Manish Kothari resigns from Kotak Mahindra Bank after 31 years

Three decades at one bank is a rarity in Indian corporate life, which makes Manish Kothari’s exit from Kotak Mahindra Bank worth pausing on. Kothari, group president and head of commercial bank, tendered his resignation on Thursday, bringing the curtain down on a 31 year innings that began when Kotak was still finding its feet as a lender.

Kothari will formally leave the bank on September 30, 2026. In his resignation letter addressed to Ashok Vaswani, managing director and chief executive officer, he indicated he may seek an entrepreneurial venture, a graceful way of saying the next chapter will be built on his own terms rather than someone else’s balance sheet. Kotak has already set the machinery in motion, initiating a planned transition and folding Kothari’s commercial banking portfolio into the retail and institutional business segments.

The scale of what he leaves behind tells its own story. Kothari joined the Kotak Mahindra Group in 1995 and spent over 25 years building the bank’s corporate franchise almost from scratch, working across every conceivable customer segment, from conglomerates and large corporates to mid corporates, multinationals, small and medium enterprises, e-commerce and start-ups, credit light corporates and the supply chain ecosystem around them. He has been a member of the Kotak leadership team for more than a decade, and in his most recent role headed a 500 strong team spread across 30 locations, covering large corporates, mid corporates, multinationals, SMEs and new age companies.

Along the way, he steered the tricky integration of ING Vysya’s corporate banking business with Kotak’s own Corporate Bank following the 2015 merger, no small feat given how often such mergers stumble on culture and client overlap. He was also credited with building the business intelligence unit, monitoring systems and marketing function for the wholesale bank from the ground up, while simultaneously running the Corporate Bank itself. Under his watch, the corporate bank franchise grew at a brisk 25 per cent plus compound annual rate, a number that will likely feature in every tribute written about him this week.

Kothari’s Kotak journey ran through several distinct chapters: seven years building the mid corporate business from a fledgling operation inside the erstwhile NBFC, Kotak Mahindra Finance, into a full-fledged franchise across a dozen locations, followed by more than a decade running the Corporate Bank, before a 2022 shift into commercial banking covering agriculture, rural, logistics, infrastructure and micro-finance. His final assignment as group president and head of commercial bank began in October 2024.

For a career built on backing entrepreneurs across nearly every sector and economic cycle India has thrown up, there is a certain symmetry in Kothari now choosing to become one himself.