Wall Street banks are set to rely more on their Indian business support centers following President Donald Trump’s shock move to impose $100,000 fees on new applications to the widely used H-1B visa program.
US lenders including Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are among the biggest employers of India’s so-called global capability centers, which handle operations from trading support and risk management to tech assistance. Staffed with software engineers, quants and accounting specialists, the centers offer low-cost services while giving firms access to skilled talent not readily available in their home markets.
Although Trump is seeking to protect US jobs by curbing immigration, the new rules could spur banks to deepen their presence in Indian tech hubs such as Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which already employ more than 1.9 million people, analysts said.
“Unless new restrictions are placed on offshoring, foreign banks will lean even more on their Indian capability centers,” said Umesh Chhazzed, founder of recruitment firm Anlage Infotech, who has worked with US lenders for more than two decades.
The H-1B visa program is used heavily by the Indian and US tech sectors to bring in skilled workers from abroad, while finance companies and consulting firms are also big users. Indian-born workers accounted for 72.3% of all H-1B beneficiaries in the US fiscal year to September 2023, which includes initial and continuing employment.
Trump’s announcement on H-1B visas “came out of the blue,” JPMorgan’s Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told the Times of India on Tuesday, adding the bank will be engaging with stakeholders and policymakers.
“For us, visas matter because we move people around globally,” he told the newspaper. “The challenge is that the US still needs to remain an attractive destination.”
The GCCs have become a $64 billion market, with annual growth of about 9.8% from 2019 to 2024, according to figures from EY. The number of centers is poised to jump to as many as 2,500 by 2030, up from 1,700 currently, with the market value projected to hit $110 billion, the consulting firm said.
US banks are among the biggest employers in the sector, allowing them to potentially shift work to India to skirt the new visa curbs. Citigroup has some 33,000 staff in the country, while Bank of America Corp. has more than 27,000, and JPMorgan employs 55,000.
“Banks would be calibrating a new strategy for the global capability centers. It appears, there will be onshoring of jobs to India adding new job functions,” said Abizer Diwanji, founder of NeoStart Advisors LLP, a financial advisory firm. “However, none will jump the gun amid evolving situations. They will wait for more clarity.”
A report in the Management Science journal found that when countries impose restrictions on skilled immigrants, companies tend to respond by hiring more staff abroad. The most “globalized” companies hire almost one employee abroad for every visa rejection, according to the 2023 study.
Existing Holders
JPMorgan is relieved the new fee doesn’t apply to existing H-1B visa holders, Sjoerd Leenart, the bank’s top executive for Asia-Pacific told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Monday in Mumbai. He said it was too early to assess the full impact of the proposed changes.
As recently as July, Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal had said immigration rules — including those relating to H-1B visas — had not come up in US trade talks.
Parvathy Tharamel, a partner at law firm Trilegal, said India is already emerging as the backbone of global capability centers for international banks, driving critical business, compliance, technology, and innovation functions.
“The new H-1B restrictions will only accelerate this trend, pushing more cross-border technology and high-value roles into India hubs,” she said.
Still, expansion plans may be tempered by uncertainty over further US measures that could weigh on banks’ global strategies. While the US has imposed duties on India’s merchandise exports, the services sector remains exempt.
Trump has upended decades of US diplomacy by slapping 50% tariffs on India in August, part of which is to penalize the country for buying oil from Russia. Tensions appeared to ease last week when trade talks resumed and Trump called Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his birthday. The abrupt move to curtail immigration puts that detente in doubt.
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