My goal is to build a younger, leaner, hungrier kind of Kotak: Ashok Vaswani

As January approaches, Ashok Vaswani will begin his third year as managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) of Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. Soon after Vaswani joined the bank, it had to start untangling itself for regulatory crosshairs. Since then, the RBI-imposed embargo on enlisting more digital customers has been lifted, it has made a couple of acquisitions, and is now in the race to acquire a big one, but Vaswani unsurprisingly sidesteps talk of IDBI Bank.

The presence of Uday Kotak, the promoter, on the board has helped him cushion the impact of the superannuations/resignations of a few senior colleagues, with Vaswani saying his ‘goal is to build a younger, leaner, hungrier kind of Kotak.’Edited excerpts:It definitely does not give sleepless nights. By the time I go home in the evening, I am so tired, I sleep very, very well. Look, competition is welcome, and these are chunky buys, but there is enough foreign shareholding in all banks, including ours.

Increased competition only benefits the customer. Having said that, we are now seeing banks from the Gulf and Japan enter the marketplace, while you are seeing the Europeans and Americans leave the shores.I feel really good that we have put in place a group-level strategy. There is a common narrative, including investor, employee, and brand narratives.

We had the technology embargo, and that sucked up a lot of time and bandwidth. We managed to put that behind us. What I feel good about is the fact that we didn't use the embargo just to paper over the issues.