Our demand for tech resources will fall in 3 years: Barclays India CEO & MD

Barclays India to slow tech hiring as AI-driven productivity reshapes GCC operations

Barclays India’s demand for external technology resources will reduce in the next three years as it upskills employees and

improves their productivity. “That means we will be hiring at a much slower pace,” says Praveen Kumar, the firm’s chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director, in an interview with Avik Das in Mumbai on the sidelines of the Nasscom GCC Summit. Kumar speaks about global capability centres and Indian innovation. Edited excerpts: 

What does Barclays’ GCCs in India do for the organisation? 

The centres have a range of services spanning the entire bank. It is a microcosm of the global bank. As we have been in this country since 2007, our primary locations are Delhi NCR, Pune and Chennai. We have a small presence in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Each location has a unique talent ecosystem that we tap into. For example, our finance operations are big in Chennai; Noida is big on customer service; Gurugram is more about analytics and insights; and technology and engineering are mostly in Pune. In Bengaluru, we acquired Tesco’s banking business where we got 250 people and now we are building the data and AI teams on top of that as the city is very strong in data engineering and AI. 

Why do you say the GCC is a microcosm of the bank? 

If you go back five years, there was a little bit of everything. The question is what is it that you will lead from here versus what is it that potentially is being executed from here. We have multiple locations around the world, and for certain capabilities, we are really doubling down on India locations. 

For example, we are building an applied AI centre of excellence [in Bengaluru], which is not going to be massive but will have the high-end specialist skills that we have in Bengaluru and Pune. For our mortgage operations, the retail banking is led globally for India through Chennai and Pune [centres]. We reimagined the whole business last year which has resulted in a massive upside from a customer’s standpoint, and our market share has increased. 

 While most GCCs are known for execution, we are building domain specialist knowledge on top of them for particular businesses where you can provide global leadership from India. In time, I would say 30-40 per cent of the workforce will be aligned to the key areas where the global leadership is. Maybe 10 per cent [of the workforce] is where we are really doing path-breaking innovation. 

What innovations developed in India have had an impact on Barclays? 

Asia is big on QR codes but even three years back, they were not that prevalent in the United Kingdom or the United States. One challenge our US consumer bank faced was that because we are co-branded, people often do not know of Barclays. Therefore, we have a large call centre in Las Vegas handling around 2 million calls a month. The question was how do we actually pivot more towards digital banking? So we started inserting QR codes and did a hackathon out of India. 

They came up with great ideas and we started inserting QR codes in every statement, every place. The interaction made it easier for customers to download the bank’s app. That led to almost a 20 per cent reduction in our call volumes. India has the UPI stack: The payment infrastructure there is an opportunity to bring such ideas into our home markets like the UK and US in different ways. 

What path do you see for the AI and data analytics team in India? 

It is a small set of people that we are hiring who are real specialists in building agentic [AI] solutions. This is because if we do not get it right, our token costs will explode. The specialists will complement the core engineering teams for any line of business. They will be almost like catalyst teams that come in, work with the core engineering teams for a specific business, uplifting their skills and delivering solutions. 

We have tens of thousands of people who are delivering from various service integrators. As our workforce productivity goes up and people are upskilled, our dependence on potentially needing so many service providers will reduce. The direction of travel certainly is that it will come down. 

On the back of productivity uplift of our existing workforce, our net demand for technology resources potentially will go down in the next three years. That means we will be hiring at a much slower pace. If I have a ratio of 60:40 for internal and external resources right now, it will become 80:20 — not on the back of insourcing but productivity gains. 

What do you say about concerns that GCCs in India often lack strong leadership, making it tougher for such centres to mature?  

In India, the leadership should at least be at the N-3 level, if you really want to drive transformation. If you really want to have a seat at the table, you need an N-1 leader, which perhaps is lacking in most of the GCCs in India.