Kotak Mahindra Bank plans to raise its core banking system’s stress-tested capacity to 4-5 times by March 2026. Currently operating at 3 times the capacity, the move aims to further strengthen resilience and scalability for future growth. Scale certification is a validation process that demonstrates a bank’s ability to handle operations, systems, and workloads at significantly higher levels of demand than usual.
“Our core banking system has not been down for a year, not a single outage,” says Bhavnish Lathia, Chief Technology Officer at Kotak Mahindra Bank. He added that this success reflects the bank’s journey through the pre- and post-embargo phases imposed by the Reserve Bank of India, where the regulatory pause became an opportunity to double down on technology transformation.
Moving from Legacy Systems
Kotak Mahindra Bank has reduced its dependence on vendorised legacy systems and instead built its own in-house engineering capability. Today, a 2,000-member technology team across Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Gurgaon drives innovation to modernise its stack. “We realised that to deliver speed, reliability, and superior customer experience, we had to move away from legacy systems designed for branch banking and reimagine our technology stack,” said Lathia.
“Today, account opening that once took days happens in minutes. Mobile app page loads have dropped from eight seconds to half a second. Branch operations are streamlined, saving employees hours each day. Customer acquisition is seamless, thanks to video KYC and digital onboarding, while personalised experiences set us apart, be it mass retail, affluent, SME, or HNI segments,” said Lathia, who added, “We have embedded superior customer service into the very fabric of our platforms. Contextual innovations like ‘click-to-call’ support directly from the app, ensuring that help is always at hand. This transformation isn’t just about technology—it’s about creating meaningful, differentiated experiences for every customer we serve.”
AI-Driven Security
Fraud prevention has also become a priority. With real-time telemetry generating nearly 10 million metrics a minute, the bank has built advanced AI-driven fraud models that intercept suspicious transactions within six seconds, ensuring customer protection before commitments are made. These in-house models are further strengthened by ecosystem-wide intelligence from RBI and NPCI, creating a layered defence against evolving threats. “We treat fraud prevention like an arms race. Just as we evolve, fraudsters evolve too. AI and data are our strongest weapons,” added Lathia.
Kotak is leveraging AI not just for fraud detection but as the foundation of its future. The bank has built its own AI platform with an abstraction layer above frontier models, enabling flexibility and compliance with data boundaries. AI now assists engineers in full-stack development, accelerating innovation cycles. Lathia calls this shift “the great reset,” stating that, “AI requires a fundamental reset to everybody’s technology stack. Even banks built digitally five years ago must redo their stacks. The differentiator will be the quality of engineering talent.”
The vision for the private sector bank is banking that is simpler, transparent, accessible, and hyper-personalised, that blends digital convenience with branch trust. “While we want to put a branch in every customer’s pocket, what customers care about is speed, transparency, reliability and access, and technology is the only way to deliver this at scale,” he added.