Where to build, whom to hire and what it will cost.

A shortlist of cities is easy to produce and hard to defend. The question the board asks is whether the city can staff the centre you described, in the time you described, at a cost the business case can carry.

CapSight puts the cities you are weighing side by side on the things that decide it: how many people already work in GCCs there, which capabilities those people sit in, how many roles are open now, what the same role costs, and what the state offers. The comparison is made for your capability, not for “GCCs in general”.

Talent feasibility is not a headcount in a database. It is whether people with your skills, at your seniority, already work in GCCs in that city, and how many other centres are competing for them.

Read the workforce by function and seniority, where each peer's hires come from, and which skills are growing fastest. If the pool is thin, you see that before you commit, not after the third offer is declined.

Pay is read at four points, the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile of annual cost to company, for the role and experience band you will hire, in each city on your shortlist. Your industry's benchmark sits next to the market's, because a financial-services GCC does not pay what a retailer's does.

Run the hiring scenario you are considering: add thirty per cent to a team in a second city and see what it costs and how long it takes.

Pick a target and its closest peers and read them on the same axes: size, growth, seniority mix, where they hire from, which skills they are adding, how the organisation is laid out and who leads each function.

Twenty-eight documented build journeys show how comparable centres actually started: the first city, the year, the mandate and what the first team did, each figure with its source.

Capability planning is a comparison against the centres that are further along. Read a capability by workforce depth, hiring intensity, senior talent and growth, for your centre and four peers, and the gaps are visible in a minute.

Second-city strategy is the same discipline applied to geography: the next city has to hold the capability you are adding, not simply be cheaper than the first. Policy and expansion activity sit beside the numbers, so you can see who else is already moving there.

The output of this work is a document other people read. Describe the decision and the report is built from the same figures you were looking at, laid out for the room, with a source line under each one.