UK's NatWest to hire 3,000 engineers in India for high-end jobs

UK-based relationship bank NatWest Group is planning to hire 3,000 candidates in India in the next three years for high-end engineering roles. Globally, the company will hire 5,000 people overall in areas like artificial intelligence, cloud engineering, and UI-UX development.

Speaking at a conference in Chennai, the Group’s chief information officer Scott Marcar said that India is critical for the company’s global operations; the global capability centres in the country drive the digital transformation of the organisation, helping its customers to have easy access to banking services. To be sure, the Natwest Group has GCCs in three locations in India – Bengaluru, Chennai, and Gurugram. The overall headcount of the company’s digital group stands at 22,000, 50% of which are in India, a company spokesperson said.

On 14 February 2020, the name of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group was changed to Natwest Group, the parent company. In India, the legal entity is still RBS, which will be changed to NatWest in a month, the company official said. 

In an interview with Mint last month, the company’s head of international hubs, Punit Sood said that the firm has two engineering hubs, one in India and the other in Poland. One-third of the NatWest employee force sits in India GCC. “Essentially, every single function of our bank has some operation here in India. Half of our India workforce works on technology and data analytics, which also accounts for 50% of NatWest’s global tech operations,” he added.

Sood said that factors like low cost, regulatory advantage, and talent are some of the reasons companies like NatWest were looking at India for setting up offices.

As per industry body Nasscom’s November 2022 India GCC report, there are 1,500 GCCs employing over 1.3 million people in the country. This number of facilities was projected to grow by 500 more facilities in the next three years.