India’s Kotak Mahindra Bank appoints Ashok Vaswani as CEO and managing director
Kotak Mahindra Bank has received approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to appoint Ashok Vaswani as its new managing director and CEO.
Ashok Vaswani, Kotak’s new MD and CEO. Image source: LinkedIn
The appointment, subject to shareholder approval, will last for a period of three years and will commence no later than 1 January 2024.
With a career spanning 35 years, Vaswani brings “significant executional experience” to his new role, the bank says. Vaswani currently serves as president of Pagaya, a US-Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) fintech, and as non-executive director at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).
He previously spent over 12 years at Barclays in several senior leadership roles, starting out as CEO of cards, Europe in 2010. He was then appointed CEO of Barclays UK in 2016, heading up its retail and business banking operations in the country as well as its cards and wealth divisions. He later served as CEO of the bank’s global consumer and payments division, and most latterly as chief digital officer.
Prior to joining Barclays, Vaswani had an eight-year stint at Citi Group, where he started off as division executive in 1999 and left the firm as CEO, consumer bank, Asia Pacific in 2007.
Prakash Apte, chairman of Kotak Mahindra Bank, describes Vaswani as a “global banking leader with a proven track record of building and growing businesses at an international scale”, adding that his appointment will “accelerate change and drive growth” for the bank.
