Kotak Bank sees Rs 300-500 crore hit to profit from RBI curbs

Mumbai: Kotak Mahindra Bank has said that RBI's ban on its onboarding of customers digitally could impact the bank's operating profit by Rs 300-500 crore.

The bottom-line impact was a back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the absence of new credit card customers, the increased cost of information technology and some savings as customer acquisition cost was front-ended.

Kotak Bank MD & CEO Ashok Vaswani told analysts in a call on Saturday that the bank would also re-prioritise IT expenses to investments in risk, resilience, and capacity rather than new features or a new mobile banking app. Joint MD Shanti Ekambaram said that while the bank would not be adding new customers digitally, there was a large number of the existing 2.5 crore 811 digital banking customers who had conducted self-KYC through one-time passwords, and who will be onboarded for a deeper relationship with the bank.

Earlier, Vaswani had said that demands on technology had risen with UPI transactions "going through the roof" as well as more customers conducting their banking activities on mobile and internet platforms. Kotak Bank had moved from the 10th position to the 5th in UPI transactions in a year. "While the supply is going up, demand is going up too. We just got to double up and get even faster," he said.

Vaswani spoke to the media for the first time since taking over as CEO, after veteran banker Uday Kotak stepped down, in Jan. He announced the bank's Q4 FY24 results, where it showed a net profit of Rs 4,133 crore for the quarter - an 18% increase over the previous year's Rs 3,496 crore.


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