By Sai Ishwarbharath B

BENGALURU - U.S. fintech firm Broadridge Financial will expand its India tech staff by 26% to 6,800 people over three years as it gears up to sell its products in the world's most populous nation, a top executive told Reuters.

The firm, which counts JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America and Wells Fargo among its clients, currently only has tech centres in India.

It plans to sell its products locally in the "near term" through an acquisition strategy, India Managing Director Sheenam Ohrie said.

"By 2030, India will be the third-largest economic power. So if that is the case, then you should be selling there," Ohrie said earlier this week, without mentioning details.

She expects most of the new India hires to be software engineers as the firm looks to modernize its existing "legacy" technology.

Broadridge provides investor communications services and financial technology software to banks, broker-dealers and asset managers for trading.

The plan comes at a time when multinational companies are increasingly setting up local offices, or global capability centres (GCCs), in India to support their daily operations, research and development and cybersecurity.

"We have a lot of customers who have GCCs in India. Over 20 of our premium customers have global leaders driving decisions around our products sitting in India. So we are building a zero-distance approach," Ohrie said.

For instance, Broadridge has been collaborating directly with the GCC counterparts of certain premium banking clients in recent months to make faster decisions, she said.

The market size of India's GCCs is expected to grow to $99 billion-$105 billion by fiscal year 2030 from $64.6 billion in 2024, according to a report by IT industry body Nasscom and consulting firm Zinnov.

Broadridge's India team has worked on BondGPT, a LLM-based product that answers queries on bonds, and Distributed Ledger Repo, which helps clients improve their cash management.