Kotak Mahindra Bank appoints Bhavnish Lathia as chief of customer experience

Mumbai: Private lender Kotak Mahindra Bank on Thursday announced the appointment of Bhavnish Lathia as the chief of customer experience to spearhead the customer experience function for the bank.

He will also oversee the technology of the consumer bank, the lender said in a statement.

Lathia comes with 25 years of global experience including 18 years at Amazon, spanning across all business functions like product management, e-commerce, marketing, engineering, and analytics with a primary focus on enhancing customer experience.

Post-Amazon, Lathia moved to Valo Health, where he worked as their chief product officer responsible for engineering, machine learning, and product management.

Dipak Gupta, joint managing director, Kotak Mahindra Bank said the bank firmly believes that strong customer relationships are crucial for business growth and giving customers consistently delightful experiences is its North Star.

"We are confident that his sharp customer focus, deep curiosity, and wealth of product, technology and operations knowledge will be an asset to the bank as it embarks on its next phase of growth," said Gupta.

Lathia has over 40 patents (approved and filed) within e-commerce, web services, distributed computing, and machine learning domains. He has an MS in Computer Science from University of Louisiana, and an MBA from California State University.

"I am indeed excited to be part of an organisation that keeps the customer at the core of its business. I look forward to working with my colleagues to innovate and introduce new initiatives to make customer experience a strategic differentiator for the bank," said Lathia.

The bank said in a statement that consumer expectations are changing much faster than the banking industry’s historical ability to adapt.

"Consumers today have more choices than ever before from financial service providers. They are rightly demanding more responsiveness, better flexibility, and higher service quality. Customer experience is now a strategic differentiator for financial services," the statement said.