A comprehensive reference for fund managers, operating partners, and portfolio leadership navigating the structural shift in how private equity firms build and deploy global capability.
The Ground Has Shifted Under Private Equity’s Operating Model
For most of the past three decades, private equity firms ran lean at the top and delegated heavily at the bottom. The model was straightforward: acquire, optimize, exit. Intelligence came from external consultants, while execution lived inside the portfolio company. The general partner’s job was to read the signals and make calls.
That model is under real pressure. According to McKinsey’s Global Private Markets research, average buyout holding periods have stretched to 6.7 years, the longest since 2005, as deal exits remain constrained by a misalignment in buyer and seller valuations. Bain & Company’s 2026 Global Private Equity Report confirms that while Q3 2025 was private equity’s strongest quarter ever for dealmaking, distributions to limited partners have been in a four-year drought, and buyout fundraising dropped 16 percent to $395 billion in 2025. The pressure to generate EBITDA growth inside the hold, rather than relying on multiple expansion at exit, has never been more direct.
Into this environment, a fundamentally different operating model is gaining traction. Private equity firms, both at the fund level and through their portfolio companies, are building Global Capability Centers (GCCs) in talent-dense offshore markets, principally India. The reasons go well beyond cost arbitrage.
GCCs are becoming the mechanism through which PE firms create repeatable value, build proprietary intelligence, and shorten the distance between decision and execution across diversified portfolios. Understanding why PE firms need GCCs, how those centers function inside an investment thesis, and what they deliver at scale is now essential knowledge for anyone operating in or around private capital.
What Has Actually Changed in the PE Operating Model
The PE operating model transformation now underway is not simply a new variation on shared services. It reflects a fundamental re-architecture of how value is created and captured during the hold period.
Deloitte India’s 2026 Asia Pacific Private Equity Almanac makes the point with unusual directness: active operational involvement is becoming a defining feature of modern PE investing. In FY2025, deal volumes in India declined eight percent while total transaction value increased 23 percent, a pattern consistent with global trends.
Current global trend: Fewer deals, larger bets, and a much stronger expectation that the firm itself will drive operational transformation, not merely fund it.
Over the past decade, India buyout deal value has nearly quadrupled, from ₹ 364 billion in 2016 to ₹ 1,380 billion in 2025, reflecting a sustained pivot toward control-oriented, platform-building investments.
Control-oriented investing only delivers on its promise if the controlling party has the operational infrastructure to execute. That is precisely where most PE firms, particularly mid-market general partners, have historically been under-resourced.
- Operating partners are expensive, episodic, and bandwidth-constrained.
- Management consultants deliver reports; they don’t embed.
- External IT vendors lack the institutional context to accelerate value creation in a compressed hold window.
The PE operating model transformation happening across the industry involves replacing these fragmented, project-based inputs with a permanent, captive capability layer that can operate continuously across the portfolio.
Global Capability Centers fill that gap. They are wholly owned, deeply integrated, and structurally different from a managed services arrangement. What a firm owns, it can transforms, while what it rents, it can only direct.
Why PE Firms Need GCCs: The Strategic Case
The question of why PE firms need GCCs has a short answer and a long one. But before getting there, it helps to understand how PE firms use global capability centers in practice, because the use case has expanded significantly beyond what most first-generation adopters imagined.
The short answer is that the cost structure of modern private equity operations, both at the fund level and across portfolio companies, has become unsustainable without a more scalable delivery model. A fund accountant based in New York or Boston costs upward of $100,000 annually. The same role, staffed through a GCC in Bengaluru or Hyderabad, runs between $35,000 and $40,000, according to research published by Wipro’s Capital Markets practice, representing a 50 to 60 percent reduction in fully-loaded labor costs.
But the long answer is more compelling. Why PE firms need GCCs ultimately comes down to repeatability, intelligence, and time compression.
Private equity has always depended on pattern recognition: identifying what works in one asset and replicating it across others. The problem is that without a centralized capability layer, those patterns stay trapped inside individual deals or inside the heads of specific operating partners.
A GCC institutionalizes the playbook. It captures benchmarks, standardizes processes, monitors portfolio performance in real time, and builds the feedback loops that make each successive deal smarter than the last. That is a competitive intelligence argument, and it is why the benefits of GCCs for private equity firms extend well beyond cost savings.
McKinsey research on bridging private equity’s value creation gap identifies two principles as central to maximizing operational returns in the current environment:
- the operating group and deal teams must work in close collaboration
- firms must focus on revenue growth and margin expansion, not just financial engineering
GCCs address both imperatives simultaneously, giving deal teams and operating partners a shared execution platform with real-time visibility into portfolio performance.
There is also the question of speed. In a compressed deal cycle, the ability to stand up capabilities quickly inside a new acquisition, before the 100-day plan runs out of steam, can determine whether a transformation takes root or stalls.
PE-backed GCCs with established talent pipelines and proven operating models can deploy into a new portfolio company faster than any external vendor relationship can be negotiated and stood up. The benefits of GCCs for private equity firms in this context are less about savings and more about reducing the lag between insight and action.
How PE Firms Use Global Capability Centers
Understanding how PE firms use global capability centers requires separating two distinct models that have emerged in the market.
- The first is the firm-level GCC, which sits inside the general partner entity itself and serves fund operations directly. Functions delivered from this type of center include fund accounting, portfolio performance analytics, ESG data collection and reporting, investor relations support, legal and compliance review, KYC and AML processes, and increasingly, AI-driven due diligence support.
At this level, the GCC operates as the intelligence and operations backbone of the firm, giving partners a live view of portfolio health that no consultant’s quarterly report can match. - The second model is the portfolio-level GCC, built inside or on behalf of a specific portfolio company to accelerate its transformation during the hold period. Here, how PE firms use global capability centers shifts toward technology delivery, product engineering, finance and HR shared services, and digital transformation execution.
A mid-market healthcare services company owned by a private equity fund, for example, might build a GCC in Hyderabad that handles revenue cycle management, data analytics, and software product development simultaneously, compressing what would have taken three to five years into eighteen months.
Both models are increasingly common. According to the Zinnov-NASSCOM GCC Landscape in India 2026 report, India currently hosts 504 PE-backed centers operating alongside 583 mid-market GCCs, a segment that grew from representing 21 percent of all new GCC additions in 2023 to 42 percent in 2024.
Revenue from mid-market GCCs is projected to grow at 15 to 20 percent annually through 2026, rising from approximately $6.5 billion in 2024 to between $7.5 and $7.8 billion, according to research published by ANSR.
Across both models, understanding how PE firms use global capability centers requires accounting for the role of AI.
Early PE-backed GCCs were built to process volume, handling back-office work more cheaply than onshore teams could manage. Today, how PE firms use global capability centers has shifted substantially toward generating intelligence: market monitoring, competitive analysis, portfolio performance benchmarking, and increasingly, AI model training and deployment.
Across both models, the functions that PE-backed centers are delivering have matured significantly. Early GCCs in the PE context focused on back-office cost reduction. The centers being built in 2025 and 2026 are handling enterprise-critical work: AI model development, cybersecurity operations, cloud architecture, and product management. It also entails financial planning and analysis at a sophistication level that matches what a firm would expect from a highly credentialed onshore team.
Read more: The GCC After It’s Built: Why Most Centers Plateau and a Few Become Value Engines
Benefits of GCCs for Private Equity Firms: A Structured View
The benefits of GCCs for private equity firms sort naturally into four categories, each of which maps to a different phase of the investment lifecycle.
- During due diligence, a firm with an established GCC brings analytical horsepower to the process that an ad hoc team cannot match.
Proprietary data on talent costs, market wages, regulatory environments, and comparable operating models in similar sectors can be maintained continuously rather than assembled from scratch for each new deal. The GCC becomes the institutional memory of what the firm has seen across dozens of acquisitions. - During the hold period, the benefits of GCCs for private equity firms are most tangible.
Shared services delivered through the GCC reduce overhead duplication across portfolio companies operating in adjacent sectors. Economies of scale in vendor relationships, IT procurement, and HR operations compound as the portfolio grows. A firm with six or eight portfolio companies running shared services through a common GCC captures efficiencies that no individual company operating in isolation could access.
The GCC also creates a platform for rapid capability deployment: when a portfolio company needs a data analytics team or a cybersecurity operations center, the GCC can stand one up without starting from scratch. - At exit, a well-integrated GCC materially improves the story a PE firm tells to prospective buyers.
A portfolio company with a mature offshore delivery model, demonstrable EBITDA contribution from its GCC, and a documented digital transformation record commands a meaningful premium over one that has not made that investment. The GCC becomes an exit-readiness asset, not just an operational convenience. - At the fund level, the benefits of GCCs for private equity firms include a structural reduction in G&A costs, giving the firm more room to operate during periods of fundraising difficulty.
With global buyout fundraising contracting and LP distributions remaining thin, the ability to run fund operations more efficiently without sacrificing analytical quality is a genuine competitive differentiator.
Building GCCs for Portfolio Companies: The Playbook
Building GCCs for portfolio companies is not a one-size-fits-all exercise. The correct model depends on the portfolio company’s size, sector, existing offshore footprint, and the PE firm’s hold thesis.
- For platform companies with revenues above $250 million and a clear technology transformation mandate, a standalone captive GCC in India typically delivers the most value. The company retains full IP ownership, controls its talent strategy, and builds a center that is directly embedded in its operating model rather than held at arm’s length through a vendor agreement.
According to Zinnov-NASSCOM’s 2026 data, 96 percent of GCCs established after FY2021 launched with a product or portfolio mandate from day one, a departure from the earlier model of starting small and expanding cautiously. Building GCCs for portfolio companies at this velocity requires a disciplined approach to governance and talent from the outset, since the crawl-walk-run model has largely been abandoned by the market’s most sophisticated entrants. - For smaller add-on acquisitions or companies earlier in their digital maturity curve, a managed-to-captive model often makes more sense. The PE firm or a specialized GCC setup partner handles the initial build, talent acquisition, and regulatory compliance, transferring ownership to the portfolio company once the center reaches operational stability. This approach preserves the benefits of a captive structure without demanding that a mid-market company build offshore management expertise from scratch.
In both cases, India as a hub for PE-backed GCCs has become the reference point against which all other locations are measured. The combination of talent density, cost structure, regulatory clarity, and institutional infrastructure that India offers is not replicated at scale anywhere else in the world today.
India as a Hub for PE-Backed GCCs: Why the Thesis Has Only Grown Stronger
India as a hub for PE-backed GCCs is, at this point, less a hypothesis than a documented outcome. The numbers from the Zinnov-NASSCOM GCC Landscape in India 2026 report are striking in their scale and their direction of travel.
As of March 2026, India hosts 2,117 GCCs operating across 3,728 units, supporting 2.36 million professionals. Revenue is projected at $98.4 billion for FY2026, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of approximately 9.9 percent since FY2021 and a 32 percent increase in the number of centers over the same period.
The GCC market is on track to breach $100 billion in annual revenue by FY2027, and KPMG’s research projects the total market reaching that threshold by 2030 with headcount exceeding 2.5 million. The Indian government’s National Policy on GCCs targets expanding the country’s GCC footprint from roughly 1,800 centers to 5,000 and generating $470 to $600 billion in GCC-led GDP contribution by FY2030.
For PE firms specifically, India as a hub for PE-backed GCCs offers several structural advantages that are worth naming precisely.
India produces more than 2.5 million STEM graduates annually, maintaining its position as the world’s second-largest producer by volume.
The country now has more than 250,000 AI and machine learning professionals, ranks second globally in enterprise AI talent behind only the United States, and leads the world in AI hiring intensity, according to Zinnov-NASSCOM. More than 1,200 GCC centers in India have already embedded AI and ML capabilities, supported by 250 dedicated centers of excellence. EY’s GCC Pulse Survey 2025 found that 58 percent of GCC centers in India are actively investing in agentic AI, with two-thirds creating dedicated innovation teams to globalize ideas developed in India. What we are looking at is no longer a labor arbitrage market but an AI co-creation hub operating at scale.
GCC trends in India 2026 also reflect a meaningful maturation in how centers are structured and governed.
According to Zinnov-NASSCOM, 64 percent of GCC site leaders now hold dual mandates, combining global business unit ownership with site leadership. Enterprise authority is migrating to India faster than corporate org charts are reflecting it.
Nearly 50 percent of all GCCs currently operate at a high maturity stage, a threshold that Zinnov’s framework associates with end-to-end product and platform ownership rather than delegated task execution. The GCC trends in India 2026 show that 75 percent of all centers are projected to reach full transformation hub status within the next five years.
Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune remain the primary tier-one markets for PE-backed GCCs, offering the deepest talent pools and the most mature vendor and real estate ecosystems.
Tier-two cities including Jaipur, Coimbatore, and Kochi are absorbing overflow demand and offering 10 to 35 percent cost advantages relative to tier-one hubs, according to NASSCOM community data.
India’s progressive regulatory environment, combined with a national policy framework explicitly designed to facilitate GCC establishment, has reduced the friction of entry for mid-market firms that previously viewed India as too complex to navigate without a global enterprise infrastructure behind them.
GCCs as a Strategic Advantage for PE Firms in an AI-First Environment
The framing of GCCs as a strategic advantage for PE firms has evolved considerably since the model first gained traction in the mid-2000s. The original case was cost reduction. Today, that case is necessary but insufficient. The firms getting the most out of their GCC investments are using them to build something that cost savings alone cannot buy: proprietary intelligence and execution capacity that compounds over time.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly central to investment decision-making, due diligence, and portfolio monitoring, the ownership of data and the infrastructure to process it is becoming a competitive moat. A PE firm that runs its own GCC has a team continuously ingesting signals about market conditions, talent markets, regulatory changes, and portfolio performance. Instead of starting from scratch on each new deal, that team is building on a base of institutional knowledge that grows with every transaction.
GCCs as a strategic advantage for PE firms, in this context, is really about who owns the intelligence infrastructure of the industry in the next decade.
The EY research on agentic AI in GCCs reinforces this point. Centers that have moved beyond basic automation to AI-led operating models are no longer just processing information faster. They are generating insights that were not visible before, identifying patterns across datasets that no human team working manually could surface.
For PE firms with diversified portfolios, this kind of continuous cross-portfolio intelligence is an entirely new capability. GCCs as a strategic advantage for PE firms is most clearly expressed when the center is generating deal-relevant insights that improve both investment decisions and portfolio management simultaneously.
There is also the question of LP transparency.
As limited partners demand more granular performance reporting and more sophisticated ESG analytics, GCCs give PE firms the production capacity to deliver that reporting without proportionally scaling their onshore headcount. The cost of compliance with evolving LP reporting standards is absorbed more efficiently inside a GCC than through external service providers. Moreover, the quality of output can be held to a higher standard when the team is captive rather than contracted.
The Future of GCCs in Private Equity
The future of GCCs in private equity points clearly toward deeper integration, broader mandates, and an accelerating role for AI as the organizing principle of what these centers do.
Three trajectories are worth tracking.
- First, the future of GCCs in private equity will involve a consolidation of the firm-level and portfolio-level models. As general partners recognize that the infrastructure they have built to support fund operations is also a deployable asset for portfolio companies, the two models will converge into a unified capability platform that serves both purposes simultaneously.
Firms that have built only one or the other will face structural disadvantage against those running an integrated platform. - Second, the future of GCCs in private equity will be defined by the rate at which centers move up the maturity curve from delivery execution to strategic co-creation. Zinnov-NASSCOM data shows that only five percent of India’s GCCs currently operate at the highest maturity tier, characterized by CXO-level functional sovereignty from India, AI-led operating models, and agentic transformation at enterprise scale.
As that percentage grows, the centers managed by PE-backed firms will increasingly own outcomes, not just execute tasks. For PE firms, this means the GCC can carry genuine responsibility for value creation, not merely operational support. - Third, the structural shift in GCC strategy that PE firms are navigating now will accelerate as AI costs continue to fall and the return on GCC-based AI investment becomes easier to document and compare.
The structural shift in GCC strategy is moving from ‘how do we reduce cost through offshore delivery’ to ‘how do we build the intelligence and execution infrastructure that makes our firm categorically better at investing and operating than our peers.’ This is why the firms that have committed to GCCs as a core operating model are unlikely to reverse course.
Deloitte India’s 2026 assessment of the PE market captures the broader context precisely: firms are focusing on operational transformation, governance, and technology-led efficiencies within portfolio companies. The GCC is the vehicle through which that commitment becomes structural.
Practical Considerations for PE Firms Evaluating GCCs
For PE firms that have not yet committed to a GCC strategy, the evaluation process is more tractable than it might appear. The case for why PE firms need GCCs is grounded in the operational realities of compressed hold windows and demanding LP reporting requirements. It is also influenced by the competitive landscape where firms with embedded intelligence infrastructure are systematically outperforming those relying on external consultants and episodic reporting.
- The starting point is a straightforward audit of what the firm currently spends on fund operations, external consultants, and portfolio-level IT and process support.
In most mid-market firms, this cost base, aggregated honestly, justifies the capital and management investment required to establish a captive center within a two to three year payback window. The 50 to 60 percent labor cost advantage India provides, combined with eliminating third-party vendor margins, makes the arithmetic relatively clean. - The harder questions are governance and talent.
A GCC is not a vendor relationship. It is an internal organization that requires the same rigor in hiring, culture-building, and leadership development that any high-performing team does. PE firms that underinvest in GCC leadership, particularly in the early years when the center is establishing its credibility with onshore stakeholders, typically see their centers underperform against the thesis.
The Zinnov-NASSCOM finding that 64 percent of GCC site leaders now hold dual mandates reflects how seriously the market’s best operators take the question of GCC leadership authority. - Location strategy within India also merits careful analysis. Bengaluru remains the default for firms prioritizing depth of talent in technology, finance, and AI. Hyderabad offers strong infrastructure and competitive talent costs for firms prioritizing engineering and analytics. Pune is a preferred market for financial services and manufacturing sector GCCs.
Each market has a distinct talent profile, cost structure, and competitive dynamic for hiring, and the right choice depends heavily on which functions the GCC will deliver and in what sequence.
How Trigent Supports PE Firms Building GCCs in India
Trigent brings seasoned experience supporting U.S.-headquartered companies in building and operating global delivery capabilities from India. For PE firms and their portfolio companies evaluating a GCC strategy, Trigent provides end-to-end advisory, setup, and managed services across the full GCC lifecycle from entity formation and talent acquisition through operational ramp-up and technology integration.
Trigent’s GCC services are specifically structured for the mid-market PE context, recognizing that the resource profiles and management bandwidth available to a firm with $500 million to $3 billion in assets under management are categorically different from those of a mega-fund.
Trigent’s engagement model allows PE firms to build toward a fully captive GCC at a pace calibrated to the firm’s readiness, the portfolio company’s maturity, and the available talent market in the chosen location. Whether the objective is standing up a fund operations center for the general partner itself, building shared services infrastructure across a portfolio, or accelerating the technology transformation of a specific portfolio company, Trigent’s India-based teams provide the institutional knowledge and operational depth to execute with the precision that a PE hold period demands.
For PE firms that are serious about the GCC opportunity and are ready to move from evaluation to execution, Trigent’s advisory team is the right place to start the conversation.
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