Booking Holdings, a provider of online travel and related services that owns travel platform Booking.com is keeping the technology capital Bengaluru at the forefront for its innovations in the travel fintech space and plans to hire more tech talent in the city.
The company has launched a commercial centre of excellence (CoE) in the tech hub.
"We just crossed 350 people in the last couple of weeks out of which 175 talent is for fintech. Around 20 percent people of my organisation globally are from Bengaluru which a year ago was zero. So, in terms of shifting where the talent is, Bengaluru has arrived dramatically. The plan for the next few years for the overall centre is to get to 1,000 more people," Daniel Marovitz, senior vice-president, fintech, Booking.com, told Moneycontrol.
He said that Bengaluru puts 2x more engineers than Germany.
"While we have been hiring people from around the world, for my fintech team the largest part of my Dutch team is India. There are more Indians working for Booking.com than Dutch people. That was also a reason to come here (Bengaluru) because we were already here without being here. We had a bigger Diwali celebration in Amsterdam than our new office in India. There is enormous talent growth in India. There is so much technology innovation in the country and most of it is happening in Bengaluru. So, it is a great place for us to be in. We expect the centre in Bengaluru to be larger than other sites," he said.
Marovitz noted that companies have been coming to India for outsourcing, offshoring but that was not their desire. "Our headquarters is in Amsterdam and the closest mega centre for technology for us is Bengaluru. The city is a more important product and engineering centre globally than San Francisco, Silicon Valley."
The company is focusing on fintech solutions for travellers. "A few years back we created a fintech unit at Booking.com and added a new business in half a decade. So, creating a fintech unit was a big deal. We saw this as a big opp for incremental commercial opp. This unit launched in Bengaluru is one of the first projects of building a big transformational program in financial management. This work is the biggest that we have today and this is for the whole group. This new centre of excellence is doing new work and this is the first time we are going to build software that will be used by the entire network," the senior VP said.
He added that India is one of the fastest-growing travel markets in the world and also the fastest for Booking.com in Asia. "More Indians travelling abroad is a massive change in the last decade. When travellers travel long haul they cross borders and they also have to use a different currency. So, this is an opportunity. We are also partnering with buy now pay later providers in the country. Also, in India there are so many payments solutions. In addition, the platform is looking to add more languages after adding Hindi recently," he said.
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