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GCC setup in India
Everything a global company needs to stand up a wholly owned capability centre in India — the sequence, the decisions, the costs and the things that go wrong — plus how Kompass runs each part of it.
In short: what does GCC setup in India involve?
Setting up a GCC in India means incorporating a legal entity, registering it for tax and labour compliance, hiring a local leadership layer, securing workspace and IT, running payroll, and connecting the centre to your global delivery model. A 15 to 25 person pilot can be live in 10 to 14 weeks; a 100-plus person centre with full leadership typically reaches steady state in 9 to 12 months. Fully loaded cost runs roughly USD 30,000 to 45,000 per engineer per year in a tier-one city.
Why companies move capability to India
The original case was labour arbitrage. That case still works, but it is no longer the interesting part. What changed is that India now holds enough senior talent to own a product, not just staff a backlog.
Nasscom and Zinnov put the market at 2,117 centres and USD 98.4 billion in FY2026, employing 2.36 million people. More than 500 Forbes Global 2000 companies now run an India centre, and the fastest growth is in mid-market firms in the USD 100 million to 1 billion revenue band — companies that would have been told a decade ago they were too small for this.
Three things follow from that. Senior talent is available but competitively priced. Your centre will be judged by candidates against other GCCs, not against outsourcing firms. And the operating question is no longer “can we staff it” but “can we give it work that matters”.
What you actually get
- Ownership. The entity is yours. Product context, institutional memory and IP stay inside the company rather than leaving with a vendor contract.
- Cost structure, not just cost. A fixed, predictable employment cost you control, instead of a rate card that reprices every renewal.
- Coverage. A working day that overlaps Europe in the morning and the US west coast in the evening, without asking anyone to work nights.
- Capacity for the unglamorous. Platform, tooling, migration, data quality — the work that never wins the priority fight in a headquarters team.
The eight decisions that shape everything else
Get these right in the first month and the rest is execution. Get them wrong and you will be re-doing work in month nine.
Charter
What the centre owns end to end, versus what it supports. Centres given real ownership hire better people and lose fewer of them. A centre defined as “capacity” attracts people who treat it as capacity.
Legal structure
Private limited company is the default for a GCC. Choose the transfer pricing method — usually cost-plus for a captive service provider — before incorporation, because it drives your intercompany agreement and your tax exposure.
City
Match the city to the dominant capability, not to an average of everything. A single centre trying to be an engineering hub, a finance hub and a customer operations hub usually underperforms on all three.
First leader
The single highest-leverage hire. A site leader who has built rather than only run a centre will save you two quarters. Hire this person before the team, not after.
Compensation philosophy
Decide whether you pay at the 50th, 75th or 90th percentile of the local market, and hold it. Inconsistent banding across the first twenty hires creates equity problems that take years to unwind.
Reporting lines
Solid line into global functions with a dotted line to the site leader works better than the reverse for engineering. For finance and operations, the opposite is often true. Decide deliberately.
Security posture
Your CISO will have an opinion about data residency, endpoint control and physical access. Bring them in during week two, not during week sixteen when the floor is ready and they block go-live.
Exit path
Even in a wholly owned setup, write down how you would wind down or relocate. Notice periods, lease break clauses and severance norms in India differ from what most parent companies assume.
What Kompass does at each stage
We carry the setup risk
Incorporation, registrations, banking, transfer pricing documentation and the statutory compliance calendar run on our clock and our accountability. You approve; you do not chase.
We hire in your name
Job descriptions, employer positioning, sourcing, screening and offer management, presented as your company. Your panel makes the final call on every hire.
We open the floor
Managed seats in weeks, a dedicated space when headcount justifies it, with network, identity, endpoint management and physical security built to your standard.
We run it until you want it
Payroll, statutory filings, benefits, performance cycles, vendor management and monthly reporting — with a transfer pack maintained continuously, not assembled at the end.