Decoding our future in India

We all experience the power of digital and it touches every aspect of our lives - be it working from home, ordering meals or staying connected with friends and family. Digital focus has rapidly made its way through economic policies in India (accelerated by the pandemic), and the last 20 years prove it with both big IT firms delivering services to global companies and the more recent rise of the startup ecosystem – from 700 to 14,000 in the last five years with 74 unicorns in 2021!

Indian tech talent is changing the world

Technology is at the heart of many industries - including finance - and is driving the evolution of processes, platforms and customer experiences, ultimately changing the way we do business. The importance of digital talent is undisputed and continues to grow.

Home to a workforce of more than 5 million techies, thanks to the vast network of universities offering technology related curriculum and a young and digitally native population, India is the global hub for digital talent. In fact, its projected that India will add almost 85,000 digitally skilled graduates every year for the next 5 years. And it’s expected that 40% of global digital engineering will be delivered from India by 2025.

This makes India a location of choice for many global organizations – just like UBS - to tap into the highly skilled talent pool.

Driving UBS’s digital ambitions from India

Since 2015, our digital talent pool has rapidly grown in India and we’re one of the largest locations for digital talent at UBS. Our size, capabilities, and the focus on engineering excellence means we contribute significantly towards the firm’s purpose and more importantly drive technology to be a true differentiator for us.

What do we do next in India? Create even more value through digital – whether its delivering end to end solutions, incubating ideas and scaling them, or driving sustainable social impact.

Our culture of continuous improvement, learning, and use of data is key to unlocking our goals. And we’ve already taken steps to drive inclusivity, innovation and intrapreneurship:

• Agile is being rolled out across UBS and India is no different. In fact, our digital teams were among the first to test things out, help us learn and adapt as we become #agile as a firm.
• Data is key to all our decision making: we’re on track to build the firm’s largest community of #data scientists in India over the next 2-3 years
• We’re learning on the job and have access to a wide variety of learning platforms. In fact, we have the largest number of #cloud certified engineers at UBS in India
• Almost 30% of our digital workforce are women. And we consistently hire from universities and the armed forces, and welcome career returners

There’s lots more to do and sky (or should I say the cloud) is the limit. What do you think firms can do to elevate India’s digital talent for greater success?