated GCCs in pretty much every single domain that one can think of — big enterprise functions like finance, risk, HR analytics, information security, security operations, you name it. I have done a non-cyber part of it, pretty much in every single GCC hotspot. I’ve built centers in a number of locations in India, Costa Rica, several locations in the US, the Philippines, obviously a very large center, Malaysia, Poland, Hungary — so you name it, Ireland. But interestingly, what I had done — and I haven’t found too many people as my compatriot, I wish there were many — I also had to exit some of the locations, which I can guarantee you, and we will talk more about that in the other questions, is much harder than building. So all in all, I think I spent a lot of time in this domain, always been an operator, always been transforming, and I’m seeing over the last year, year and a half how AI is dramatically reshaping this, and I’m very involved in the AI ecosystem. I’m advising several growth-stage AI product companies, B2B, on the enterprise side. For the fun of it, I’m now a principal mentor in one of the leading tech accelerators in New York City, again advising a handful of fintechs on the commodities trading side and healthcare — but again, in how do they perfect their go-to-market, their commercial and strategy. So yeah, a long, long experience, a lot of good lessons, a lot of failures. You learn more from that than sometimes from success.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[04:21]
Thank you, Arindam. You know, that’s a very unique vantage point, right? It gives you a much more, what do I say, grounded view of how this model actually works and how it has evolved over a period of time. If you look at GCCs today, the numbers look incredibly strong, right? There are more than 2000 GCCs in India itself, maybe 3000 centers in India itself — more talent, bigger mandates. But this apparent size expansion, this apparent success — is it masking any deeper issues? What do you think is actually broken beneath the surface?
Arindam Mukhopadhyay — Managing Director, Global Head of Finance Controller Systems and Data Operations, Citi[05:02]
Yeah, you know, I’ll probably characterize that a little bit differently, and I wouldn’t use the term broken because that has a negative connotation. What I would probably say is the scale had been enormous and breathtaking, to be honest. A little anecdote here, in a sense — we both love stories, right? When I built the finance center in Mumbai back in 2008-2009, along with, at that time, the head of FP&A, we came here and we were looking for — is anybody doing anything sitting in India, sitting in Mumbai, not for the country? Obviously Citi had a very large India presence, continues to be one of the biggest foreign banks in the country. And we had an office somewhere, back in the days, in a dusty lane near the old international airport, and we went there and we’d been told that there are a handful of people who are supporting the US business and UK business, and we were actually on a hunting trip trying to find who those people are. And after like half a day of search, I think we finally gathered somewhere around 20 people who kind of crawled out from different floors, and we all came to the conference room, and they’re looking at each other for the first time, right? I mean, it is unbelievable. That’s where we all started, and that team, over the next four or five years, grew into — between the function that I ran and what was run under FP&A — something like 1500. So the scale had been breathtaking, it is fantastic, and then obviously every single corporation talked about the number of GCCs that have grown here and got great success. But I think we have gotten a little too used to the growth, right? We have almost started to take it as a given, like nothing is going to change this juggernaut, right? This path is forever and for perpetuity. I think that’s where the risk is, right? The leadership has to evolve to tackle that there will be a cycle. There is one type of leadership when you’re growing, which is let’s just get more people in, a more manual process, move it over here, do it cheaply — do it well, not just cheaply, but do it well. But then that cannot be the source of sustenance for the next 10 years. We’re already seeing it, and people are struggling: where do we go from here?
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[07:24]
You know, that’s a very interesting point you’re bringing out, Arindam, because a lot of the conversation right now is focused on technology and AI, right? But you’re saying that it’s not really an AI problem, it’s a leadership problem first. What are the specific leadership mindsets or behaviors that are holding GCCs back right now, if I were to build up on the point that you just made?
Arindam Mukhopadhyay — Managing Director, Global Head of Finance Controller Systems and Data Operations, Citi[07:49]
Yeah, you know, it’s not a tech problem. Tech is a disruptor. Tech had always been a disruptor, right? It’s just that the scale of disruption that we’re seeing at this moment is, again, breathtaking. I mean, every single day we’ve got a new coding tool coming up which is competing with the old one. We had Cognition, you know, just on the coding side, because there is such a large tech population in India supporting globally. I don’t have the exact stat — you guys are better at it — but they’re probably well over 50 to 55% in the domain of technology, right? I mean, I’ve seen some form of infrastructure, development, etc., and they’ve all relied on writing code of all shapes and sizes. And that whole code-writing skill, if I just narrow it a little bit on that — and I’ll come to the leadership, how it plays into it — that whole code-writing skill is under threat. You don’t need to sit there and write code, because the machines are writing code which every single day is getting as good, if not better, than how humans had been writing billions of lines of code in the past, right? So, you know, just today, there is another company called Factory, which is getting like a $2 billion valuation led by Khosla Ventures, and then Sequoia and everybody else is participating, and they’re competing head-on with, obviously, the ubiquitous Claude Code and Cursor and Cognition and others. So these are all coming right at us at a breathtaking speed. And if the leadership’s view is that we have come to this point of leadership — which certainly has brought them a lot of glory and a lot of economic mobility, let’s not ignore that fact, a lot of social mobility, which has all been a good thing — but over a period of time, most of the leaders in GCCs that I’ve seen have just become leaders of people, managing an infrastructure of very large, several thousand people under the organization. And they have taken that as their role, and so they will continue to grow in the organization if another 100 people gets added to the domain of influence, another 1000 gets added, and they kind of go up a level. And over a period of time, how the work is getting done and how that work needs to change — the leadership at the top has kind of got distanced from there. And then AI is bringing us right back to how the work was done historically and how that’s going to change, like, dramatically. So if the leaders are distanced from that, they’ll suddenly find themselves at a spot where their value has fallen and will fall. So this is the core of it. You cannot divorce yourself from domain expertise, and I think a lot of middle managers, as I see, have kind of gotten distanced from the domain expertise, right? You have to be demanding excellence from your people, not demanding time. Again, I have believed in it — people who have worked for me, they know that, yes, I have been a demanding leader, but I have not demanded their loyalty. I didn’t demand their time, that you work 20 hours a day. I demanded excellence, because that’ll take them — them, not me — to the next level of their career, and people have proven me right in doing so. So how do you demand excellence as a leader if you yourself are not close to the process? So what the leaders will need to do is to make sure that they are getting closer to the process that is under their domain of influence. They’re not just sitting there and being a manager of facilities. It’s not a landlord role, right? A landlord role is gone, and you can’t do a landlord role — real estate did that. So that’s what I would say: the leaders will have to get back so that you understand the process, get over that obsession of I need 100 more people, 1000 more people to prove that I have a point of impact in the organization. Your impact is not, or will not, be defined by the number of people you command. Your impact would be defined by what outcome you produce for the organization, right? That’s the core change, and to do so you have to know the process very well so that you can speak for your people. I always saw the role of the leader in the GCC — because you’re usually by design 8000, 6000, 9000 miles away from where a lot of the headquarters decision-making is happening — the role of the GCC leader is to represent the thousands of people who are working thousands of miles away in a room where they’re not there, but speak on their behalf with absolute fluency and conviction. And you can’t do that if you don’t know what they’re doing and how you can improve their life by adopting better technology, and not trying to protect the empire, right? Take your youngest population, the lowest level of the employees, the entry-level fellows, and just take them out for a coffee. You’ve got a fantastic cafeteria — just grab a coffee. Ask them what they’re doing, let them educate you. That’s the only way that we can make that leadership work.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[12:44]
Yeah, and I think I love the analogy of how you said the landlord role is gone, right? I agree that you’re bringing out the importance of domain. So if leadership is really the lever here for you, Arindam, then the next question obviously is what needs to change, right? If leaders get this right, what needs to change in how they operate in an AI-driven world, and how does the future-ready GCC really look as a result?
Arindam Mukhopadhyay — Managing Director, Global Head of Finance Controller Systems and Data Operations, Citi[13:15]
You know, I think some of the core tenets of leadership will never change, right? Like, you’ve got to have empathy. You’ve got to know your subject — which is where I think some of the weaknesses are coming — but you’ve got to have empathy. You’ve got to have the communication skill. You’ve got to have the influencing skill. You’ve got to be able to get into a room, or the virtual room these days a lot more than the real room, and be able to read the room, right, and understand where people are coming from — what are your stakeholders’ point of view, what’s their agenda? And I’m not using the word agenda here negatively; the agenda in a positive way, like what is it that they want to accomplish and where would this GCC plug in to help them accomplish their goal. You know, I heard a long time back from the CEO of a very large financial services company, and this gentleman described his role as to make his colleagues successful. It stuck with me, always stuck with me. Not to make the company successful, not the employees, not the shareholders — he said my role is to make my colleagues successful. So if the GCC leader thinks of my colleagues being the stakeholders at a corporate or different business segments, or enterprise leaders or CFOs or CROs or CHROs or head of tech — my job is to make them successful. And to do that, I’ve got this fairly large number of people behind me who can make it happen. How do I act as the bridge with conviction, empathy, and the knowledge? So I think that’s where people will have to stick to it. A lot of it is just sticking to the basics, but the difference is — and you know, this has become cliche — just in the last two days I’ve been speaking at a conference, doing a bunch of panels and workshops, and this term “reimagine your process” is being thrown around a lot, and some people kind of start to roll their eyes when they hear it one more time. But I’ll tell you, there is real value in that, in reimagining your process, and you almost start by saying: everything that I do as a step, let’s start with the assumption that some form of intelligence, artificial intelligence, can do that. Right? If you start with that, and you put that AI in the center of your thinking, and now start looking at your process, and you only say it cannot do it once you have tested, kicked the tires really, really hard — then you have a much different appreciation of what your people do and where AI can come in. And then as a GCC leader, you go to the organization and say, I believe we can put AI here. I know the process. I know that part of the process which is ready for AI, and I can also tell you with conviction the part of the process where we do not need to spend money on AI — there are other ways that we can modernize that process. As a GCC leader, you have to get to that level and speak to it, right, which means you yourself will be demanding excellence from yourself as a leader. At the same time you’ll be carrying the whole army of people who are there in the GCCs — and you would not have such a large army, I think that’s a fact that we all have to accept, right? And then how do you make sure that you pivot from thousands of people to a lesser number, less thousands of people, maybe hundreds of people, but you have your best people in the mix who can take the process to the next level? It’s a lot of moving parts, but if you’re always thinking in your head, for me to move to the next level I need another 1000 people under my belt — you’re completely on the wrong track.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[16:38]
I think that’s a great note to end this on, Arindam — how to make my colleagues successful. I think that’s a great leadership mantra: not only reimagining just the model, but the people behind it, the leadership behind it. Thank you for joining us and sharing your perspective on such an important topic. Personally, I believe leadership is often the biggest challenge, more than technology or the business model. After all, it’s strong leadership that has really brought GCCs to where they are today, right? So we look forward to having you back with us in the future to see how your vision for the evolution of GCCs is playing out. Have a great day. Thank you.
Arindam Mukhopadhyay — Managing Director, Global Head of Finance Controller Systems and Data Operations, Citi[17:15]
OK. Thanks, Achyuta.
