Kotak Mahindra Bank will hire around 400 engineers this year. Recently, RBI has banned the bank from opening new credit cards and accounts through online channels due to lack of IT infrastructure. The bank now wants to strengthen its IT infrastructure by hiring engineers.
The bank's Chief Technology Officer Milind Naganur said that the bank has hired more than 500 engineers in the last two years. They have been taken from companies like Google and Amazon as well as companies like Paytm and PhonePe.
Naganur is Kotak's most high-profile tech hiring. Along with him, Customer Experience Head Bhavnish Lathia was also hired in 2022. Naganur has worked in US-based fintech company Early Warning Services. While Lathia has spent almost two decades at Amazon.
RBI had found serious deficiencies in the bank's IT inventory management, user access management, vendor risk management, data security and data leak prevention strategy areas. This was seen for two consecutive years, but the bank could not take any concrete steps.
Due to lack of strong IT infrastructure, the bank's core banking system (CBS) and its online and digital banking channels saw frequent outages in the last two years. The latest outage took place on April 15, causing inconvenience to customers.
Now the restrictions imposed will be reviewed after the external audit of the bank. For this external audit, the bank will have to take prior approval from RBI. The bank will also have to remove all the deficiencies pointed out in RBI's inspection and external audit.
On April 24 last month, RBI took action against Kotak Mahindra Bank using its power under section 35A of the Banking Regulation Act 1949. After the RBI action, the bank's stock witnessed a huge drop.
On April 24, Kotak Mahindra Bank's stock was at Rs 1,842.80, which fell to Rs 1,543. However, now it has seen some recovery and today i.e. on May 8, it closed at Rs 1648. Even now Kotak's stock is 11% below the rate of April 24.
