“There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.” With these words, we opened our recent McKinsey’s Global Operating Model Next Summit.
The financial services sector is at just such a moment. After more than a decade of moderate global performance—steady ROE, measured digital transformation, and incremental productivity gains—the sector is undergoing profound change. The pressure for efficiency is continual, regulatory complexity is escalating, and the rapid evolution of AI, gen AI, and agentic AI is reshaping the business landscape at a dizzying pace.
At the recent McKinsey Global Operating Model Next Summit, where we brainstormed with more than 25 financial services organizations, one message was clear: To compete and thrive in this new environment, financial institutions must reimagine their global operating models (GOMs), looking beyond cost to see their global talent centers as engines of innovation, resilience, and value.
As one executive put it, “The AI revolution will enhance the best GOMs and commoditize the laggards.”
Here are five insights from the summit that are shaping the future of the global operating model:
1. Harness global talent to deliver exponential value
With gen AI accelerating the level of automation for low- to mid-complexity work in global centers, the role of these centers is shifting from low-cost efficiency to distinctive global capabilities. By building their skills in training and overseeing gen-AI-based models and agents, centers can be a testing ground for AI transformation across the entire enterprise.
Organizations at the forefront are starting to embed experienced center leaders into the core enterprise—significantly accelerating the scale-up of gen AI. Frontrunners can be expected to expand on their lead: There is already a tenfold difference in global leadership participation between top- and bottom-quartile global centers, according to a recent McKinsey Global Capability Center survey of banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) organizations.
“The critical question is not technology but change management and reimagining of skills and operating models,” said one leader.
2. AI-powered efficiency isn’t just about cost
Gen AI does cut costs, yet its true value will not come from automating poor or outdated processes but rather reimagining them altogether. For example, one global bank reduced a 75-day credit-card insurance process to under a week.
As one participant noted, “If you’re automating ten steps that shouldn’t exist, you’re just making bad processes go faster.”
The best global centers use AI to drive productivity, improve customer experience, and fuel innovation at scale. The combination of AI-human collaboration, expansion of core services, and end-to-end tech solutions is shifting value creation toward top-line growth.
3. Innovation-led value creation requires cultural change
Creating a frontline ownership mindset, where teams in both the global centers and the core enterprise understand the customer mission, is a differentiator. Leadership engagement, trust-building, and talent exchange between locations have become essential. Leaders are adopting objectives and key results (OKRs) aligned to enterprise-wide strategic goals, and the mindset is shifting from measuring activity to measuring impact.
“Successful transformations often involve creating a ‘ground-floor’ ownership culture,” said one participant. “Employees in global capability centers understand the business purpose of their work and see how it connects to the end customer.”
4. Geopolitical resilience is a core capability
Recent events underscore that geopolitical distance now matters more than geographic distance. Global operating models must embed agility, scenario resilience, and redundancy into financial services companies’ operations. These factors are essential, not only to help navigate trade disruptions but also longstanding cybersecurity, data sovereignty, and regulatory compliance issues that remain top concerns for global operations leaders.
At the summit, organizations shared how they have baked this geopolitical perspective into their risk strategies by diversifying locations, preparing for regulatory shifts, and stress-testing their footprints. The most obvious lesson learned so far is that resilience is not reactive, but proactive. The organizations that succeed and thrive in this area are the ones that anticipate disruption and embed flexibility deep into their global models.
“Geopolitics will no longer be an exception—it is the new norm. How you plan your footprint has to be wired into what you do,” advised one attendee.
5. A triple play is a differentiator between leaders and laggards
McKinsey’s work on global operating models, with a base of more than 100 global talent programs, suggests that a triple play can generate value in three ways:
- Building the future of talent through reskilling
- Generating exponential AI-enabled efficiency and top-line impact
- Institutionalizing a culture of innovation to pivot to creating value
Only 93rd percentile GOMs can generate value across all three dimensions, with double plays largely generating labor benefits, according to recent survey results. Talent centers without any distinctive plays tend to degrade enterprise value.
An evolving world requires a new kind of organization with new ways of creating value. This means fundamental changes to identity, new business activity, and innovation, enabled by dramatic shifts in how the human systems of the organization operate together with agentic AI. Such a transformation requires pulling multiple levers to drive systemic change at scale, including embedding and incentivizing new behaviors.
As one of the leaders concluded: “Triple play or fade away.” The time to act and fundamentally reset the GOM is now.