Hyderabad: Backbase, the Amsterdam-headquartered banking software company, has added 30,000 square feet of office space at its development centre in Hyderabad’s HITEC City, the company announced on October 9, 2026.
The centre was inaugurated by D. Sridhar Babu, Telangana’s Minister for Information Technology, Electronics and Communications, Industries and Commerce and Legislative Affairs.
Backbase India has grown from fewer than 50 engineers in 2020 to more than 600 today, making India the company’s largest engineering hub outside its Amsterdam headquarters. Backbase announced the Hyderabad centre in January 2021 as its second global development centre.
The new space will house roles in UX, full stack engineering, data engineering, SDETs, forward deployed engineering and applied AI engineering, all working on product and platform development. Backbase said it chose Hyderabad for its talent pool, cost efficiency, proximity to key customers and access to engineers who bring fresh thinking to complex problems.
“Banks want AI agents that finish the work, from the customer’s request through to a governed outcome, with a record of every step. That takes deep engineering, and our team in Hyderabad does a growing share of it. Banks can rent AI models but they cannot rent the accountability for what those agents do, so we build the controls that let them keep it. This expansion gives us more capacity to do that work,” said Jouk Pleiter, Founder and CEO of Backbase.
Surabhi Sharma, Site Leader for Backbase India, said: “We’ve scaled 10x in five years because we found the right people here. Our new center is about having the physical space to keep building the team we need. Hyderabad gives us access to talent that’s hungry and capable, and that matters for how we compete globally.”
Sridhar Babu said Backbase’s growth “reflects the shift we’re seeing across Telangana,” with global companies moving core product and platform development to the state, not just operations support. “That’s what builds lasting competitive advantage,” he said.
Backbase was founded by Pleiter in 2003. It has teams across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Africa and Latin America, and more than 120 banks run on its platform across retail, small business and commercial, private banking and wealth management.
The Narrative Republic: Growing With India
Our analysis
Backbase’s India team has grown more than twelvefold since 2020, and the new roles are in product and platform development, including applied AI. By the company’s own account, its Hyderabad team now does a growing share of the engineering behind the controls banks need for AI agents.
That puts core product work, not just support, in India. Whether Hyderabad can keep supplying such engineers as demand grows will decide how far this shift goes.
Will India become the place where the AI behind global banking is built?
