How a US Enterprise Software Company Set Up Its GCC in India with Wisemonk

40: India GCC hires
8 months: From first hire to the company's own entity
100%: Statutory compliance handled

The challenge

Building an Owned India Centre Without a Year-Long Wait

By the time this enterprise software company looked seriously at India, the decision itself was easy. It had the scale to justify a Global Capability Center, and it wanted a real one: engineers and product-operations staff on its own books, not a vendor's. The hard part was timing. An owned centre starts with an Indian entity, and incorporation plus the tax and provident-fund registrations that follow runs close to a year. Nobody wanted to tell the engineering leads their first India hire was twelve months out.

The usual shortcut, contractors or a staffing firm, solved the speed problem and lost the point. The board had signed off on a captive centre the company would own and control, and a rented team was not that.

So the company needed two things that normally pull against each other: people working this quarter, and a wholly owned entity at the end of it.

The solution

Hiring on EOR First, Then Moving the Team to Its Own Entity

Wisemonk split the build in two. While the entity was still being incorporated, it employed the first GCC cohort as Employer of Record, so engineers started, got onboarded and shipped work on fully compliant Indian contracts from their first payroll run, provident fund, professional tax, TDS, gratuity and health cover included.

At the same time, Wisemonk set up the company's own Indian entity and registered it for tax and as an employer. Once it was live, the team moved across onto it. The company did not end up renting a team, it ended up owning the centre, which was the whole point.

The company picked the people and set the operating model. Everything underneath it, the contracts, the payroll, the filings and the entity itself, ran through one point of contact at Wisemonk.

The results

A Wholly Owned GCC, Live in Eight Months

The company stood up a 40-person GCC and got from its first hire to its own operating entity in eight months. Done entity-first, most of that year would have passed with nobody hired at all.

It did not have to trade ownership for that speed either. The ramp ran on EOR, the destination was the company's own entity, and compliance held through the handover.

Now that the centre exists and the entity is live, adding headcount is just hiring into something the company already controls. The India GCC has become a standing part of how it builds product rather than a one-off project.

We needed engineers live in India this quarter, but the board wanted a centre we owned outright. Wisemonk gave us both: the first hires started on their EOR while our own entity was being set up, then moved across to it cleanly. We got the speed without giving up ownership.

— VP of Product Engineering, US enterprise software company