Kotak Mahindra Bank’s Milind Nagnur steps down as COO, CTO | Company Business News

Mumbai: Kotak Mahindra Bank’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer Milind Nagnur has resigned citing personal reasons, his exit coming several months after the Reserve Bank of India imposed restrictions on the lender citing technology-related deficiencies.

In his resignation letter, Nagnur said he planned to return to the US “to care for family members” and that 15 February would be his last day at the lender, according to the bank’s stock exchange statement on Friday.

Kotak Mahindra Bank said it has put in place an interim technology organization structure to ensure smooth functioning.

Nagnur’s exit is the second senior-level departure from Kotak Mahindra Bank since March, when the lender’s former joint managing director K.V.S. Manian resigned to join Federal Bank as its chief executive officer.

In April, the Reserve Bank of India restricted Kotak Mahindra Bank from adding clients through its online and mobile banking channels and from issuing credit cards due to “serious shortcomings” in its information technology (IT) infrastructure.

These shortcomings reportedly caused recurring service disruptions, including a major outage on 15 April. The restrictions are still in force.

Handpicked by Kotak

Nagnur had been handpicked by Kotak Mahindra Bank’s former CEO Uday Kotak in 2022 to oversee its technological transformation. He was later elevated as COO as well in February last year after Ashok Vaswani took charge as the bank’s CEO.

Nagnur had previously served as managing director at Citigroup for over a decade until 2018 and as CTO at US-based fintech firm Early Warning.

Nagnur said in a recent post on his Linkedin page that Kotak Mahindra Bank had built a deep engineering unit by onboarding more than 600 engineers.