Beyond Cost Centre, Hyderabad is Becoming a Fintech GCC Engineering Hub

While other cities tend to host a single ecosystem—Mumbai is BFSI hub, Bengaluru is the centre for tech talent, and Delhi is the nucleus of policy and public sector influence—Hyderabad is bent on becoming the jack of all trades, harnessing the advantages of all three ecosystems. 

The Telangana capital is building strong momentum through deeptech talent across AI, data, cloud, and cybersecurity, alongside growing financial services capabilities and a thriving global capability centre (GCC) presence.

Banks and insurers are now moving risk, analytics, compliance, fraud, and core platforms to GCCs in Hyderabad.

According to a Nasscom report, the pace of setting up engineering, research and development (ER&D) GCCs—often focused on digital financial services in the BFSI (banking, financial servces, and insurance) sector—has grown 1.3x faster than the overall GCC setup rate over the past five years.

When US-based electronic bill presentment and payment solutions platform InvoiceCloud began exploring India in 2024, the company was cautious. Like many first-time GCCs, leadership was unsure how quickly the experiment would scale. Within little more than a year, however, its Hyderabad centre transformed from a small exploratory setup into a rapidly expanding engineering hub.

Ravi Teja Darbha, Partner and Head of Hyderabad Center at global management consulting firm Zinnov, notes that the city’s role is moving beyond being just a cost or scale play for BFSI GCCs. “Global financial services firms are anchoring core engineering ownership here across banking, payments, insurance, and capital markets,” he tells AIM.

A BFSI HQ

Global financial institutions, including UBS and Vanguard, have set up GCCs in Hyderabad in the last six months, joining JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo that are expanding their India footprint. This reflects a clear shift toward domain-led engineering and decision science.

Darbha states that the shift is in mandate depth. In banking, firms are building risk, regulatory, and AI-led platforms at enterprise scale. Payments players are focusing on fraud, trust, and next-generation transaction infrastructure. 

Insurance is evolving in parallel, with the liberalisation of FDI norms enabling global insurers to establish more strategic capability centres. This is translating into work across underwriting intelligence, claims automation, and risk analytics. These are domain-intensive, ER&D-led systems central to how financial institutions operate and compete.

Talent is being built accordingly. Firms are hiring financial engineers, AI and data specialists, cybersecurity experts, and platform architects with end-to-end ownership. What differentiates Hyderabad is not just the availability of talent, but also how it is systematically developed.

The state-backed BFSI Consortium, anchored in Hyderabad, brings together firms such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, State Street, and LSEG to co-create curriculum and embed domain learning into academia. With plans to train up to 10,000 students annually and implement skilling initiatives across financial markets, cybersecurity, and cloud, the initiative is building a structural talent pipeline aligned to GCC demand in the city.

This is complemented by scale-ready infrastructure. Hyderabad accounts for roughly a fifth of India’s GCC base, with over 350 centres, and recorded ~11.4 million sq ft of office absorption in 2025, with GCCs driving nearly half of demand, according to Zinnov.

“For BFSI leaders, the decision is no longer where to build a presence. It is where to anchor long-term platform ownership. Hyderabad is increasingly central to that choice,” Darbha adds.

Hyderabad Over Bengaluru

InvoiceCloud’s decision to choose Hyderabad over Bengaluru in 2024 quickly proved pivotal. The company began with a conservative hiring plan focused mainly on core engineering roles. But early productivity changed the headquarters’ outlook.

What started as a small seed team soon expanded rapidly. The India team expanded to over 200 within a span of 14 months from establishing the India GCC centre, taking the global headcount to 650.

“We are heading towards probably 300+ by the end of the year,” Biju Davis, SVP, India Site Leader, InvoiceCloud, adds. 

Nearly 70% of its India workforce is in engineering, reflecting a deliberate decision to build innovation capabilities rather than back-office support functions.

“It is not like we wanted to start with support,” Davis explains. “We started with engineering.”

The India team later expanded into customer success and operational investigation roles, supporting global clients.

“It was surprising that we found the right talent and were able to be productive very early,” Davis remarks. 

While experienced hiring dominates, InvoiceCloud also recruits selectively from universities, including Chitkara University, KMIT Hyderabad, Mahindra College, and Jain Institute.

The company prioritises local hiring in Telangana while maintaining a national talent pipeline.

“There is an abundance of universities and talent available,” Davis mentions. “It’s a mix of engineering and even MBA talent for go-to-market roles.”

Building an AI-First Engineering Centre

From inception, the Hyderabad GCC was designed as an AI-led innovation hub rather than a legacy support centre.

“We were very clear that we wanted cutting-edge work—not moving old tech to India,” Davis says.

The company embedded AI tools across workflows, including enterprise access to ChatGPT and multiple large language models. “We crossed the bridge on productivity. Everybody is AI-enabled,” he adds.

Current development areas include predictive analytics for customer behaviour, fraud and failed payment detection, customer experience automation, ticket deflection systems, and AI-driven reconciliation processes.

Reconciliation, Davis notes, remains one of fintech’s biggest operational challenges.

“We’re trying to see how we can get that AI-automated,” Davis shares.

The company has already launched more than a dozen AI agents.

Experimenting with AI Developer Tools

InvoiceCloud actively experiments with emerging AI development platforms including Devin AI, Claude, and GitHub Copilot.

Davis describes how Devin accelerated legacy modernisation projects. “A classic transformation would take months… Devin took a week and got us 80% there,” he says.

Human engineers still play a critical role. “You have the human in the loop to validate logic and ensure everything is correct.”

While engineering talent is strong, niche domain roles remain scarce. Examples include pricing analysts in fintech, Spanish-speaking analysts, performance engineers, and data security and privacy specialists.

“These are domains new to India because earlier they were held at headquarters,” Davis says. “In most cases, we are trying to build the capability.”

Looking ahead, InvoiceCloud hopes innovation from the Hyderabad GCC will drive a major business transformation—from being a biller enabler to a payment facilitator, taking end-to-end ownership of payment workflows.

Much of this innovation is being driven from India, supported by local product managers, designers, and engineering teams. “We have product owners and designers sitting here… leadership here is driving teams in the US,” he says.