Kotak Mahindra Bank strengthens leadership with veterans from Amazon, HUL, Citi, Barclays, CRISIL, and Bajaj Finance

A day after the new MD & CEO Ashok Vaswani took charge at Kotak Mahindra Bank, the private lender announced the appointment of yet another lateral hire, Anupam Kaura, as its Chief Human Resources Officer. Kaura joins the bank founded by Uday Kotak from CRISIL, London, where he was the Global CHRO.

Kaura is among the many other lateral hires in the last two years with global as well as local experience in areas like technology, customer experience, marketing & branding, data & risk analytics.

The new CEO himself is a global professional with three and a half decades of experience at majors like Citigroup and, more recently, Barclays. His most recent stint was at Pagaya Technologies Ltd , a US-Israeli joint venture with a focus on artificial intelligence.

Kotak, the founder, who has moved from MD & CEO to a non-executive role after two decades of building the Rs 4.89 lakh crore institution, is also instrumental in building the new team to take on the digital challenge. The mandate of the new team is to offer an Amazon-like banking experience, focus on enhancing the employee experience, and emphasis on increased productivity.

Some of the members of the new team actually joined when Uday Kotak was in charge.

After almost two decades of building large businesses at the Seattle-based Amazon, coding enthusiast Bhavnish Lathia joined as Chief of Customer Experience & Head of Technology in August 2022.

Milind Nagnur, who joined as Chief Technology Officer around the same time as Bhavnish, worked at JP Morgan, Citibank, to Wells Fargo. Eager to break free from old-fashioned banking and take new challenges, he landed at Early Warning Services, the US based instant payment services provider, something like India's NPCI, before heading home and joining Kotak.

Rohit Bhasin, a veteran from FMCG behemoth Unilever, joined Kotak in February last year. Bhasin’s last assignment was about repositioning the once iconic Ponds brand in Singapore, which underwent a complete transformation under Bhasin’s leadership.

Bhasin has joined as Head of Retail Liabilities Product and Chief Marketing Officer.

In April last year, Kotak picked Bhaskar Kumar, who worked with Bajaj Finserv, HSBC, and GE Capital as Head of Retail & Commercial Risk.

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