Kotak Mahindra Bank has elevated Bhavnish Lathia to the role of chief technology officer (CTO). He has been with the bank since August 2022, as chief of customer experience and head of technology-consumer bank.
Lathia, who completed an MBA from California State University-Dominguez Hills, also holds an MS in computer science, from University of Louisiana, Lafayette. He worked as a software engineer/principal architect for Egghead Software, in the initial years of his professional journey (1998-2000).
In January of 2000 he moved to EMC Dantz as head of product management, working out of Seattle, US, for three years and eight months.
In August of 2003 began his long association with Amazon. He joined as technical product and programme manager, e-commerce platform. Within a year he was promoted to principal technical product and programme manager, marketplace expansion. From 2007 to 2012 he served as general manager, foundational web services. In 2012 he was again elevated to director-WW expansion, core e-commerce platform. For the next two years he remained responsible for product and engineering within Amazon’s core e-commerce platform services with a primary focus on generalising the architecture and making it self-service to enable WW expansion. The period 2014 to 2018 saw him serving as general manager-WW value-added services. By the time he moved on from Amazon in 2018, he had reached the position of general manager, WW heavy bulky products, services and shop local.
Lathia’s next stop was Valo, where he played executive vice president, chief product officer, from 2021 to 2022, before relocating to Mumbai from the US, to join Kotak Mahindra Bank as chief of customer experience and head of technology-consumer bank.
In his role as CTO, Bhavnish Lathia will spearhead innovation, customer experience, and operational efficiency.
Ashok Vaswani, MD & CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank, acknowledged that Lathia “ has been instrumental in driving our technology initiatives for the last three years, building a world-class team of engineers to help drive our technology agenda. The rapid deployment of technology, with business leaders working closely with their respective technology teams, will be key to transforming our businesses for scale. This approach will drive customer satisfaction and organisational efficiency. And with Bhavnish’s leadership, we will achieve our ambitious agenda and set the bar for technology leadership in the banking industry.”
Lathia said in his social-media post, “We are on a mission to build the most customer-centric, technology-enabled bank in India. With over 20 million lines of code written in just three years, patentable innovations in high-scale, fault-tolerant, distributed systems the remarkable in-house engineering team at Kotak has begun to build the Bank of the future. Our vision is bold, energy is high, and we are just getting started. If you are passionate about working with world-class engineers to re-imagine banking at Internet scale reach out to us.”
