Kotak Mahindra Bank appoints Anup Saha as MD & CEO for three-year term

They said Saha’s appointment signalled strategic continuity while bringing a retail and consumer banking-focused leader to the helm.  

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, Saha (56) could serve until he turns 70, subject to approval by the bank board and RBI, providing a longer leadership horizon to drive strategic and operational changes at the bank, experts said. Saha joined the bank in January this year.  

In June, the bank had said that Vaswani would not seek reappointment due to personal reasons when his term ended in December. He assumed office on January 1, 2024, for a three-year term. 

According to a note by Citi, the decision (to appoint Saha) delivers strategic continuity while installing a retail/consumer banking-focused leader at the helm. This will be constructive on two counts — reaccelerating growth and easing the overhang of capital deployment, according to the brokerage.  

According to other brokerages, among Saha’s key priorities will be stabilising the organisation and stemming senior-level exits, accelerating balance-sheet growth to improve return on equity (RoE), building a more granular liabilities franchise, and improving the turnaround time and responsiveness across the bank. 

“The single-biggest priority is to drive loan growth and deposit growth. Kotak’s return on equity (RoE) is the lowest among its large peers and the only way to improve that is to consume more capital and drive up leverage through faster balance-sheet growth,” said Suresh Ganapathy, MD & head of India research, Macquarie Capital, adding that another priority would be to make the deposit base granular as deposits above ₹5 crore formed almost 23 per cent of the balance sheet as of June 2025 (further disclosures not available) and would look to see this proportion coming down. 

According to Jefferies, Saha has experience leading the retail segment at Bajaj Finance and ICICI Bank; timely team reorganisation, if any, will help. “An uptick in the bank’s retail deposit & net interest income (NII) growth, along with operational efficiencies, can lift earnings,” the brokerage said.  

Saha has over 32 years’ professional experience, including 25 years in financial services across banking and non-banking financial institutions. He was associated with Bajaj Finance, the largest private sector non-banking financial company (NBFC), from 2017. He held roles, starting as president (consumer finance), followed by deputy CEO (consumer; micro, small and medium enterprises; marketing; operations & service; and digital platform), executive director, deputy MD, and finally MD & CEO from April 2025 until his resignation in July the same year.  

Before that, Saha spent 14 years at ICICI Bank, where he served as senior general manager and group product head, overseeing retail home loans, vehicle loans, developer funding and the credit-card businesses. 

Earlier in his career, he worked with GE Capital from 1999 to 2003, handling credit cards, sales and analytics, and with Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd from 1991 to 1995 in production engineering, following a brief stint in sales of consumer durables.