Who is Bhavnish Lathia? Kotak Mahindra Bank CTO resigns within one year of appointment

Kotak Mahindra Bank CTO Bhavnish Lathia has resigned from his role citing personal reasons, the private sector bank said in a statement on Monday. In a stock exchange filing, Kotak Mahindra Bank said its board of directors had accepted the resignation, with Lathia last working day being 9 February.

“We wish to inform you that Mr. Bhavnish Lathia has resigned as the Chief Technology Officer (Senior Management Personnel) of the Bank, due to personal reasons. Mr. Lathia’s resignation has been accepted on February 9, 2026 and, accordingly, Mr. Lathia has served his last day as CTO of the Bank on February 9, 2026,” the filing said.

The Kotak Mahindra Bank Chief Technology Officer's resignation came in less than one year after his appointment in March 2025. The bank has appointed Nilesh Chaudhari as the new Chief Technology Officer, it said in the stock exchange filing.

Who is Bhavnish Lathia?

Bhavnish Lathia had been associated with Kotak Mahindra Bank since 2022. Known as Nish among his colleagues, Lathia has over 25 years of global experience across roles in different industries.

In 2022, he joined Kota Mahindra Bank as the Chief of Customer Experience and Head of Technology in its Consumer Bank division, where he was responsible for customer experience and service across channels and the service quality for consumer bank.

After working for nearly three years in the role, Bhavish Lathia was promoted to the position of the CTO. Days ahead of his resignation, Bloomberg reported that Kotak Mahindra Bank is recruiting 500 engineers from large tech firms — a move in which Lathia, an ex-Amazon manager, played a key role.

He told Bloomberg in an interview that Kotak is building a “technology company with a banking licence”.

“Where we see a unique opportunity is in combining talent from deep tech companies with talent that brings deep domain expertise,” Lathia said. “To me, it’s like ginger and cardamom going into chai.”

Before joining Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bhavnish Lathia worked for nearly 18 years in Amazon spanning across all business functions like product management, ecommerce, marketing, engineering and analytics with a primary focus on enhancing customer experience. Post-Amazon, he moved to Valo Health, where he worked as their Chief Product Officer responsible for engineering, machine learning, and product management.

At the time of his appointment as CTO, Kotak Mahindra Bank said in a statement that Lathia has pursued “high-ambiguity hard problems, working backwards from a customer centricity standpoint to derive insights, and invented solutions on behalf of customers (Consumers, B2B partners, and Developer segments) to maximize value creation. ”

He has over 40 patents (approved and filed) within ecommerce, web-services, distributed computing, and machine learning domains.

Bhavnish Lathia holds an MS degree in Computer Science from University of Louisiana, and an MBA from California State University.