For most of the last decade, the line was simple. A global company either ran its own capability centre in India or paid an IT services firm to do the work. The captive was the threat, the vendor was the incumbent, and every new centre looked like revenue leaving the services campuses.
That line no longer holds. India’s largest IT services firms now sell GCC building as a business in its own right, and in 2026 the trade began to run both ways. Vendors build centres that clients later take over, and they take over centres that clients no longer want to run. Our view: this is a defensive business that pays less than classic outsourcing, but vendors have no better option, and global companies now have far more choice than the old captive versus outsourced debate allowed.
The forward trade: build it, run it, hand it over
Citizens Financial Group shows how the forward model works. The US bank opened its first India GCC in Hyderabad in April 2025 in partnership with Cognizant, with a plan to reach about 1,000 technology, data and analytics staff by March 2026. In May 2026 the two companies said the centre had made its 1,000th hire within its first year.
In July, Citizens appointed Rajesh Mani, previously head of Asia Pacific tech hubs at Mastercard, as managing director of CFG India. A client that hires its own India chief is a client preparing to run the place itself.
Truist Financial took the more formal route. Infosys won a contract in March 2026 to build and run a Hyderabad centre for the bank for five years, after which ownership and operations pass to Truist. Reports put the deal at upwards of $500 million, with about 4,500 staff planned over time and around 2,000 in the first phase. On 19 October, Infosys said more than 1,000 colleagues were being onboarded under its Build, Operate and Transfer enablement model.
Vendors are building whole units around it
TCS launched a dedicated unit, Global Value & Innovation Centres, in June 2026. It is headed by Soumen Roy, formerly country head for TCS Canada, who reports directly to chief executive K Krithivasan. TCS said it serves more than 150 enterprises across different stages of the GCC lifecycle.
On 28 October, LTM launched GCC Origin, an independently operated unit led by Shailendra Singh. Its menu runs from assisted and virtual GCCs to joint ventures, staff augmentation, Hire-Operate-Transfer and a variant it calls Build-Operate-Transform-Transfer. Chief executive Venu Lambu put the pitch simply: “The role of the GCC has changed.”
Cognizant, Wipro and HCLTech have each appointed global heads for their GCC practices. When every large vendor builds a separate sales and delivery structure for the same service, it has stopped being a side offering.
The reverse trade: Best Buy hands its centre over
The more telling deal came from Best Buy. The US retailer opened a 70,000 square foot technology centre in Bengaluru in 2024 and called it a heart of innovation for its mobile and AI platforms. Two years later it gave the centre to a vendor.
On 1 October 2026, TCS announced a multi-year agreement under which Best Buy’s India entity and its employees move into TCS, which will convert the site into an AI-native capability centre. Neither company disclosed a value.
This is build, operate, transfer run backwards. A company that went captive decided ownership was not where its value lay. It kept the team and its domain knowledge, and passed the job of turning that team into an AI operation to someone whose core business it is.
What this does to vendor margins
The economics deserve a plain answer. A build, operate, transfer deal is worse business than a long outsourcing contract. Industry analysts describe GCC services as typically lower margin than large outsourcing deals, and the structure explains why. The vendor carries hiring and setup costs early, earns a running fee for a fixed term, then hands over the people it recruited. At transfer, the operating revenue stops.
Scale matters too. Infosys is expected to generate at least $100 million from the Truist deal in the current fiscal year. TCS reported consolidated revenue above $30 billion for the year to March 2026. Even large GCC mandates are small against those bases, and they come with an end date written into the contract.
Truist adds a sharper warning. The bank said it is pulling work previously spread across several India supplier relationships into a more integrated model at its GCC. The centre Infosys is building will absorb work other vendors used to do. One vendor’s build fee is another vendor’s lost annuity.
So why chase it? Because the alternative is worse. Industry data shows India had 2,117 GCCs employing 2.36 million people in FY26, generating $98.4 billion in revenue. That spending flows to captive models whether vendors take part or not. Being the builder keeps a vendor inside the account, close to architecture decisions, and first in line for platform, cloud and managed services work after the handover.
The reverse trade is the better business. A takeover like Best Buy’s turns a captive cost centre back into a multi-year services contract, with a trained team and client knowledge already in place. If more companies that set up captives decide they would rather rent than own, vendors will earn more from taking centres over than from building them.
The counterpoint: vendors are training their replacements
The strongest case against the vendors is talent. Every transfer contract ends with the vendor’s recruits moving onto a client payroll. Citizens now has its own managing director. Truist will own its Hyderabad centre outright after five years. Each handover leaves the client more capable and less dependent.
There is a pricing risk as well. A vendor that takes over a centre and promises to turn it into an AI operation has to deliver those gains inside the terms it agreed, and the client keeps the benefit if it falls short.
For global companies, the risk runs the other way. A vendor that builds the centre also designs the hiring pipeline, the tooling and the processes. Without clear terms, the client inherits a centre shaped around the vendor’s way of working.
Our view
The captive versus outsourced line has not vanished. It has become a dial that clients turn as their needs change, and IT services firms now charge for every turn. For vendors, that means thinner margins on the build and harder bidding for takeovers, in exchange for a seat they would otherwise have lost. TCS, Infosys, Cognizant and LTM are right to build these units, but investors should treat GCC services as a hedge, not a growth engine on the scale of classic outsourcing.
For global companies, the advantage sits with the buyer. A firm can start with a vendor-built centre, take it in house once it has scale and leadership, or hand a captive back when running it stops paying. Best Buy made that move in about two years.
That flexibility moves the hard work into the contract. Ownership of the hiring pipeline, the intellectual property, the transfer price and the services the vendor keeps afterwards should all be settled on day one. Companies that do this get the speed of a vendor build without giving up control of what they end up owning. The ones that decide early what they want to own, and rent only the rest, will get the most out of India’s GCC boom.
