Ashok Vaswani to step down as Kotak Mahindra Bank MD & CEO

MUMBAI: Ashok Vaswani is calling it quits at Kotak Mahindra Bank, and he’s giving the board a full six months’ notice to find his replacement. India’s fourth-largest private lender announced on Saturday that its managing director and chief executive will not seek reappointment when his current term expires on December 31, 2026, citing personal reasons. The board, in a stock exchange filing, said it has “respected his decision” and kicked off the hunt for a successor, promising to wrap things up within regulatory timelines, which will include sign-off from the Reserve Bank of India.

It is the bank’s second such succession scramble in three years. Vaswani took the reins on January 1, 2024, on a three-year term cleared by the RBI in October 2023, stepping into shoes vacated by Uday Kotak, the bank’s formidable founder, who had run the show for roughly two decades before handing over to interim chief Dipak Gupta ahead of Vaswani’s arrival.

The tenure that followed was anything but smooth sailing. Barely months into the job, the RBI slapped Kotak Mahindra Bank with a ban on April 24, 2024, blocking it from onboarding new customers through its online and mobile channels and halting fresh credit card issuance, over deficiencies in its IT risk and information security set-up. The bank was also dragged into the wider microfinance downturn, forcing a rethink of its MFI strategy. Senior ranks thinned out too: K V S Manian, long seen as a contender for the top job himself, exited just four months after Vaswani took over, while Milind Nagnur, brought in specifically to spearhead the bank’s tech transformation, also left earlier than expected, raising eyebrows about leadership continuity mid-overhaul.

The numbers tell a similarly mixed story. Consolidated profit after tax for FY26 slipped to Rs 19,103 crore, down from Rs 22,126 crore in FY25, even as customer assets climbed healthily to Rs 6.16 lakh crore from Rs 5.37 lakh crore a year earlier. The bank’s market capitalisation now sits at roughly Rs 4.06 lakh crore, with shares up 12 per cent since the start of 2025 and closing at Rs 409 on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Saturday.

Vaswani himself arrives with three decades of global banking pedigree behind him. A graduate of Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai, he most recently served as president of Pagaya Technologies, a US-Israeli AI-driven fintech outfit, before that as chief digital officer at Barclays UK, and earlier still as chief executive of Barclays Bank UK and then of its global consumer, corporate and payments businesses.

His exit now sets the stage for one of Indian banking’s most closely watched leadership hunts, a second test in three years of whether Kotak Mahindra Bank can find someone capable of filling the considerable shoes left behind by its legendary founder.