Ashok Vaswani to step down as Kotak Mahindra Bank CEO after 31 December
Kotak Mahindra Bank said on Saturday that its managing director Ashok Vaswani is not seeking reappointment when his term ends on December 31.
Vaswani informed the bank’s board that he did not want to be reappointed “due to personal reasons,” the bank said in a filing to the stock exchange.
The statement said, “The board of directors respected its decision at its meeting today and initiated the process for the appointment of the new general manager and chief executive officer. The process will be completed within the relevant regulatory calendar.”
Vaswani’s career
The bank hired former Barclays executive Vaswani after billionaire banker Uday Kotak decided to hang up his boots in September 2023.
Before joining Kotak, Vaswani was president of Pagaya Technologies Ltd, a US-Israeli artificial intelligence fintech company. He served as chief digital officer for the final nine months of his 12-plus year career at Barclays, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before taking up the role of CEO of Barclays UK in March 2016, he served as Africa CEO, UK retail and business bank CEO, and personal and corporate banking CEO at Barclays.
He also worked at Citigroup Inc. during his career spanning thirty-five years. In a post on the official Barclays LinkedIn page in 2021, Vaswani, a dual graduate, chartered accountant and chartered secretary, wrote in a letter to her younger self that as a young boy growing up in India, she could not have imagined that her career would take her to almost every continent in the world. Vaswani’s mother wanted him to become a doctor.
Vaswani’s decision to leave the bank after December came as some of his colleagues either sought reappointment or were expected to do so. Mint In April, it had reported that some of India’s leading private banks would decide who their new CEOs would be by the end of next year, and experts were keen for clarity on the second line of leadership while maintaining the suitability of incumbents.
leadership change
CEOs of five leading private sector banks – HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and IDFC First Bank – will need regulatory approval for another term. While ICICI Bank’s board has already approved a shorter-than-usual two-year tenure for CEO Sandeep Bakhshi, HDFC Bank’s Sashidhar Jagdishan is all set to serve another term.
In an interview Mint In December, Vaswani said he felt good about putting a strategy in place at the group level.
“There is a common narrative that includes investor, employee and brand narratives. There was a technology embargo and that consumed a lot of time and bandwidth. We managed to put that behind us,” he said.
When asked if founder Uday Kotak was on the board, Vaswani said he was very open about it and thought a lot about it in New York.
“I’ll ask you this question: If you owned 26 percent of a very valuable company, would you hand the keys to someone and say, ‘Thank you very much, would you come back and see me in five years? That’s unrealistic.’
Kotak was managing director and CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank until September 1, 2023, and became a non-executive, non-independent director from the next day.
