Equiniti GCC aims to deliver higher value work from India, use AI with caution
The global capability centre of Equiniti in India plans to expand its scope of activity ranging from technology, services and operations as it has become key location for the company’s global financial services operations.
US-headquartered financial services company, Equiniti, which focuses on share registry services, aims to generate higher value work from its global capability centre (GCC) in India through upskilling its employees and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) with caution.
Equiniti primarily provides share registry services, which means it completely maintains the legal records of a shareholder for any company such as their names, dividend payments, transfer, rights issues, IPOs etc. This is a third-party service.
It first established its GCC in India in 2014 and now has a presence in Bengaluru, Chennai and Nagercoil. Before this, the company was engaged with third-party IT outsourcers in the country.
Now with 2,700 people in India GCC, Equiniti is gearing up to a different kind of growth playbook.
In an interaction with EnterpriseStory, Anand Ramakrishnan - Managing Director of Equiniti India said, “I want to add more work into India, but not necessarily add people. So, the idea should be to upskill, use technology, AI and to do more value-added work with the same amount of people.”
Today, Equiniti India is the largest centre for the company globally with the other two locations being in the United Kingdom and the United States. India has 40% of the company’s global workforce. The India GCC is also part of all the services the company provides such as tech, finance shared services, HR, and marketing.
Although Equiniti started its GCC in 2014, it was during the post Covid period around 2021-22 that India became the focal point of the company when it realised that the country has the requisite talent pool to become an integral centre for the organisation globally.
Equinity’s India GCC started small with a few core operations, internal HR, finance etc. It was a period of steady expansion.
“Post Covid we actually started growing extensively as the organisation realised that the potential in India is immense,” Ramakrishnan remarked.
This potential was not just in terms of availability of the skills but also the ability to learn. In 2022, Equiniti also ran a people location strategy and the top leadership also understood that scaling their operations in India would not be a challenge and additionally the presence in the country could provide continuous services.
Additionally, Equiniti also employed a training model for the employees, especially for the freshers, inducted into the company. This was primarily because share registry services is a specialised activity and the talent is not widely available. Also, post 2022 it launched a tech transformation programme as most of it is built inhouse.
A significant part of Equiniti’s procurement, order to cash processes is run from India. Today, a whole gamut of customer services, internal operations and technology is being run out of India.
“Whatever is core to the business gets done from here,” Ramakrishnan said.
Role of AI
Today, AI has become the top priority for every enterprise and each one of them is at their own level of adoption. However, for Equiniti it is more of a cautious play given that they are in a highly regulated financial services sector.
Ramakrishnan said, “We cannot adopt AI randomly. For us, security and client confidence is paramount.”
However, this does not mean that Equiniti is steering clear of AI as it is exposing this technology to all its employees and encouraging them to learn how to use it.
“We believe it will definitely help but be careful. We don't want to jump into it because somebody else is doing it,” Ramakrishnan said.
Equiniti has already deployed AI solutions in its work processes. For example, it has used AI to neutralise Indian accents while engaging in customer services or leveraging the technology of optical character recognition (OCR) to go through various mails which come in the letter format so it can be directed to the right department.
Edited by Affirunisa Kankudti