Uday Kotak and Family

Uday Kotak turned a bill-discounting firm into one of India's most valuable banks by doing one thing at a time.

Kotak started Kotak Mahindra Finance in 1985 with a small bill-discounting operation, at a time when the Indian financial sector was dominated by state-owned banks and a handful of established private institutions. He grew the business through lending, investment banking and asset management before securing a banking licence from the Reserve Bank of India in 2003, making Kotak Mahindra the first non-banking finance company in India to convert into a commercial bank. That conversion was not incidental: it allowed the group to access deposit funding at a substantially lower cost and gave it the platform to build a full-service retail bank over the subsequent two decades.

Kotak Mahindra Bank is today one of India's most valuable private banks by market capitalisation, with a customer base spanning retail depositors, high-net-worth individuals and large corporations. Uday Kotak stepped down as chief executive in 2023. His tenure ran from a two-person office to one of the country's most significant financial institutions.