When Anup Saha walked out of Bajaj Finance in July 2025, barely four months into the top job, the rumour mill had him headed for a troubled IndusInd Bank. Instead, he turned up at Kotak Mahindra Bank in January 2026. Less than a year later, he is set to run it.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has approved Saha’s appointment as managing director and chief executive officer for three years from January 1, 2027. He will succeed Ashok Vaswani, who has led the bank since January 2024.
It caps a remarkably quick climb. Saha was named whole-time director in March, just two months after joining, with charge of retail banking, government business, data analytics and marketing. His elevation also extends Kotak’s turn towards outside leadership. Since 2023, the RBI has signalled a preference for fresh thinking beyond the bank’s pool of insiders, and Vaswani became the first outsider to lead Kotak after founder Uday Kotak.
The choice says a lot about Kotak’s priorities. The bank is working through stress in parts of its unsecured book, notably credit cards, and wants to grow its small and medium enterprise business. Saha has spent much of his career in exactly these areas, handling credit cards at ICICI Bank and the consumer and MSME businesses at Bajaj Finance.
“Since joining Kotak, he has worked closely with our teams and demonstrated a clear understanding of the opportunities ahead. I am confident that Anup will build on Kotak’s strong foundations, deepen its customer relationships and lead the Bank forward with purpose and discipline,” Vaswani said.
Jefferies called the appointment a positive, citing his record of running retail businesses. “Timely team reorganisation (if any) will help. Uptick in bank’s retail deposit & NII growth, along with operational efficiencies, can lift earnings,” the brokerage said in a report.
From the shop floor to finance
Saha’s career began far from banking. An engineering graduate from IIT Kharagpur, he started out in production engineering at Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) in 1991. After four years there and a brief stint selling consumer durables, he moved into financial services with GE Capital in 1999, working across credit cards, sales and analytics. He also holds an MBA from IIM Lucknow.
In 2003, he joined ICICI Bank, where he spent 14 years in senior roles spanning retail secured assets, business intelligence, retail and rural collections, credit cards and retail structured finance. He also represented the bank as a nominee director on the boards of TransUnion CIBIL and ICICI Home Finance.
His most prominent stint came at Bajaj Finance, which he joined in October 2017 as president–consumer finance, just as the non-bank lender was expanding rapidly. He rose fast. He became deputy CEO in April 2019, overseeing consumer and MSME businesses, marketing, operations, service and the digital platform. He was made executive director in 2023 and deputy managing director in 2024, before taking over as MD and CEO in April 2025.
Kotak gives him a far bigger stage: a full-service bank where the businesses that defined his career now matter both to its growth ambitions and to its asset quality. Execution and customer focus are likely to sit at the heart of his mandate.