Building GCCs as Strategic Assets: Monica Pirgal on India’s Next Leap

A strategic leader with over 25 years of experience spanning consulting, banking, and retail, Monica Pirgal has a strong track record of enabling and scaling Global Capability Centres (GCCs) for Fortune 100 companies. Monica serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Bhartiya Converge, as the lead for GCC (Global Capability Centres) business in India. In this role, she partners with global enterprises to conceptualise, build, and scale their strategic operations in India, transforming their vision into thriving, high-impact capability hubs.

As the former Managing Director and Site Head of Neiman Marcus Group in Bengaluru, she played a pivotal role in building their captive centre from the ground up. A seasoned GCC professional, Monica brings deep expertise from her leadership roles at Lowe’s India and Goldman Sachs India, where she successfully navigated the full lifecycle of GCC operations — from setup and scale to maturity.

In this interview with AsiaBizToday, Monica shared her views on India’s growing significance as a GCC destination and how the ecosystem needs to evolve.

ABT: India is already the world’s largest GCC destination. What do you believe is changing now in the ecosystem?

Monica: India’s GCC narrative is shifting from scale to design. For years, success was defined by headcount growth, cost efficiency, and faster time-to-market. While these remain relevant, they are no longer the primary differentiators. Today, the focus is firmly on value creation, with global enterprises asking deeper questions around governance maturity, ownership of innovation, leadership depth, and long-term sustainability.

What is changing in the ecosystem is the intent with which GCCs are being built. Organisations are moving towards cohesion by design, where talent strategy, operating models, and decision-making structures are deliberately aligned with global business priorities. GCCs are increasingly being designed as natural extensions of the enterprise, organically attuned to the global rhythm of business and embedded into the strategic core, enabling sustained value creation at scale.

ABT: What led to the creation of Bhartiya Converge, and how is your model different from traditional GCC partners?

Monica: Bhartiya Converge was created to address a fundamental agility challenge global enterprises face while setting up or scaling GCCs in India. While organisations want their GCCs to focus on core business, innovation, and value creation, leadership teams often end up managing a complex coordination exercise across real estate, talent, compliance, IT, and operations. Each vendor delivers a component, but no one owns the outcome end-to-end, slowing decision-making and diluting focus.

Our model is designed to solve this by bringing what enterprises need and how it is delivered onto a single, integrated platform. From strategy and entity setup to workspace, talent scaling, governance, and ongoing operations, Bhartiya Converge takes end-to-end ownership of the GCC lifecycle. This allows enterprises to stay focused on their core priorities while we manage the operating complexity, thereby reducing friction, accelerating timelines, and providing global leadership teams with clear visibility, accountability, and control as their India operations scale.

ABT: How are GCC mandates evolving as companies move away from a cost-arbitrage mindset?

Monica: As companies move away from a pure cost-arbitrage mindset, GCC mandates are shifting from execution to ownership. This change is being driven by faster innovation cycles, distributed global teams, and the need to make decisions closer to where talent and technology capabilities are concentrated. GCCs today are no longer measured by efficiency alone; they are increasingly accountable for business outcomes-owning product roadmaps, platform engineering, AI adoption, cybersecurity posture, and data-led transformation as integral parts of the global enterprise.

This evolution demands a different operating model-one built around empowered leadership, strong governance, and deep integration with global decision-making. India’s unique combination of scale, depth of talent, and a mature technology ecosystem makes it well-suited for these expanded mandates. At Bhartiya Converge, we help enterprises design GCCs with this ownership mindset from day one- aligning India teams to global priorities, embedding them into the broader innovation ecosystem, and providing the end-to-end operating backbone that allows GCCs to lead, not just support, enterprise transformation.

ABT: What types of organisations are driving GCC demand today, and where do companies most often go wrong?

Monica: GCC demand today is being driven by three broad segments: companies setting up their first global centre to build digital and engineering capabilities; enterprises upgrading existing centres into higher-value hubs with expanded mandates; and organisations diversifying their delivery footprint to improve resilience and reduce concentration risk. Across all three, the common driver is the need to innovate faster, build differentiated capabilities, and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Where companies most often go wrong is in approaching a GCC as a tactical setup rather than a long-term strategic investment. Many focus heavily on talent availability but underinvest in defining a clear vision-covering mandate, leadership model, governance, and scalability. This is particularly critical for mid-market organisations, where the margin for error is smaller. Without a well-articulated strategy, early momentum can quickly give way to friction, attrition, or stalled growth. Successful GCCs are those designed with clarity of purpose from the outset, ensuring they are resilient, scalable, and aligned to long-term business outcomes, not just speed of setup.

ABT: Talent remains a critical issue. How should companies rethink talent strategies in India today?

Monica: Talent strategy in India today needs to be approached as a two-phase challenge: attracting the right talent and retaining it at scale. While access to talent remains strong, competition for high-quality skills is intense, particularly in areas driving enterprise value. Companies can no longer rely on brand or compensation alone. Attracting the right talent increasingly depends on having a clear India-specific strategy, one that defines the kind of work the GCC owns, the problems it is solving, and the level of responsibility India teams are entrusted with.

Retention, however, is where most strategies succeed or fail. This is shaped not just by career paths or learning programs, but by cultural integration between global headquarters and India, leadership quality on the ground, and the substance of work being delivered from India. When GCCs are positioned as core contributors rather than extended execution arms, talent engagement and continuity improve significantly. Sustainable talent outcomes emerge from this combination of clear mandate, meaningful work, strong leadership, and deliberate integration into the global enterprise, not from isolated hiring or HR interventions. We assist firms in structuring talent models addressing twin imperatives of speed and retention.”

ABT: Looking ahead, what will define successful GCCs in India over the next 3–5 years?

Monica: Over the next three to five years, successful GCCs in India will be defined less by what they do and more by how they are designed to evolve. Adaptability will be the core differentiator-reflected in multi-city operating models, sharper specialisation in advanced capabilities, and GCCs that are structurally embedded into global strategy and decision-making. As business cycles compress and technology shifts accelerate, static operating models will struggle to keep pace.

India will continue to sit at the centre of global capability strategies, but the real distinction will lie in whether GCCs are built as strategic assets or operational conveniences. Those designed with clarity of mandate, leadership depth, and the ability to continuously reshape themselves will create sustained enterprise value. The next generation of GCCs will not be measured by scale alone, but by their capacity to anticipate change, absorb complexity, and lead transformation-rather than react to it.