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Ashok Vaswani’s resignation from Kotak Mahindra Bank caught a few insiders off guard, but it still landed like a thunderclap on Dalal Street. India’s fourth-largest private lender announced on Saturday that its MD and CEO has decided not to seek reappointment after his current term wraps up on December 31, 2026, citing “personal.”
In a regulatory filing, the bank confirmed the board has “respected his decision”. It immediately kicked off the hunt for a successor, promising to conclude the process within applicable regulatory timelines, which will require sign-off from the Reserve Bank of India. This is the bank’s second CEO transition scramble in just three years, a fact that no amount of corporate language in a stock exchange filing can gloss over.
Vaswani took charge on January 1, 2024, for a three-year term approved by the RBI. He succeeded founder Uday Kotak, who stepped down on September 1, 2023, with Dipak Gupta serving as interim MD and CEO in the intervening months. The appointment was significant; it marked the first time an outsider had been handed the keys to a bank Uday Kotak had built essentially from scratch over three decades.
Vaswani arrived with an impressive pedigree: three decades of global banking behind him, including stints as CEO of Barclays Bank UK and its global consumer, corporate and payments businesses, and most recently as president of Pagaya Technologies, a US-Israeli AI-driven fintech firm. On paper, it looked like an inspired hire. In practice, things got complicated quickly.
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 online and mobile channels and halting fresh credit card issuance, over deficiencies in its IT risk and information security framework. That ban, and the reputational heat it generated, set the tone for much of Vaswani’s tenure.
Senior ranks thinned out too: K V S Manian, long seen as a potential CEO candidate himself, exited just four months after Vaswani took over, while Milind Nagnur, brought in specifically to lead the bank’s technology transformation, also left earlier than anticipated — raising questions about leadership continuity at a time of significant operational change.
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. Meanwhile, the bank reported a 13% rise in net profit to Rs 4,027 crore in Q4 FY26, aided by stronger lending growth and lower provisions.
The bank’s market capitalisation sits at roughly Rs 4.06 lakh crore, with shares up 12% since the start of 2025, closing at Rs 409 on BSE on Saturday.
Two senior executives, Paritosh Kashyap and Anup Saha, are among the internal candidates being considered. Kashyap, a Kotak veteran, oversees wholesale banking across structured finance, investment banking and debt capital markets. Saha, a former Bajaj Finance CEO who joined Kotak more recently, leads consumer banking, marketing and data analytics.
Banking regulations require that if the board considers external candidates, at least two names must be referred to the RBI, ranked in order of preference, at least four months before the current CEO’s tenure ends. A tentative list of candidates is expected to be submitted to the RBI by early August.
Vaswani, in an internal letter to employees, said he would continue working closely with the chairman and board during the transition, describing the months ahead as “some of the most important in Kotak’s journey.”
Given that this is only the bank’s second external CEO search ever, those months may well define a generation of Kotak Mahindra’s story.
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