Bengaluru: US investment services firm Charles Schwab is accelerating its India playbook, scaling up its Hyderabad global capability centre (GCC) to around 500 employees by the end of this year and 2,000 by 2027-end, with a strong focus on engineering capabilities.The centre’s initial mandate spans technology imperatives, including cybersecurity, data, analytics, cloud computing, and deploying AI to improve engineering productivity and efficiency. “Over time, the centre will play an increasingly important role in advancing technology modernisation, supporting innovation and contributing to capabilities across areas such as cloud, data and AI. AI is an important part of the broader technology landscape, and Schwab continues to apply AI and machine learning capabilities to create scale and efficiency across the organisation,” said Pradeep Menon, country head and MD at Schwab India.As the centre scales up, Schwab India plans to transition select work currently outsourced to technology contractors, largely based in India, to its own employees at the Hyderabad centre.Schwab’s India centre is bypassing the traditional GCC path of starting with support functions and moving up the value chain. Instead, it has begun with technology and engineering, with capabilities being built around core business needs that directly support business outcomes.The centre will initially focus largely on lateral hiring, with Schwab planning over time to build a broader talent ecosystem that includes campus hires, mid-level talent and employees trained internally. “The initial mandate is engineering excellence. We will look at getting tenured engineers with well-rounded skills in these areas,” Menon said.When asked whether the company plans to build capabilities such as security operations centres (SOCs) in India, Menon said cybersecurity would be an important focus, but not the centre’s sole mandate. “If you look at the top 20 GCCs with a technology footprint in India in the BFSI sector, you will see many NOCs (network operations centres) and SOCs being set up. It wasn’t as common a decade ago, but this is increasing and you will see it across large GCCs,” he said. “For Schwab specifically, there is a focus on cyber, but it is not limited to that. For us, it is one cog in the whole machine. There are other cogs too.”“Schwab India strengthens our ability to serve the 48 million account holders and 30,000 employees who rely on our technology every day,” said Christopher Wyse, managing director and chief corporate affairs officer at Charles Schwab. “Direct investment in engineering talent here allows us to build with greater speed and quality, and it reflects our confidence in Hyderabad as a long-term technology hub for our company.”Charles Schwab has $13 trillion in total client assets, 39.9 million brokerage accounts, and $1.6 trillion in proprietary mutual funds and ETFs.
