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As Global Capability Centres (GCCs) increasingly move beyond traditional delivery models towards greater ownership of product development and innovation, India is becoming central to how global technology companies build and scale their platforms. For InvoiceCloud, that shift is reflected in its Hyderabad centre, where teams are taking ownership across product engineering, AI capabilities, cloud-native architecture and platform reliability. 

In conversation with The GCC Hub, Biju Davis, Senior Vice President & India Site Leader, InvoiceCloud, discusses how the centre is helping shape the company’s agentic AI agenda, build intelligent payment experiences and strengthen Hyderabad’s role as a global product and engineering hub.

Q1. What areas of global product development does the India team now have greater ownership of?

When we established our India centre at Hyderabad in October 2024, we made a clear decision: this would be a centre that co-authors those product specifications and owns the outcomes. 

Our India teams have meaningful ownership across product engineering, AI capability development, platform reliability, cloud-native architecture and site reliability engineering. These are global capabilities that happen to originate from India. Our agentic AI offering, which helps consumers understand bills, answer payment questions and resolve common service requests, was designed and collaboratively developed from the centre in under six months. The SRE programme that now governs how we think about platform health across our entire organisation was established here.

The most accurate way to describe the ownership model is that our India and US teams function as a single engineering and product organisation. Geography does not determine responsibility; expertise and accountability do. Engineers here participate in architecture reviews, influence the product roadmap and remain involved from design through deployment and production monitoring. That is what genuine product ownership looks like in practice.

Q2. How is InvoiceCloud exploring agentic AI within its payments and customer engagement ecosystem?

Agentic AI is not a research initiative for us; it is already in production. Our first agentic capability helps consumers navigate billing and payment interactions: understanding their bills, answering payment questions and resolving common service requests without needing to contact a live support agent. That is a real customer experience improvement with measurable outcomes.

What makes our approach distinctive is the architecture underpinning it. Building AI in a payments environment is fundamentally different from building a general-purpose conversational tool. Our customers serve regulated industries — utilities, insurance, government — where the stakes of a wrong answer are real and the consequences of a system failure extend beyond inconvenience. We built transparency, observability, governance and human oversight into architecture from day one. Not as an afterthought, but as a foundational requirement. We call it putting experts in the loop, not just humans in the loop — leveraging domain knowledge to improve AI-driven outcomes rather than simply inserting a checkpoint.

The India centre is pivotal to where this goes next. The combination of engineering depth, domain expertise in payments and the pace of AI innovation here makes it the natural home for our AI development agenda. The teams are identifying customer problems, building prototypes, and bringing business cases to the table.

Q3. What are the engineering and architectural challenges in building payment infrastructure that is simultaneously scalable, secure, and customer-centric?

These three requirements pull in different directions, and reconciling them is genuinely one of the harder engineering problems in enterprise software.

Scalability demands that systems handle large, unpredictable volumes, billing cycles create significant payment spikes, and the platform needs to absorb that demand without degrading. Security requires that every transaction be protected, every access be controlled, and every compliance obligation be met without exception. Customer-centricity demands that all of this complexity be invisible to the end user; a payment should be simple, fast, and reliable, regardless of what is happening underneath.

The architectural choices that make this possible include cloud-native design that scales horizontally with demand, deployment architecture that allows rapid deployment across environments, a multi-tenant SaaS model where all clients benefit from the same platform improvements simultaneously, and an SRE practice that measures success from the customer’s perspective rather than through infrastructure metrics alone. We ask: did the payment go through? Was the bill presented correctly? Was the experience consistent? Those are the measures that matter.

What I would add is that compliance is not a layer you add at the end; it is an architectural principle you build in from the beginning. In the regulated industries we serve, security and compliance are foundational design choices, not features.

Q4. How do you see the shift toward intelligent, personalised digital payments impacting the future of customer engagement?

Most payment and billing systems today are built to respond: a customer misses a payment, a query comes in, a problem surfaces. The next generation of platforms will anticipate rather than react, knowing a customer is likely to miss a payment before it happens, flagging a billing anomaly before it becomes a dispute, personalising the payment journey in real time based on what a customer’s history tells you about what will work best for them. The shift is more proactive than reactive.

AI makes this possible in a way that was not realistic a few years ago. For the industries we serve- utilities, insurance, government- where customer relationships are long-term, and the stakes of a missed or incorrect transaction are real, proactive intelligence is not a feature. It becomes the foundation of how trust is built and maintained over time.

I also think accessibility will become an equally important differentiator. There is still a meaningful population that has not fully transitioned to digital payments — not because the technology is unavailable, but because the experience has not been designed for them. The platforms that solve the accessibility and trust barriers for those users, rather than simply improving experiences for those already digitally engaged, will define the next decade.

Q5. What capabilities will become most important for GCC talent, and how are you balancing AI-assisted development with human expertise?

The most valuable engineers five years from now will not be those who know the most tools — they will be those who can frame problems most clearly, collaborate most effectively across geographies, and apply judgment most reliably in situations where AI cannot. Tool familiarity will be table stakes. Curiosity, adaptability, domain understanding, and the habit of questioning AI outputs will be the real differentiators.

At InvoiceCloud, AI adoption across our engineering teams is close to universal — engineers use AI for coding, code review, documentation, testing, and problem-solving. We have seen 40%+ improvement in engineering productivity as a result. But we are deliberate about what that productivity buys us. It is not about doing the same work faster — it is about creating more capacity for the work that requires genuine human judgment: architecture decisions, customer problem-solving, product thinking, and the domain expertise that makes our AI trustworthy in a regulated environment.

We think of AI as a mindset, not a skillset. Tools change constantly. What does not change is the ability to learn continuously, to question outputs, to apply domain knowledge wisely, and to take genuine ownership of outcomes. That is what we hire for and what we develop for — and our HPEL early talent programme is designed to instil exactly these qualities from the very beginning of an engineer’s career.

Q6. Why was Hyderabad chosen, and how do you see the centre’s role evolving over the next three to five years?

Hyderabad was not a default choice — it was a deliberate one. We were looking for a location that could support a genuine product and engineering hub, not a delivery centre. That meant deep talent in cloud-native platforms, enterprise software, and AI, combined with the ecosystem maturity to attract and retain senior engineering and product leaders.

Hyderabad offered all of this. The academic pipeline from IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Hyderabad, BITS Pilani, and Osmania University feeds a talent pool with strong technical foundations. The GCC ecosystem here is among one of the most mature in India; professionals have built careers navigating global engineering mandates, which means the learning curve for working as an integrated part of a global organisation is much shorter. And critically, the engineering community here demonstrated something important: a genuine appetite for ownership, not just execution. That appetite is what makes the model work.

Over the next three to five years, I expect Hyderabad to become increasingly central to InvoiceCloud’s global strategy across multiple dimensions. On talent, we will continue to invest, not because of cost, but because that is where the engineering and product depth is being built. On innovation, I expect more of our most significant product capabilities to originate here. And on leadership, the professionals growing through our Hyderabad centre today will increasingly shape decisions that affect our global customer base.
The question I keep coming back to is not how large the centre will be, but how consequential it will become. That is the measure that matters.