The Growth of GCCs

What is a GCC?

A GCC is a captive, in-house entity established by an organisation, typically offshore or nearshore, to deliver a broad range of business, technology, and specialist services. While the terminology used across the market varies, what distinguishes a GCC from a traditional shared service centre or outsourced arrangement is its strategic orientation.

PwC's GBS Study 2025 identifies GCCs as specialised entities designed to drive business capability development, innovation, and transformation, not simply centralise transactional work. Key characteristics include:

• Strategic focus: Aligned with enterprise strategy, prioritising capability development over capacity.

• Deep integration: Embedded within the operating model as a critical complement to corporate centres and business units, often supported by ecosystem partners including start-ups and academia.

• Expanded scope: Delivering across traditional functions (finance, HR, IT, procurement) and advanced domains (R&D, engineering, innovation, new product development).

Critically, GCCs offer a higher degree of control, deeper integration, and stronger cultural alignment than outsourced models, while still accessing global talent at scale.

The Strategic Advantages of a GCC 

For Australian enterprises evaluating their operating model options, GCCs deliver a compounding set of advantages that go well beyond cost savings. When designed and executed effectively, a GCC becomes a structural asset that strengthens the enterprise across multiple dimensions simultaneously.

Build capabilities you cannot easily build at home. GCCs develop deep process, domain, and technology expertise that may not exist elsewhere in the enterprise. Unlike outsourced models where knowledge accumulates outside your organisation, a GCC retains and compounds intellectual capital internally. For Australian organisations facing acute domestic skill shortages in analytics, AI, and enterprise architecture, this is a powerful mechanism to build capability at pace and scale.

Drive innovation, not just execution. The most mature GCCs actively power new product development, digital transformation, and customer experience redesign. They house innovation labs, design thinking teams, and rapid prototyping capabilities that allow the enterprise to experiment faster and at lower cost.

Contribute directly to enterprise growth. Leading organisations now measure GCC impact through business outcomes:

• Speed to market for new products

• Customer satisfaction improvement

• Quality of data-driven decision support

• Contribution to strategic initiatives and revenue growth

• Become a source of competitive differentiation that is difficult to replicate.

Maintain control while preserving flexibility. GCCs offer direct operational oversight, IP protection, and cultural alignment with flexible establishment options ranging from fully self-managed operations to build-operate-transfer models, allowing organisations to move at a pace that matches their maturity and risk appetite.

Orchestrate an ecosystem that multiplies impact. Perhaps the most underappreciated advantage: a well-designed GCC can sit at the centre of a curated network of technology partners, start-ups, and academic institutions. When orchestrated through a managed service model, this ecosystem:

• Accelerates adoption of emerging capabilities such as generative AI and intelligent automation

• Connects the enterprise to innovation infrastructure that would be impractical to replicate domestically

• Continuously refreshes and expands what the centre can deliver

• Operates within structured governance aligned to enterprise priorities

For executive teams, the managed service wrapper provides confidence that ecosystem innovation is being harnessed in a disciplined, strategically aligned manner.

PwC's Perspective: From Cost Arbitrage to Capability Arbitrage 

At PwC, we view the rise of GCCs as the natural next step in the maturity journey of global business services. Our 2025 GBS Study identifies a clear trajectory: organisations are moving from cost centres to capability centres, and the most mature are repositioning their service delivery operations as engines of enterprise-wide innovation.

This shift is defined by three fundamental changes in enterprise expectations:

• From capacity to capability: Organisations now expect their offshore centres to deliver outcomes that directly shape business performance.

• From cost to value: Talent and value arbitrage is replacing pure labour arbitrage as the primary driver.

• From SLAs to business impact: Success is measured by contribution to growth, customer experience, and competitive differentiation, not operational metrics alone.

PwC's research reinforces the momentum: 80% of surveyed organisations have already initiated scope expansion into more complex and value-adding services, while aspirations to be recognised as data and insight generators grew from 1% in 2023 to 16% in 2025.

What We Are Seeing in Australia 

In the Australian market, we observe a growing number of organisations exploring or actively establishing GCCs. Domestic talent shortages, particularly in engineering, digital, analytics, and automation, are making it increasingly difficult to build capability at the pace the business demands. At the same time, executive teams are under pressure to embed AI, modernise operations, and deliver measurable transformation outcomes.

For these organisations, GCCs are increasingly acting as catalysts for enterprise-wide change, with focus shifting towards:

• High-judgement and decision-intensive activities

• Design, engineering, and product development workloads 

• Data-driven decision support and advanced analytics

• Enterprise-wide automation and process optimisation

The Way Forward

PwC's 2025 GBS Study concludes that by 2030, GBS organisations are poised to become core strategic partners deeply embedded in enterprise strategy, significantly aided by their evolution into GCCs. For Australian enterprises, the question is no longer whether to explore this model, but how quickly and deliberately they can move.

The organisations that act now, defining their GCC strategy, selecting the right location portfolio, and investing in the integration of AI and advanced capabilities, will be best positioned to secure the talent, build the capabilities, and create the competitive advantage that the next decade demands.

If your organisation is exploring how a GCC could accelerate your transformation agenda, PwC Australia's Global Business Services team can help.