Asia is witnessing a shift from transactional execution to strategic business enablement, driven by digitisation, AI, and a focus on enterprise value creation. For organisations considering expanding backoffice and midoffice operations into shared services, the decision between prioritising scalability or resilience is now more critical than ever.

Expanding shared services in Asia offers cost savings, process standardisation, and access to skilled talent, boosted by AI and cloud technologies that transform them into strategic business partners. However, scaling risks operational resilience, and exposes firms to geopolitical, cyber, and talent challenges. Leaders—COOs, CFOs, CIOs, CHROs, and CMOs—must balance scalability with resilience by defining scope, integrating systems, managing change, ensuring data readiness, and aligning with ESG goals. Success depends on robust governance, workforce upskilling, risk mitigation, and maintaining customer experience to build agile, secure, and future-ready shared services.

In this PodChats for FutureCOO, Byron Fernandez, CIO at TDCX, shares his thoughts on how to balance scalability-resilience: the shared services conundrum.

1. Give us a state of the shared services market in Asia in 2025.

2. Which processes or functions are best suited for centralisation, and which should remain local?

3. Should leaders build a captive centre, outsource, or adopt a hybrid model?

4. How do organisations ensure data quality and readiness for migration?

5. Drawing from your experience, what governance structures and project teams are needed to manage the transition?

6. Our topic is on scalability vs resilience. How do leaders balance the need for scalability with the imperative for operational resilience?

7. At the beginning I cited risks that go with any change in strategy. What are the key risks—cybersecurity, regulatory, talent—and how will organisations mitigate them?

8. Still on the issue of people. how will leaders manage change and maintain employee engagement throughout the transformation?

9. CFOs have started to be more critical of investments. What financial investments and returns can leadership realistically expect over a multi-year horizon?

10. How does a shared services strategy support an organisation’s broader ESG and sustainability objectives?

11. What is your advice for organisations thinking to move to a shared services model?