Kotak Mahindra Bank CTO Bhavnish Lathia Resigns after 11-Month Stint

Kotak Mahindra Bank Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Bhavnish Lathia has resigned from his role after serving for less than a year. Prior to his appointment as the CTO in March 2025, Lathia served as the Chief of Customer Experience and Head of Technology in the lender's Consumer Bank division.

Lathia resigned citing his need return to the US for personal reasons. Following this, the private lender appointed Nilesh Chaudhari as the new CTO and as a Senior Management Personnel of the Bank. Additionally, Aravamudham (Vijay) Narayanan has been appointed as the Head–Innovation and AI and as a Senior Management Personnel of the Bank.

Notably, Lathia has over 25 years of global experience across roles in different indistries. Before joining Kotak Mahindra Bank in 2022, he worked for nearly 18 years in Amazon spanning across all business functions like product management, ecommerce, marketing, engineering and analytics with a primary focus on enhancing customer experience.

In his resignation, Lathia also addressed that the bank's technology platform is in the best shape it has ever been. "The technology leadership team is stable, mature, and ready for broader responsibilities. There is never a good time to resign but I feel this is the best time for me to step off the stage and let the next generation of technology leaders take the center stage," he said.

Meanwhile, an earlier report had cited Lathia and said that the bank is looking to actively hiring talent from large global technology companies and rival bank to build a tech company with a banking licence. Kotak Mahindra Bank has been stepping up its technology push by planning to hire as much as 500 engineers to strengthen its long-term competitiveness in an increasingly digital banking landscape, according to an earlier report by Bloomberg.

This development comes at a time when the bank has been undergoing a major leadership rejig over the past two years. Founder and long-time CEO Uday Kotak stepped down in September 2023, with Ashok Vaswani taking over as CEO in January 2024.

Last year, head of consumer banking assets Ambuj Chandna resigned to join DBS Bank. Additionally, before Lathia's appointment, the bank's former CTO Milind Nagnur had stepped down ahead of his relocation to the US. In 2024, Kotak Mahindra Bank also saw the exit of its head of credit Phani Shekhar in April, followed by the superannuation of consumer banking head Virat Diwanji in July, underscoring continued churn at the senior management level.