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Kotak Mahindra Bank CTO Bhavnish Lathia exits within a year of taking charge
Tech chief steps down for personal reasons as lender reshuffles digital leadership
MUMBAI: Kotak Mahindra Bank’s chief technology officer Bhavnish Lathia has stepped down less than a year after taking the role, marking yet another leadership churn in the private lender’s technology ranks as banks double down on digital muscle.
In a regulatory filing, the bank said Lathia resigned for personal reasons, with the board accepting his exit on 9 February 2026—his last working day. Lathia is relocating to the US, according to the disclosure.
Lathia, part of the bank’s senior management, had assumed the CTO role in March 2025. His departure follows that of predecessor Milind Nagnur, a Silicon Valley veteran who quit in January 2025 after a little over two years in the job.
Kotak has named Nilesh Chaudhari as the new chief technology officer, the same filing showed.
A customer-experience technologist
Lathia joined Kotak in 2022 as chief of customer experience and head of technology for the consumer bank, overseeing service quality and customer experience across channels. After nearly three years in that role, he was elevated to CTO.
Known as Nish among colleagues, he brings over 25 years of global experience spanning technology, product and customer-focused roles. He is a former Amazon executive, having spent nearly 18 years there across product management, ecommerce, marketing, engineering and analytics, largely focused on sharpening customer experience.
After Amazon, he moved to Valo Health as chief product officer, leading engineering, machine learning and product management.
Days before his resignation, Bloomberg reported Kotak was planning to hire around 500 engineers from large technology firms, with Lathia playing a key role in that talent push.
Market reaction
Shares of Kotak Mahindra Bank traded higher after the disclosure. The stock was at Rs 432.10, up Rs 3.35 or 0.78 per cent. It opened at Rs 432, touched a high of Rs 432.10 and a low of Rs 428.80, against a previous close of Rs 428.75. The 52-week high stands at Rs 460.31 and the low at Rs 378.98. The volume-weighted average price was Rs 430.23.
Lathia’s exit comes at a time when banks are racing to upgrade technology stacks, strengthen digital services and woo customers through slicker platforms. In that contest, stability at the top matters.
At Kotak, the message is becoming familiar: in the digital banking race, the code must keep running—even when the coders change.
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IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
