MUMBAI: Kotak Mahindra Bank’s CEO, Ashok Vaswani, said on Saturday that the bank will spend up to Rs 1,700 crore on technology upgrades to address Reserve Bank of India’s concerns regarding the bank’s technology capacity, risk management and resilience.
Last month, RBI instructed Kotak Bank to halt onboarding customers digitally and issuing credit cards as a penalty for not rectifying its technological issues to the regulator’s satisfaction. Vaswani said the bank has been addressing RBI’s concerns in these areas. He also added that there would be no restrictions on the bank’s existing customers across channels or products.
“For the past two to three years, we’ve made senior hires, documented internal tech, and invested in capacity building for risk and resilience. Our technology expense is running at about 10% of our total operating expense. However, what is evident is that our efforts have fallen short of what the regulator expects,” he said.
Vaswani was speaking to the media for the first time since taking over as the CEO from veteran banker Uday Kotak in Jan. He was announcing the Q4FY24 results, where the bank showed a net profit of Rs 4,133 crore for the quarter ending in March 2024, an 18% increase over the previous year’s Rs 3,495.6 crore.
