Kotak Mahindra Bank on Saturday said its chief executive, Ashok Vaswani, does not wish to seek reappointment when his term ends on 31 December.
The bank said in a stock exchange filing that Vaswani had informed the board of the bank that he did not wish to seek re-appointment “for personal reasons”.
“The board has, at its meeting held today, respected his decision and has initiated the process for the appointment of a new managing director and chief executive. The process will be completed within applicable regulatory timelines,” it said.
Vaswani’s career
The bank hired Vaswani, a former Barclays executive, after billionaire banker Uday Kotak decided to hang up his boots in September 2023.
, Vaswani was the president of Pagaya Technologies Ltd, a US-Israeli AI fintech. He was the chief digital officer at Barclays during the last nine months of his 12-plus-year career there, according to his LinkedIn profile. At Barclays, he served as the CEO of Africa, CEO of UK retail and business bank, and the CEO of personal and corporate banking, before taking up the mantle as the CEO of Barclays UK in March 2016.
In his career spanning three and a half decades, he also worked at Citigroup Inc. In a post on the official Barclays LinkedIn page in 2021, Vaswani, a double postgraduate, chartered accountant and chartered secretary, addressed a letter to his younger self, stating that as a young boy growing up in India, he could not have imagined his career taking him to nearly every continent of the world. Vaswani’s mother wanted him to be a doctor.
Vaswani’s decision to leave the bank after December comes as some of his peers are either seeking reappointment or are expected to do so. that a set of India’s top private banks will decide by the end of next year who their new CEOs would be, and while the incumbents remain eligible, experts are keen on clarity over the second line of leadership.
Leadership change
CEOs of five prominent private-sector banks—HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and IDFC First Bank—will require regulatory nod for another term. While the board of ICICI Bank has already approved a shorter-than-usual two-year term for CEO Sandeep Bakhshi, HDFC Bank’s Sashidhar Jagdishan is willing to serve another term.
, Vaswani said that he felt good to have put in place a group-level strategy.
“There is a common narrative, including investor, employee, and brand narratives. We had the technology embargo, and that sucked up a lot of time and bandwidth. We managed to put that behind us,” he said.
Asked about the presence of the founder, Uday Kotak, on the board, Vaswani said that he had been very open about this and thought a lot about it in New York.
“I would ask you the question. If you owned 26% of a company that was worth a lot of money, would you give the keys to someone and say, ‘Thank you very much, come back and see me in five years’? That’s not realistic.”
Kotak was the managing director and CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank till 1 September 2023 and then became a non-executive non-independent director from the next day.