Your GCC is a Data Processor to Its Own Parent-and That Fiction is About to Break
For considerable time, many multinational enterprises have considered their Indian Global Capability Centres (“GCCs”) as an extension of the parent company in terms of data protection. Essentially, the overseas parent was considered as the controller of personal data and the Indian GCC was considered as a processor acting on the instructions of the parent. As […]
DPDP’s Significant Data Fiduciary Designation Is the Sleeping Compliance Obligation for India’s GCCs
Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India have spent the last year preparing for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (“DPDP Act”). Privacy notices have been updated, vendor agreements revisited, cross-border data flows mapped, and internal policies refreshed. Yet, one of the Act’s most consequential compliance obligations has received comparatively little attention: the possibility of […]
Agentic AI in the GCC: Who Is the “Employer” of an Agent That Acts?
There’s an accidental joke sitting at the center of this question. In Riyadh or Dubai, “GCC” means the Gulf Cooperation Council. In Bengaluru or Pune, it means Global Capability Centre, the in-house delivery arm that multinationals now use instead of traditional outsourcing. Put an agentic AI system into that sentence and the pun stops being […]
GCC-to-GBS Conversion: The Compliance Debt Nobody Prices In
Every GCC-to-GBS pitch deck looks the same. A slide showing the captive centre’s cost curve flattening out, followed by a slide showing the GBS entity’s revenue curve climbing up and to the right. Somewhere between those two slides, a whole category of risk gets waved away with a bullet point that says, “transfer pricing and […]
POSH Compliance at a GCC Is Not a Policy Problem but a Jurisdictional one
Every GCC I’ve worked with as an External Member has a POSH policy. Most of them are good documents, properly worded, properly circulated, properly acknowledged in the onboarding checklist. And almost none of them answer the question that actually shows up in the room once a complaint lands, “whose jurisdiction is this, exactly?” That’s not […]
GCC vs Outsourcing: Understanding the Legal and Business Differences
Introduction In essence, companies frequently mix the phrases GCC and outsourcing as if they were just two different vendors distinguished by price. This is a wrong belief with actual effects when applied into a structural decision. Outsourcing is a commercial deal, a business that sets a scope of work, provides it to an outside vendor, […]
A Complete Legal Guide to Setting Up a Global Capability Centre in India
Introduction Global Capability Centre is an offshore or nearshore entity, fully owned and operated by a parent company, built to house specialised functions ranging from information technology and R&D to finance, HR, and increasingly AI-led product work.1 India’s GCC story has genuinely become one of scale. There are now around 1,700 such centres in the country, […]
How AI Is Transforming Global Capability Centres
Introduction Not long ago, a Global Capability Centre in India was, in practice, little more than a large operations floor dedicated to processing tickets, reconciling invoices, and handling calls that headquarters preferred not to field itself. The proposition was pretty straightforward i.e. lower cost, greater scale. This model proved sufficiently effective for a sustained period […]