New Kotak CEO Ashok Vaswani values humility as a key leadership trait

“In my opinion we are the largest fintech company in the UK,” Vaswani had said on 27 September 2016, likening the British bank to new-age financial companies that use technology to differentiate their businesses from traditional lenders. He then went on to explain how one in every two people in the UK has some kind of relationship with the bank, and that it was seeing incredible levels of engagement.

Seven years after that statement Vaswani is all set to be the new chief executive of private lender Kotak Mahindra Bank, taking over from founding chief and billionaire banker Uday Kotak who stepped down last month. On Saturday, the bank said that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has approved a three-year term for Vaswani.

At the domestic lender, which was one of the first among peers to launch a digital banking platform called 811 in 2017, Vaswani is expected to drive the digital agenda.

Given that Kotak has a significant focus on digital banking — in Q2 of this fiscal, 95% of new personal loans by volume were disbursed digitally and 97% of new credit cards were sold digitally — Vaswani’s appointment comes at an opportune time.

Vaswani has been quite fascinated with the digital world and has been a champion of using data and analytics towards better customer experience. He is currently the president of Pagaya Technologies Ltd – a US-Israeli AI fintech. Having spent over 12 years at the British banking group, his last role as per his Linkedin profile was a relatively short stint of nine months as its chief digital officer. As part of his stint at Barclays, he served as the CEO of Africa, CEO of the UK retail and business bank, 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.

Given that he is taking over from Uday Kotak, a name associated with entrepreneurship and the building of a financial services entity from scratch, Vaswani’s performance and his leadership style will inevitably be compared to his predecessor. Once asked by peer-to-peer board community Criticaleye on what makes a great leader, Vaswani had answered humility.

“For me it is really important personally to be humble. Humility is hugely important because it is only if you are humble that you learn and if you do not learn you stagnate and if you stagnate you die,” he had said in 2017.

Insiders see his appointment as a continuation of Kotak Mahindra Bank’s strategy to bring global talent into India. In 2022, Kotak hired Milind Nagnur as president and chief technology officer (CTO) from Early Warning, a fintech company that operates Zelle Network, and is owned by seven major US banks. It also hired Bhavnish Lathia from Amazon last year as the chief of customer experience.

Dipak Gupta, the interim chief executive of the bank, told reporters on Saturday that getting Vaswani can be seen as getting talent back to India to run a local institution. “His experience in global tech and consumer will help the bank going forward,” said Gupta.

The question, however, remains on Vaswani’s ability to quickly have his finger on the pulse of the Indian banking ecosystem. He would also need to navigate local regulatory issues and deal with a larger potential customer base and run a much younger institution.

Financial services is an extremely competitive proposition in India, with some state-owned banks competing fiercely with their private peers. Then there are the non-bank financiers, with the most recent addition being that of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries-backed Jio Financial Services, and large existing players like consumer lender Bajaj Finance. Moreover, the Indian financial sector is quite tightly regulated and the regulator, having chosen an external candidate to run the bank, is likely to keep a close watch.

Gopika Gopakumar contributed to this story

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Updated: 21 Oct 2023, 07:34 PM IST