UDAY KOTAK

Uday Kotak started on 21 February 1985 with ₹30 lakh borrowed from family and friends to set up a bill discounting business, undercutting banks on credit and paying investors more. Anand Mahindra and his father Harish invested the following year, which is where the Mahindra in the name comes from.

He spent 18 years building a tight, well-governed financial institution. In 2003, the Reserve Bank of India let him convert the NBFC into a full bank, the first Indian NBFC ever allowed to do it.

Today Kotak Mahindra Bank holds over $110 billion in assets and runs more than 2,000 branches.

In October 2018 the Government of India put him in charge of the wreckage of IL&FS, the infrastructure lender whose collapse had just frozen India's credit markets. He served as non-executive chairman of the specially constituted board until April 2022, running the rescue of a group that owed roughly ₹99,000 crore.

Being handed the country's worst financial mess is a strange kind of compliment.

Kotak remained MD and CEO of his own bank for 38 years, one of the longest founder-CEO tenures of any major global bank, before stepping down in September 2023. His personal fortune of $14.2 billion comes almost entirely from his stake in the bank he founded.

Kotak Mahindra Bank — Founder, MD & CEO (1985–2023), now a non-executive director. IL&FS — Non-Executive Chairman of the government-appointed board (2018–2022).

Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance — Major shareholder. Kotak Securities — Founded.

Kotak Mutual Fund — Founded. Kotak Mahindra Capital Company — Founded

Conservative, capital-first banking. Kotak maintained higher capital ratios than RBI required — which cost him market share in boom years but made the bank bulletproof in every crisis.

He's been a vocal critic of India's overleveraged shadow banking sector for years before those warnings proved right. Slow, disciplined, fundamentals-driven growth.

The banking license conversion in 2003. Converting a profitable but limited NBFC into a full-service commercial bank — flawlessly — while maintaining the conservative culture that made it successful.

Most companies that get banking licenses either lose their culture or fail to execute the expansion. Kotak did neither.

In 2018, the RBI ordered him to dilute his personal shareholding in the bank. He fought it in court rather than negotiate, then withdrew the case in January 2020 and settled on capping his voting rights instead.

You can be a $14 billion founder and still lose a fight with your regulator.

Capital is not free. Every rupee you lend must be recoverable.

Growth that requires sacrificing credit quality is not growth — it's deferred loss recognition. Banks that forget this become problems for the whole system.

Married to Pallavi Kotak since 1985. She is a businesswoman who trekked to Everest base camp in 2014.

Two sons. Jay Kotak co-heads the bank's digital arm, Kotak811, and married the actress and former Miss India Aditi Arya in 2023.

Dhawal Kotak works at Amazon.

Bachelor of Commerce, Sydenham College, Mumbai. MBA, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai.

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