Electronic payments provider PayPal plans to push its Indian development centres to take up a larger regional role as part of it’s ‘global talent strategy’ (GTS) programme.
The GTS is a transformation programme, which among other things, gives a stronger strategy and execution role to its development centres in Chennai and Bangalore. As part of this programme, the India Development Centre will house several centers of excellence across Chennai and Bangalore delivering cutting edge technology solutions to our customers
“Basically, our customers in Asia will have regional specific needs and problems. It doesn’t make sense to scale and change our solutions by referring to North America every time. This regional partnership will provide regional technological and business solutions. Currently our Singapore office will serve as the head for Asia-Pacific and coordinate with other regions. The regional partnership is formalized and is intended to have India Development Centre working in proximity with the business in an agile delivery model,” Jayanthi Vaidyanathan, Director, Human Resources, PayPal India Private Limited said.
Changing things to suit the region could be as simple as tweaking our products. This does not mean however, that our Indian operations will not have a global role and not work on our global payment solutions, Mrs. Vaidyanathan added. For PayPal, regional scaling of solutions gels well with its yet-to-be-resumed domestic transactions. Currently domestic trade operations are not allowed, pending licencing issues with the Reserve Bank of India.
“Right now, we are in talks with the RBI, and what we are looking at is that hopefully within a year we should be able to resume domestic trade operations, “she said.
Employee trends
PayPal, whose global revenues grew by 26 per cent to $1.4 billion last quarter, has recently been on a hiring spree and plans on adding nearly a 1000 more employees spread over its Chennai and Bangalore centres.
According to Mrs. Vaidyanathan, employees are now becoming more technological oriented, rather than heading down a managerial path.
“Seven years ago, most employees would want to get married and become a project manager and settle down. My fundamental problem would be more of the nature on how to get them to U.S. to become managers there. Now, what we are seeing is more people want to progress down the role of a technologist and advance through that path.”
This article is re-edited for clarity
