GCCs have to focus on what is needed in the future: Ramkumar Narayanan

FIS says GCCs must evolve beyond support roles by building future-ready talent, expanding global leadership and scaling trusted AI adoption

Fidelity Information Services (FIS), an American fintech company, provides software and other services around the world. Its global capability centres (GCCs) in multiple Indian cities house almost 40 per cent of its global workforce of more than 50,000. Ramkumar Narayanan, executive vice-president for artificial intelligence (AI) technology enablement and head of India and the Philippines at FIS, speaks to Avik Das in Bengaluru about GCCs’ significance. Edited excerpts:

 

You have taken over the leadership of a capability centre that has been up for two decades. Where do you see it moving strategically?

 

The reason I came in was because this centre needed to be brought forward into the new paradigm of GCC, and to tune in the value to be even higher. This was a case of a large mature centre and transforming it. I have to say that in two and a half years, we have made phenomenal strides. The core of it is around four areas. The first is our portfolio work. We continue to tune it and be more aligned with the company. That meant opening up a number of global roles for our local leaders here. The second step is a talent base. We are taking a very strong look at talents that will be needed in the future and giving a lot of local intervention in terms of training, learning and development, besides bringing in fresh blood from outside. The third is about building a brand. The last is governance and compliance. It is really about running a tight ship and engaging on the right side — types of dialogues, employee value proposition — and making this a great place to work.

 

Do you think the GCC would have lost relevance if the strategy was not changed?

 

There were two triggers. One was when Stephanie Ferris became the company’s chief executive officer in 2022. She brought in a whole remit of new leaders into the company and leadership was very focused on moving FIS to be much more solidly focused on the future. As we had more than 40 per cent of the workforce in India, the country became a core part of it. It was a fairly large distribution of many core areas that we were already operating. If India didn’t transform, the company transformation may not have been successful. The main shift happened last September.

 

Can you explain what are some of the key global roles here and what are their responsibilities?

 

Some of those roles are in the fields of software development, technology development, professional services and client experience. Even in finance and internal operations as well, many of our local leaders here became global leaders. For example, I didn’t have a global role when I joined the company. I run AI Technology Enablement for the company now. I have teams in the United States, the United Kingdom and India reporting to me. The aim was to shift the organisation from a landlocked, local reporting structure, which was very services-driven. The way we think about it is L1 is our CEO, L2 is CEO direct reports and L3 is the next level below. So I’m an L3 and report to the chief technology officer. The next level below are L4s where there are vice-presidents and senior-vice-presidents.

 

What portfolios are global leaders handing here in India?

 

There are now 10-15 such leaders who were not there till the middle of last year. The way our technology organisation is set up, there are 14 portfolio leaders globally with two of them now based in India. Portfolio would be an area of work, for example at banking we have our next-generation core. It’s called modern banking platform — overall engineering and product management leaders of which are based in India. They used to report to me earlier but now report functionally to the head of banking development. Another portfolio leader owns all of our business process services and products around it. These are very large businesses worth over a billion dollars each.

 

The other example is I own all of the AI technology enablement for the company globally. We have more than quadrupled our investment in AI going into 2026. The challenge with that was how do you move it into an effective AI model from proof of concept to much more scaled, trust-driven [system], which delivers value to the company.

 

What challenges do you still see in enterprise adoption of new technology?

 

It is mainly data and regulations. Since we work with banks and other financial institutions, data is not easy to access. It’s customers’ data. We have to work with the bank to identify their data, bring it together, clean it up, and then help them build solutions on top of it. The regulatory environment is still evolving and rightly so. There are concerns about using AI at scale and biases. It’s up to us to build the scaffolding around these solutions so that the regulator also gets comfort in that.