From IIT Engineer to Kotak Mahindra Bank CEO: Who Is Anup Kumar Saha?

Before he spends a single day as the chief executive of one of India's most valuable private banks, Anup Kumar Saha has already lived a career most bankers would call complete. Production engineer. Consumer-lending executive. A brief, turbulent stint as a CEO that ended in resignation. And now, from January 1, 2027, the top job at Kotak Mahindra Bank, succeeding Ashok Vaswani for a three-year term after the Reserve Bank of India signed off on his appointment.

An Engineer Who Became a Banker

Saha's career didn't start anywhere near a bank branch. He has a B.Tech in engineering from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow, but his first job, between 1991 and 1995, was as a production engineer at Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, the state-run industrial equipment maker. It's an unusual launchpad for someone who'd eventually spend more than three decades in financial services, but it's not an uncommon one in Indian banking, where engineering graduates have long found their way into roles built around data, risk and operations rather than pure finance.

He later worked at GE Capital before his career found its real footing at ICICI Bank, where he spent 14 years, from May 2003 to June 2017. There, Saha built his expertise in some of the least glamorous but most consequential parts of retail banking: secured lending, business intelligence, retail and rural loan collections, credit cards, and structured retail finance. He also served as ICICI's nominee director on the boards of TransUnion CIBIL and ICICI Home Finance, giving him a seat close to how India's credit scoring infrastructure actually works.

The Bajaj Finance Years

If ICICI built his foundations, Bajaj Finance is where Saha climbed. He joined the consumer lender in October 2017 as President of Consumer Finance and moved steadily upward over the next eight years: Deputy CEO overseeing consumer lending, MSME, marketing and digital platforms from 2019, Executive Director from 2022, Deputy Managing Director from 2024, and finally Managing Director and CEO starting in April 2025.

That final step didn't last long. Saha resigned as Bajaj Finance's CEO in July 2025, just a few months into the role, a notably brief tenure that doesn't appear to have slowed his career down. By January 2026, he had joined Kotak Mahindra Bank as a whole-time director, and since March 2026 has overseen the bank's retail business, data analytics and marketing functions, essentially the same terrain he'd spent years mastering elsewhere.

Stepping Into a Big Chair

Saha now takes over from Ashok Vaswani, the international banker who joined Kotak in 2024 after a long career at Barclays, and whose own three-year term concludes on December 31, 2026. Before Vaswani, the bank was synonymous with one name for two decades: founder Uday Kotak, who built the institution from a small finance company into India's fourth-largest bank by some measures before resigning as CEO in September 2023, four months ahead of schedule, citing personal reasons.

Saha inherits a bank with a reputation for conservative risk management and a premium market valuation to match, qualities analysts have historically tied directly to the institution's underwriting discipline rather than any single leader's personality. Whether his background in consumer lending data and retail analytics shapes Kotak's next growth phase, or whether the bank's board expects more continuity than change, is something his three-year term will have to answer. For now, what's clear is that Kotak has chosen an internal candidate with deep, specific expertise in the exact businesses he'll soon be running, rather than another outside hire from a global bank.