This $120-billion financial services company says it needs tech to win business
In April of last year,
StoneX
employees in Bengaluru moved out of a cramped WeWork setup and into a purpose-built office that seats 830 people. The transition summed up a six-year journey for the $120-billion global
financial services
giant that describes itself as 'one of the biggest names no one's heard of.' The company's chief operating officer Stuart Davison, on a recent trip to India, told us that when the firm established an Indian global capability centre (GCC) in 2019, it fielded barely a dozen engineers testing a payments idea; today Davison calls the twin hubs in Bengaluru and Pune 'one of the engines of innovation powering the whole group'.
StoneX's experience mirrors a broader industry trend where technology and financial services have become intricately intertwined. 'For me, I don't even consider them separate services. It's very symbiotic,' Davison says. 'If you want to be a leader in financial services, you need to be tech driven.' This philosophy has driven StoneX's aggressive expansion in India.
The crown jewel of the innovation drive in India is Xpay, a proprietary
payments platform
developed primarily by teams in Pune and Bengaluru over many years. Previous systems from outside vendors struggled during highvolume trading days, Davison says, creating artificial ceilings on business capacity. 'That's not a ceiling we want to have on our business.' Since its February launch, Xpay has processed over $50 billion in transactions, mostly from high-value institutional, corporate, banking, and NGO clients.
The technological imperative inherent in the financial services sector has driven StoneX to build comprehensive engineering capabilities across its India centres. Beyond payments technology, the facilities now house teams working on financial crime prevention, cybersecurity, derivatives trading support, and core IT infrastructure. The Pune office operates with a 90 per cent technology focus, drawing talent predominantly from regional banking institutions to develop and maintain these critical systems.
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Cybersecurity operations out of India are particularly big. StoneX's India teams monitor thousands of daily phishing attempts and operate a security operations centre that protects the company's global infrastructure.
Organic evolution
Rather than following a predetermined expansion plan, StoneX has allowed different business units to discover how Indian talent could address their specific challenges. This organic evolution has created a unique multi-functional hub that supports diverse aspects of StoneX's global operations. Teams in India, Davison says, now assist with derivatives trading, bullion operations, securities trading, compliance, legal support, and a variety of development projects.
We started off (StoneX's India operations) with a payments division as a proof of concept in 2019. That went really well, and then we started with other functions, now we do everything from derivatives trading, securities trading, bullion operations, and so on. The good thing is that because our centres here have been open for six years now, people are starting to have real institutional knowledge of our company. And we're just at the cusp where we think we're going to start to have global leaders based out of the India offices as well.
Stuart Davison | Chief operating officer STONEX
The expansion, he says, reflects a structural change in finance rather than simple labour arbitrage. 'Ten years ago you won business on price; today you win it on technology,' he says. Clients accustomed to one-click experiences on their phones will not tolerate clunky interfaces or three-hour settlement windows. StoneX therefore hires engineers first and financiers second, confident that market mechanics are easier to teach than clean code. With every employee – including executives – working in open-plan seating, newcomers absorb conversations from trading, compliance and cyber security, completing a steep learning curve in months rather than years.
The feedback loop now runs both ways. Indian colleagues possess enough institutional memory to lead global projects, and StoneX intends to base whole product lines in the country. The first on-shore revenue unit – a gold-trading desk that builds on the firm's status as the world's largest non-bank bullion broker – is pencilled in once regulators approve.
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