Set up Your Global Capability Center in 2026

A Global Capability Center (GCC) is a centralized hub where tech product companies run core functions and manage areas like engineering, IT, finance, and support across multiple regions. Everest Group notes that 2025 is the second year in a row in which companies have opened more than 300 new offshore and nearshore GCCs worldwide, and that about 67% of enterprise and GCC leaders plan to work with providers to drive their business transformations.

I’m Dmytro Ovcharenko, CEO at Alcor, your software R&D center partner offering GCC as a Service. As a Global Capability Center provider, we help Western tech product companies build their own R&D hubs across Latin America and Eastern Europe. Our edge is simple: 100% tech focus and everything you need to run a GCC in one place – access to top-10% tech talent through our IT recruitment, compliant Employer of Record, and 360-degree operational support.

If your main worry is “How do we build a GCC without turning tech leaders into full-time HR and legal managers?”, our job is to take that load off your team.

In this article, you’ll get a clear answer to the question, “What is a Global Capability Center?”, see how it actually works in practice, and learn why tech giants rely on GCCs instead of classic outsourcing. You’ll also learn about how to set up a Global Capability Center step by step, and walk away with a practical plan for your own center. If you’re under pressure to scale engineering globally without losing control over quality, IP, or culture, this guide will help you understand whether a Global Capability Center for product companies is the right play.

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Key Takeaways

• Well-designed GCCs let companies save 40-50% on costs for senior roles, with access to deep talent pools, faster innovation cycles, greater resilience, and tighter control over IP and quality.
• Before launching, you need a clear strategic intent, a willingness to run a single global team, a view on which skills must sit within the GCC, a defined risk appetite, and internal capacity to sponsor the setup.
• Successful GCCs start from a clear 12-24 month plan, rigorous location research (tax, payroll, legal, office), a realistic team model and talent strategy, a chosen employment/compliance model, and strong governance and culture from day one.
• India offers massive scale but also saturation, skill, and time-zone trade-offs; LATAM (Mexico, Colombia) adds nearshore overlap and ~50-60% salary savings; Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania, Ukraine) brings top-tier engineering quality with 40-50% lower senior salaries and EU-grade legal frameworks.
• Outsourcing is fine for quick wins and small projects, but a GCC gives you your own team, direct control, unified tools and processes, and a single structure for recruitment, payroll, and operations.
• With GCC as a Service across LATAM and Eastern Europe, Alcor combines top-10% tech recruitment, 100% compliant EOR, and 360° operational support so you can spin up and scale a GCC from 10 to 100 engineers without opening entities or juggling multiple vendors.

GCC Operating Model: Core Functions

A GCC centralizes core functions, including IT and software development, business process management (finance, accounting, payroll, procurement, customer support), HR management, risk and compliance, and marketing and sales support. Unlike a pure R&D center, which focuses mainly on product engineering, a GCC is a multi-functional hub designed to standardize, optimize, and scale business operations across multiple regions.

I would say the easiest way to think about a GCC is as your offshore or nearshore extension of HQ. A Global Capability Center (GCC) runs a defined set of core functions for multiple regions, typically covering strategic areas like:

• IT and Software Development: Building and maintaining software applications, managing IT infrastructure and support services, and providing cybersecurity and data protection.
• Business Process Management (BPM): Handling back-office operations like finance, accounting, payroll, and procurement, managing customer support and contact center services, and streamlining supply chain and logistics processes.
• Human Resources (HR) Management: Recruiting, onboarding, and training employees, managing employee benefits and performance, and ensuring compliance with labor laws and regulations.
• Risk Management and Compliance: Monitoring regulatory changes and ensuring compliance, managing enterprise risk and internal audits, strengthening disaster recovery and business continuity planning.
• Marketing and Sales Support: Providing content creation, digital marketing, and SEO support, managing CRM tools and customer databases, and assisting with lead generation and market outreach.

Thus, a GCC is essentially the same as an R&D center or (GCC) Global Captive Center, but operates on a more global scale. While R&D centers are specialized facilities dedicated solely to innovation, product development, and engineering, GCCs are multi-functional hubs that manage a broader range of business operations, focusing on centralizing and optimizing processes across regions.

So, what specific advantages could setting up a global capability center bring to your business beyond simple cost or time savings?

Global Capability Center Benefits

The main business benefits of setting up a Global Capability Center (GCC) are beyond simple cost savings:

• Access to lower-cost regions (e.g., Mexico, Poland) reduces dependency on expensive H-1B hiring, salary, infrastructure, and operational spend by ~40-50% vs the US, freeing budget for product and growth.
• GCCs tap into deep pools of tech talent in LATAM (2 million) and Eastern Europe (1.8 million), helping address tech talent shortages at HQ.
• GCCs increasingly own digital, R&D, analytics, and AI capabilities, enabling faster releases, standardized tooling, and safer experimentation.
• A single GCC model makes it easier to add squads and rebalance capacity across markets.
• You keep direct control over teams, IP, tools, and KPIs while centralizing compliance, security, and business continuity.

Access to global talent

A GCC opens doors to the best specialists worldwide and directly tackles the talent shortages you’re probably feeling at home base. ManpowerGroup’s latest Talent Shortage report shows that around 73% of employers in the US struggle to fill technology roles due to a lack of skilled talent.

By setting up your global capabilities in the right locations, you can build a talent strategy that taps into deep regional pools instead of fighting over the same software development teams in San Francisco:

• Latin America has amassed a 2 million tech talent pool, with Mexico alone hosting over 800,000 tech experts.
• Eastern Europe is home to more than 1.8 million tech professionals, backed by 124,000 STEM graduates annually.

In other words, a well-designed GCC or global capacity center gives you access to a global talent bench and enables dedicated staffing for critical roles, without the geographic limits of your HQ country.

Cost optimization

I would say cost optimization is still the “entry ticket” benefit of global capability centers. GCCs provide access to more affordable regions with a lower cost of living than in the US. This leads to significant savings not only on developer salaries but also on infrastructure and operational expenses, allowing you to redirect budget to product and growth. On top of that, the global capability center operating model helps you avoid additional overhead from rising H-1B visa costs and new fees for US-based foreign hires, which further increase the total price of keeping all engineers in one country.

For example, when using the global capability center model for expansion in Mexico, the annual salary of a senior Software Developer typically ranges from $44K to $85K, according to our internal research. In Poland, senior software developers often fall within the $46K-$87K band, depending on the stack, city, and company size.

From our internal research below, you’ll see how typical salary ranges compare across the US, Latin America, and Eastern Europe for different tech stacks.

Senior position, USD, Gross	USA	Eastern Europe	LATAM
AI/ML Engineer	151,800	75,900	73,875
Cloud Engineer	146,400	76,050	65,400
Mobile Developer	165,000	75,900	67,350
Automation QA Java/JS Engineer	123,000	63,300	57,300
DevOps Engineer	145,200	81,150	69,750
Blockchain Developer	156,600	71,250	72,450
React.JS Developer	120,000	70,500	54,300
Python Developer	132,000	73,950	66,600
PHP Developer	102,000	63,000	58,200
Java Developer	110,400	75,900	60,900

Innovation and agility

GCC reports highlight that over 78% of new centers prioritized digital capabilities. Additionally, leading centers now own R&D, product design, analytics, and AI initiatives, helping HQ scale innovation globally and drive transformation across the enterprise rather than pure cost levers.

So you might ask: “What does it mean for me?” From my point of view, it is:

• shorter cycles from idea to production, because product and engineering sit together in one global capability center platform;
• easier rollout of new features or services across regions using unified tooling and standards;
• safe experimentation – you can pilot new initiatives in one GCC location and then scale them globally once they work.

Scalability and business resilience

Instead of spinning up separate vendors or entities for every new market, you extend the work to an existing team model within your global capability center.

That means you can add new squads, products, or geographies by plugging them into the same hiring pipeline, onboarding process, tools, and governance you already use in the GCC. If demand spikes, you grow headcount in that hub; if a market cools down, you can rebalance teams to other products without unwinding multiple external contracts.

Control without operational overload

With global capability center services, you keep the steering wheel but don’t have to build the engine yourself. In practice, that means you delegate operations to a GCC provider while still owning every key decision:

• You keep direct supervision of product development, architecture, and delivery.
• You run daily communication with your engineers and specialists in the GCC.
• You define the processes, tools, and KPIs – the provider simply implements and maintains them.
• The provider handles the “heavy” part: office lease and fit-out, hardware procurement (often on better terms via their vendor network), IT support, payroll, benefits, insurance, and HR admin, so your internal team doesn’t have to.

With a partner like Alcor, you also keep a clean path to insource: your team, contracts, documentation, and equipment can be transferred fully under your entity later without extra buyout fees. So you get global talent and cost advantages of a GCC, without losing control over architecture, security, or release cadence – and without turning your executives into facilities and payroll managers.

Risk mitigation

Building on the previous points, setting up a global capability center platform helps you manage risk on several fronts:

• IP and data protection. Your core codebase, data, and know-how remain within a controlled, in-house structure rather than being spread across multiple vendors.
• Regulatory and compliance risk. A mature GCC with strong governance can centralize risk management, compliance, and internal audit functions, ensuring consistent adherence to frameworks such as GDPR, ISO 27001, and local labor laws.
• Operational continuity. By distributing critical operations across regions, global capability centers support disaster recovery and business continuity planning, helping you stay online during geopolitical or economic shocks.

Global Capability Center Examples

Airbnb’s Atlanta Tech Hub (GCC) leverages local talent to support global expansion and regional development. Warner Bros’ Hyderabad GCC is scaling toward 2,000 specialists and building advanced AI analytics for streaming. Digi-Key’s Bengaluru GCC centralizes sales, IT, engineering support, and supply chain to optimize resource allocation. GSK operates multiple GCCs (Poland, Costa Rica, India, Malaysia, UK, etc.), contributing to more product approvals and increased R&D investment. McDonald’s new Hyderabad GCC, its largest office outside the US, unifies technology, analytics, finance, HR, and operations to support global digital and operational transformation.

Want to see how Global Centers work in practice and the results they can deliver? I suggest looking at a few success stories from the global capability center companies:

• Airbnb: Since 2010, Airbnb Hosts in Georgia have earned a total of $1.2 billion, contributing significantly to the company’s revenue. With the opening of its new Atlanta Tech Hub, which serves as a GCC, the company is driving regional development. At the same time, it aims to significantly boost its income by leveraging local talent and streamlining operations to support global growth.
• Warner Bros: By establishing its GCC in Hyderabad, the company has gained access to highly skilled professionals and is planning to grow the team to 2,000 members. Moreover, the Hyderabad team is enhancing AI analytics for streaming platforms, enabling better consumer preference predictions. By integrating these advancements into its GCC operations, the company significantly optimizes its processes and reduces infrastructure costs.
• Digi-Key: By opening its own GCC and transitioning certain services to Bengaluru, including sales, IT, design engineering support, and supply chain operations, Digi-Key optimized resource allocation and enabled its headquarters to concentrate on core activities.
• GSK: With GCCs in Poland, Costa Rica, India, Malaysia, the UK, and other countries, GSK has significantly boosted its innovation efforts. Since 2017, it achieved 11 major product approvals and doubled its Phase III assets. Driven by the pursuit of even greater results, in 2023, GSK invested £6.2 billion (roughly $7.8 billion) in R&D, marking a 13% increase at actual exchange rates (AER) and 14% at constant exchange rates (CER) compared to 2022.
• McDonald’s. The fast-food giant recently opened its first Global Capability Center in Hyderabad – its largest office outside the US. This GCC will host around 1,500 employees across technology, analytics, finance, HR, and enterprise operations, and is designed to support McDonald’s global digital and operational transformation, with data, design, and decision-making centralized in one hub.
• ThredUP. When ThredUP decided to build its own R&D center in Eastern Europe, Alcor helped them launch a fully-fledged hub: we hired 20 exceptional local engineers (including an ML specialist plus Java and .NET developers), handled salary processing, tax planning, and 100% legal compliance under US and local laws. The outcome was a fully staffed, compliant engineering center in a new location and a stronger product team for the company.

I would say these examples show GCCs can do more than just bring benefits – they can exponentially boost a company’s success. Now, let’s dive into how you can make this a reality for your business.

Factors to Consider in GCC Setup

A GCC must serve clear strategic goals beyond cost savings, such as product velocity, digital capabilities, customer experience, or resilience. You need readiness to operate as one global team, with leadership willing to share ownership and build a distributed model. Also, mind the importance of defining required skills and seniority up front, aligning your GCC design with risk appetite and control needs (owned GCC vs assisted setup), and being realistic about internal capacity to sponsor and drive the project.

Before you look at any steps to set up GCCs, it helps to be honest about whether a global capability center is the right move for your company right now – and what shape it should take. I’d look at a few big-picture factors first:

• Strategic intent, not just cost pressure
  If the only goal is “get development cheaper,” then building a GCC is probably the wrong tool. For short-term features or non-core work – especially if you’re a non-tech product company – freelance developers or classic outsourcing will usually do the job. A sustainable global competency center makes sense when you’re targeting several strategic goals at once: faster product velocity, new digital capabilities, better customer experience, or redundancy for mission-critical systems. Write those outcomes down clearly before you even start discussing countries and locations.

• Budget and expected ROI
  Before launching a GCC, it’s crucial to understand not only where you’ll build it, but how much you’re ready to invest and what return you expect. Treat your global capability center as a capital project: estimate upfront costs (entity or EOR model, hiring, office or equipment, tools, management overhead) and ongoing run-rate, then map them against expected impact on product delivery, revenue, and risk reduction over 3-5 years. A clear GCC budget and ROI hypothesis will help you decide how fast to ramp, which roles to prioritize, and whether the model truly outperforms classic outsourcing or local hiring for your specific case.
• Readiness to work as one global team
  Even with a partner, someone senior on your side has to champion the GCC. Ask yourself: who owns the strategies to set up GCCs and the day-to-day decisions? A GCC is a real part of your organization, not a side project. That means you need leaders who are ready to own a distributed team model, share decision-making, and invest time into building trust with a new hub. Just as importantly, you must ensure smooth cooperation between your GCC and in-house teams: align processes, integrate the center into your corporate culture, and prepare managers for cross-time-zone and cross-cultural leadership. That takes additional resources, deliberate communication, and a clear plan for how the GCC plugs into your existing org, not runs in parallel to it. You’ll probably want a stronger globalization partner for the GCC setup or a specialized vendor to set up a GCC that can shoulder more of the heavy lifting.
• Risk appetite and control requirements
  If you’re handling sensitive customer data, regulated workloads, or core IP, you’ll care more about control than pure cost. Some companies will consider only fully owned global capability centers; others are comfortable starting with a GCC-assisted setup in which a partner handles employment and operations, while the client retains technical control. Your risk appetite should shape your model – not the other way around.

Once these factors are clear, the offshore development center checklist and GCC setup best practices suddenly become easier to apply – because you know what kind of global capacity center you’re building and why.

Global Capability Center Setup & Scale-Up Checklist with Best Practices

• Define a clear GCC vision and a short-, mid-, and long-term plan (12-24 months, 2-5 years, 5+ years): what functions the center will own at each stage and how it will support the overall strategy.
• Perform structured location research on tax, legal, payroll, IP, infrastructure, and entity vs EOR options before choosing a country.Design the team model, setup process, and talent strategy, including roles, stacks, seniority, and leadership.
• Choose the right employment and compliance model, then standardize tools, security, and operations across a unified GCC platform.
• Embed governance, culture, and scale-up best practices, and, if needed, work with an experienced GCC provider.

So you’ve decided that starting a global capability center makes sense. Now the question is: what are the concrete steps to set up GCCs and scale them without losing your sanity?

1. Clarify your GCC vision and plan

Start with a simple, written plan. Define what your global innovation & capability center will actually own in the short term (first 12–24 months), then outline mid-term goals (2–5 years) and long-term ambitions (5+ years): product development, platforms, technology, analytics, customer operations, or a mix. Decide whether you’re building a focused R&D hub or a broader global capability center solutions that will later evolve into a center of excellence. Finally, align this vision with product, engineering, and finance so everyone knows why you’re doing this and what success looks like.

2. Do serious homework on location choice

This is where I’d absolutely keep a checklist. Proper location choice for offshore GCC setup means structured research, not just “I’ve heard Poland or Mexico are good.” For each potential country, you’ll want to understand:

• Legal and tax regime (for example, Colombia’s standard 35% corporate income tax on IT companies, plus potential surcharges; or Ukraine’s Diia.City regime where residents can opt for a 9% exit capital tax and 5% PIT for IT specialists under specific conditions).
• Payroll and employment specifics (such as Colombia’s mandatory social security and parafiscal contributions, which can add roughly 30% to the gross salary, plus 13th-month pay and severance funds that must be budgeted correctly).
• IP protection, data-privacy rules, and any sector regulations (take a GDPR privacy law with strict consent and data-transfer rules in Eastern Europe).
• Options for a legal entity vs. working via EOR/global capability center setup services for US companies.
• Office setup and infrastructure: procurement, IT support, security standards, insurance, and workplace policies.

If you do this entirely on your own, you’re looking at months of calls with local law firms, payroll vendors, and landlords in every market where you might set up an offshore global capability center. This is exactly the kind of background work Alcor takes on when helping clients with nearshore or offshore GCC setup in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

3. Design your team model and setup process

Next, decide how work will actually be structured. Define the team model for your GCC: which squads or functions sit there (product teams, platform teams, DevOps, data, support) and how they connect to HQ. Clarify decision rights and communication flows so your global capability center doesn’t become a parallel universe. Then outline a realistic setup process: pilot team – stabilization – ramp-up. This sequence keeps you from trying to hire 50 people into a structure that doesn’t exist yet.

4. Build a talent strategy and dedicated staffing approach

A GCC without a smart talent strategy is just an office with laptops. Translate your roadmap into specific roles, tech stacks, and seniority levels you’ll need at each phase, and think about on-site leadership early – it’s hard to scale if every decision still has to come from HQ. Then decide how you’ll actually hire these people: can your internal team realistically handle sourcing, screening, and offers in a new market, or do you need a provider to own recruitment on the ground (see step 8)?

5. Choose your employment and compliance model

Then comes the boring-but-critical part: how will people be employed? If you open an entity, you’ll need to run local HR, payroll & accounting, benefits, and compliance for each country. If you start with an EOR-first approach, look for a GCC-assisted setup with a real globalization partner on the GCC setup – not just a generic payroll vendor. Alcor, or another right global capability center provider, provides you with a 100% legal shield, handles onboarding/offboarding, payroll, benefits, and local admin, while you retain full control over day-to-day work and delivery.

6. Set up operations and your GCC platform

Once the people piece is clear, you need a working environment. Standardize tools, security, and workflows across your global capability center platform: code repositories, CI/CD, observability, ticketing, documentation, and access controls should match HQ standards. In parallel, sort out real-world operations – office or hybrid model, procurement & IT support, insurance, employer branding, and on-the-ground HR services.

7. Embed governance, culture, and scale-up best practices

Think about how you’ll run and grow the center once the first teams are live. Define KPIs for your GCC (delivery, quality, retention, cost, efficiency), set up regular reviews, and agree on how issues are escalated. Then, bake in a few GCC setup best practices:

• lead with a clear enterprise-aligned vision;
• build a strong local leadership bench that can balance global standards with regional realities;
• foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement;
• invest in collaboration with HQ – shared rituals, cross-location squads, and regular leadership touchpoints, so the center doesn’t become a “dead end.”

8. Find a trusted GCC provider

The last item on the checklist is choosing who will walk this road with you. You can absolutely go fully DIY, but most tech companies prefer a GCC-assisted setup for the first phases. I’d keep three things in mind:

• Scope and ownership. Look for a vendor to set up a GCC that can cover the full stack in-house – tech recruitment, compliant employment, and day-to-day operations – instead of stitching together multiple third parties. Clarify what’s included, what’s extra, and who owns which risks.
• Local and legal depth. A solid globalization partner for GCC setup should have real on-the-ground experience: years in the market, a legal entity, and strong knowledge of labor law, tax, and employment specifics in your chosen location.
• Transparency and reputation. Ask for clear, line-item pricing with no hidden markups or buy-out fees, then sanity-check it against local market rates. Finally, review case studies and independent ratings (e.g., G2, Clutch, GoodFirms, Trustpilot) to see how they actually deliver for other tech product companies.

A partner that scores well on these three points won’t replace your strategy, but it will make the whole GCC journey faster, safer, and much less painful for your team.

GCC: Alcor Assisted Setup

Alcor’s GCC as a Service lets you launch and run a GCC in LATAM or Eastern Europe with one partner handling legal setup, hiring, payroll, and office ops – proven by People.ai’s 25+ engineers, fully compliant R&D hub built in months, not years.

If the previous checklist felt like a lot of work, that’s because setting up a GCC really is a heavy lift. Legal entities, local hiring, tax and payroll, office setup, security, HR, culture – it’s a full project, not a side task for your VP of Engineering. This is exactly where Alcor’s GCC as a Service model comes in.

Instead of juggling multiple vendors, you get one partner with:

• Local legal entities and in-house legal advisors in key LATAM & Eastern European locations.
• 40+ local tech recruiters who live in these markets and know where the strong engineers actually are.
• Dedicated account and operations managers who keep your GCC “on rails” day to day.

You stay focused on the product. We take the setup and operations off your plate without you having to become an expert in local bureaucracy.

Let’s take a real example from People.ai. Their ask looked roughly like this:

“We want to replace a patchwork of vendors with our own R&D hub in Eastern Europe, hire rare-skill AI, data, and full-stack engineers, and stay fully compliant – without opening a local entity or building a back office from scratch.”

What happened on our side, and how it resulted:

• We sourced, negotiated, and fully equipped a dedicated office, giving them a functioning R&D hub in just one month instead of a long DIY setup.
• Our recruiters built a team of 25+ senior developers (Python, Scala, Java, React, Big Data, Kafka, AWS) with a 98.6% pass rate on probation, effectively matching the Silicon Valley bar in Eastern Europe.
• Through our EOR and back-office support, we’ve kept payroll, benefits, and HR running smoothly, while People.ai stayed focused on product, architecture, and team leadership.

Top Locations to Set up a Global Capability Center

• India is still the world’s largest GCC hub (1,700+ centers), but faces challenges: lower skills ranking vs CEE/LATAM peers, high market saturation, low English proficiency, and tough time-zone overlap with the US.
• Mexico offers ~800K tech specialists, ~47-54% lower dev salaries than the US, a strong STEM pipeline, and nearshore time zones ideal for US-based GCCs.
• Colombia combines 165K tech professionals, ~49-59% salary savings vs the US, an A4-rated business climate, and GMT-5 alignment with the US.
• Poland and Romania provide mature EU engineering hubs with 40-50% lower salaries, strong skills, high English proficiency, and innovation-friendly environments.
• Ukraine adds 302K+ tech experts, ~50-60% savings vs US, top-tier STEM output, and advanced digital government and open data, supporting fully digital, compliant GCC operations.

If you Google “where to set up a GCC,” you’ll see the same names over and over: India, parts of Southeast Asia, and increasingly countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Let’s start with India, then look at alternatives in LATAM and Eastern Europe that can give you similar or better value with fewer trade-offs.

India

India remains the world’s biggest GCC hub. Recent reports indicate that the country now hosts over 1,700 GCCs, employs nearly 2 million professionals, and generates around $64.6 billion in exports, with projections to reach 2,400+ centers by 2030.

That scale is impressive, but there are a few real-world constraints you should be aware of:

• Less-skilled talent: According to the Coursera Global Skills Report 2025, India ranks 89th, falling behind countries such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Chile, all of which are in the top 55. Moreover, while it may seem like you’re saving high costs by hiring Indian developers, you won’t receive the expected quality of development, resulting in additional costs for subsequent fixes.
• Saturated market: With nearly two thousand GCCs plus traditional IT services giants all competing in the same hubs (Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, etc.), it’s not unusual to see intense bidding wars for senior engineers. That means the “cheap India” assumption often breaks down at the lead/architect level, especially for product companies that can’t compromise on quality.
• Low English proficiency: From 2020 to 2025, India’s English proficiency ranking dropped 24 positions, from 50th to 74th. While the local talent may typically have higher proficiency, setting up a global capability center in this location can still pose challenges when you need to work with cross-functional teams, communicate effectively with clients, or manage operations and services globally.
• Time zone differences and work ethic: The 10+ hour time difference between the USA and India can be a less-than-ideal factor when choosing a location for a global capability center development. Add a work culture that can be quite different from North and South America or Europe, and you often get more async overhead and slower feedback loops than you budgeted for.

So, if not India, what are the alternatives? Are there better locations where you can easily set up a GCC while keeping it cost-effective? Here are a few ideas for you:

Mexico

Mexico is Latin America’s one of the largest tech hubs, as well as a natural nearshore GCC location for US-based product companies.

• Deep talent pool at nearshore distance. Around 800,000 tech specialists across Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and other tech hubs give you enough depth to build full product teams.
• ~51% salary savings vs the US. Mid-level developers earn on average $46K per year, and senior devs $69K per year, which translates into roughly 47-54% savings compared to US averages of $101K for middle and $125K for senior.
• Time zone overlap with HQ. Mexico’s GMT-6 time zone mirrors cities like Chicago, Austin, and Dallas, making real-time collaboration with US engineering teams straightforward.
• Solid education & tech ecosystem. With 22 universities in the QS World University Rankings 2026 and around 110,000 STEM graduates a year, plus 1,137 top startups and 11 unicorns, Mexico offers both a strong talent pipeline and a dynamic tech ecosystem for your GCC.

Colombia

Colombia is an increasingly popular nearshore GCC base, combining competitive salaries, a growing tech ecosystem, and friendly time zones for US companies.

• Improving talent base and business climate. The country has about 165,000 tech specialists, concentrated in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. It also holds an A4 business rating, and features 13 universities in QS rankings, indicating a reasonably stable environment and a solid educational backbone for long-term GCC investments.
• ~54% salary savings vs the US. Mid-level developers earn around $42K on average, and senior devs $64K, giving you around 49-59% savings vs US benchmarks for similar roles.
• US-friendly time zone. Operating in GMT-5, Colombia overlaps almost fully with the US East Coast and a large portion of Central time.

Poland

Poland is one of Eastern Europe’s most mature engineering hubs and a top-tier choice for building high-skill GCCs with strong EU protections.

• Large, senior-heavy talent pool. With around 650,000 tech professionals and major hubs like Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, and the Tri-City area, Poland can support everything from small product pods to 500+ engineer global capability centers.
• ~45% lower salaries vs the US. Senior developers earn $73K a year on average (vs $125K in the US), and mid-level devs average $54K, giving you about 42-47% savings on senior and mid positions.
• Top tech skills and innovation level. Poland ranks #4 in CEE in Coursera’s 2025 global skills ranking and sits around #15 globally in EF’s English Proficiency Index. Also holding a 4th place in Global Innovation Index 2025 among CEE peers, Poland offers EU-grade IP, data protection, and a strong R&D ecosystem for GCCs.

Romania

Romania offers a balanced mix of strong engineering, good English, and attractive salary levels – ideal if you want a compact yet powerful GCC in the EU.

• 250,000+ tech specialists. Romania’s talent pool sits at around 250,000 tech engineers, mainly based in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, and Iași, with strong competencies in Java, .NET, front-end, and cloud-native stacks. The country is also a leader in Europe and ranks among the top 6 worldwide for the highest number of certified IT specialists per 1,000 citizens.
• ~46% salary savings vs the US. Mid-level developers earn, on average, $50K a year, and seniors $74K, resulting in about 50% savings at the mid-level and ~42% at the senior level compared to US salaries.
• EU legal and business environment. With 10 QS-ranked universities and an A3 business climate, Romania offers a stable, EU-aligned environment for long-term GCC investments.

Ukraine

Ukraine remains one of Europe’s strongest engineering pools, especially for complex product work, despite the ongoing Russian war, and many tech companies still treat it as a strategic GCC base.

• 302,000 tech specialists in key hubs. Ukraine has around 302,000 tech professionals, concentrated in Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Odesa, with deep expertise in product development, AI/ML, and cybersecurity.
• ~55% savings vs US roles. Mid-level developers earn on average $41K and senior devs $61K annually, which means ~59% savings at mid-level and about 51% at the senior level compared to US averages.
• Very strong tech skills and education. Ukraine ranks #5 in CEE in Coursera’s 2025 skills ranking, and is #1 among European countries for the number of tech graduates with 23,000+ qualified IT graduates and 130,000 general engineering professionals annually.
• World-class digital state & open data. In the 2024 UN E-Government Survey, Ukraine ranks 30th in the E-Government Development Index, 1st in the E-Participation Index, and 5th globally in the Online Service Index – climbing from 102nd in 2018, a 97-position jump. Combined with a 97% open data maturity level and a top-3 spot in the European Open Data Maturity ranking, this govtech environment makes it much easier to run fully digital, compliant GCC operations for software development.

Each of these locations offers ideal conditions for the setting up of a global development center. But can we rely on regular outsourcing instead? Let’s explore why it’s better to choose a GCC provider rather than a traditional outsourcing company.

GCC vs Outsourcing Services

Outsourcing is well-suited to short-term or small projects but often entails less control, hidden costs, fragmented vendor relationships, and greater IP risk. A Global Capability Center offers an integrated, long-term model in which hiring, payroll, compliance, and operations are unified under a single structure and aligned with your product goals.

Outsourcing company

This option is a cheaper and faster alternative, ideal for short-term projects and hiring a small number of developers.

However, it’s important to understand the role of potential pitfalls. Hidden costs, lack of transparency in pricing, and external developers’ disinterest in your project’s long-term success can negatively impact its quality. Additionally, the absence of direct control over engineers’ work, with all processes routed through a third-party provider, can lead to significant delays in product development. The high risk of sensitive information leaks and intellectual property breaches could be another crucial factor when choosing between outsourcing and GCC.

Furthermore, outsourcing providers usually only offer recruitment services, so if you need payroll processing, tax handling, and other services, you would have to involve additional providers and manage multiple partnerships, which could add unnecessary stress.

Global capability сenter

The GCC model is more comprehensive, offering a seamless solution that covers everything from recruitment to operational support. Instead of managing multiple providers for recruitment, payroll, and office setup services, companies can opt for the GCC solution, which streamlines the entire process through a single trusted partner. This approach saves time, reduces risks, and ensures compliance in the chosen region.

An intriguing offer, isn’t it? Here’s a little bonus for you – the opportunity to set up your GCC with a trusted and exceptional end-to-end provider like Alcor!

Alcor – a Trusted GCC Provider

Alcor helps tech companies build and run their own GCCs in Latin America and Eastern Europe, combining top-10% tech recruitment, 100% compliant EOR, and 360° operational support. You get entity-free hiring, transparent pricing, no buyout fees, and a fully managed GCC setup and scale-up under one partner.

At Alcor, we will help you build your own software R&D center – which is the same model as a Global Capability Center – from scratch in one of our locations in Latin America and Eastern Europe! We provide a mix of the most sought-after services, including:

• EOR for FinTech & Beyond: Enjoy seamless operations and benefit from expert navigation of legal matters, onboarding and offboarding of your developers, payroll management, and benefits administration. Check out the BigCommence case – they’ve already leveraged our EOR services to simplify their daily tasks and take their business to the next level!
• Top-notch IT recruitment: Qualified candidates, 80% of whom are approved of by clients and invited to interviews. Not to mention that our tech recruiters fill 15% of vacancies from the first CV, and they have achieved incredible results, making 6 top-notch hires in 6 weeks for a global company like GoTransverse.
• 360° operational support: For your convenience, we offer office lease and hardware procurement services for your software research and development team, visa support, insurance assistance, and employer branding to boost your company’s global image.

And on top of our core services, you gain numerous benefits:

• No need to register a legal entity;
• Zero buyout fees;
• No intermediaries and direct team management.

Dreaming of your own GCC? Kick off your stress-free scaling journey today with Alcor!