By Siddhi Nayak
MUMBAI -India’s Kotak Mahindra Bank has appointed Grant Thorton Bharat as an external auditor for its IT systems, months after the central bank (RBI) barred the lender from adding new clients digitally, its chief executive officer said on Saturday.
The scope of the audit is finalised with the RBI, and Kotak Mahindra Bank has submitted process timelines to the regulator, Ashok Vaswani told reporters in a media call.
The bank has “beefed up” its internal tech team, with resources from Accenture, Infosys, Oracle and Cisco, he said.
In April, the RBI asked Kotak Mahindra Bank to stop adding clients digitally and issuing credit cards due to gaps in its IT infrastructure.
Earlier on Saturday, Kotak said its net profit for the April-June quarter jumped 81% from a year earlier, helped by a one-time gain of 35.2 billion Indian rupees ($420.43 million)from the divestment of a stake in its general insurance arm to Zurich Insurance Company in June.
The private lender’s standalone net profit, excluding subsidiaries, rose to 62.5 billion rupees in the fiscal first quarter, from 34.52 billion rupees in the same period last year.
That was sharply higher than analyst estimates of 37.57 billion rupees, according to LSEG data.
Kotak’s net interest income, the difference between interest earned and paid out, increased 10% on-year to 68.42 billion rupees.
Its net interest margin (NIM), a key gauge of profitability for banks, shrank to 5.02% in the quarter from 5.57% in the same period last year, and was also lower than the 5.28% of the January-March quarter.
Indian banks are trying to raise deposits to fund rising credit growth, which has weighed on their margins.
Kotak’s NIMs were also affected because it could not build on its high-yielding credit card book due to the RBI order, chief financial officer Devang Gheewala said in the same conference.
The private lender’s loans rose 20% in the quarter, while deposits were up 21%.
Its gross non-performing assets (NPA) ratio, a key gauge of lenders’ asset quality, was at 1.39% at the end of June, flat to the prior three months.
The bank is seeing signs of stress in its microfinance book, specifically in certain states, as well as in credit cards, Vaswani added.
($1 = 83.7240 Indian rupees)
(Reporting by Siddhi Nayak; Editing by Tom Hogue, Alexandra Hudson)
