Kotak Mahindra Bank Achieves Major Digital Global Milestone, Playbook Revealed

Kotak Mahindra Bank took a huge leap in H1, 2025-26 in the digital banking space. The bank’s Kotak811 app achieved a major milestone globally. According to Kotak Mahindra Bank, Kotak 811 app ranked as the third most downloaded banking app globally and the topmost downloaded banking app in India. He was speaking at the post Q2 results analyst call. 

According to data from app analytics platform Sensor Tower, Kotak811 logged 16 million downloads, a jump of 250 percent year-on-year – the fastest jump for any bank during a one year period. State Bank of India’s YONO bank was ranked fourth with 14 million downloads in the first six months of 2025. NeoBanks - Brazil’s NuBank and UK’s Revolut topped the chart, however they don't have physical branches. 

Bhavnish Lathia, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Kotak Mahindra Bank sat down with FE CIO, speaking about the journey of Kotak811. 

What are the key strategic objectives driving Kotak811, and what overall benefits has it delivered—not only to your customers, but also to your internal team, cross-functional business units, and other stakeholders?

Kotak Mahindra Bank’s 811 journey began a few years ago. The core insight for us was that the next generation of customers - who are in their 20s and 30s, have a very different set of expectations from their banking requirements, their relationships, etc., compared to the generation that's in their 50s and 60s. Thus 811 was envisioned as a product having a digital native experience. It's a full stack bank. 

The bank talked about it in this quarter in a big way, we achieved a big milestone in terms of the number of downloads. But what it's also doing is making banking a lot more accessible to core India. If you think about the large masses where maybe we don't necessarily have the type of branch penetration or the branch density. This puts a branch inside every customer's pocket effectively. And it's built for the younger generation.

How did the IT and cross-functional teams collaborate while you were working on designing Kotak811 and Solitaire. What was the scale that you were looking at? What skills are required, so that such platforms can be made scalable and they could suit the requirements of the generation?

A couple of years ago, we introduced the notion -- two-in-a-box – within the bank. The idea is that you pair an IT team member with a businessperson. Think of it as a businessperson or domain expert, who brings a deep expertise in customer experience (CX). 

A lot of what we see today is an outcome of decisions that were taken years back. One of those decisions was to create this cross-functional two-in-a-box kind of model. We then expanded it to include executives from distribution, compliance, legal, etc. This allows people to be on the journey from day one. And not wait till the end when everything's defined to get pulled in. 

The other big shift we made was unlike how products and propositions are designed traditionally. We took a customer working backwards approach to designing these. We started going out and researching our customer base. For one of our products, ‘Solitaire’ for example - we went out and interacted with many affluent customers to really understand what their stated and unstated needs were. We then identified what kind of proposition would cater to not just the material aspect of their needs, but also their emotional aspect. So that's how we designed the proposition, working backwards from the customer. 

Throughout the whole journey, the entire cross-functional part was together.  Everybody saw the exact same customer research with a similar understanding of what we're trying to solve. That's what made a program like 811 successful. Because you bring everybody together and then they stay together for the duration of the journey. As opposed to, a product-centric approach or a technology-centric approach. 

To take a comprehensive view - the technology exists in support of the business which is not independent of it. So for me, the biggest success coming out of both these propositions, and it's a playbook that we're now going to build on top of, is that you can have cross-team collaboration in a deep and meaningful way that generates outcomes for customers that we can all be proud of. 

Can you share an example of the ‘two-in-a-box’ approach in action? What is your specific role within that framework? Since you provide a broad perspective, how do you contribute different viewpoints or insights?

For example, our credit card business. The technology head for credit cards sits in the staff meeting of the business head for credit cards. So even though they report to different management chains, they talk on a daily basis and  share problems and solutions.

The business head is aware of exactly where his technology roadmap is, and the technology person is aware of all the challenges the business head is trying to solve. So, they're coupled together. We operate on a shared fate model. They either sink or swim together.

The business head for credit cards rolls up to the business head for consumer bank, for example. Similarly, the technology head for credit cards rolls up to a technology head for consumer bank. Now, the same model plays out over there. The technology head for consumer bank and the business head of consumer bank talk on a daily basis. So they also operate on a shared fate model. This brings the best of domain expertise, the best of technology expertise together and allows us to invent on behalf of our customers in a way that any one of them individually might not have been able to do. Whenever they go into presentations, board meetings, it's always the two of them together. 

Regarding skill sets, what types of expertise are essential for successfully executing these cross-functional initiatives?

On the technology side, at the most macro level, we're targeting having a mix of in-house engineering and external vendors. Currently, our ratio is 50:50 in terms of in-house engineers and external vendors. We have about a 2,000 person in-house engineering team. About three years ago, we were much more heavily skewed towards a vendorized model but we realized three years ago that in order for us to deliver the outcomes and given the cycle time on these outcomes is getting shorter and shorter each year, it's important for us to sort of invest in in-house engineering resources.

We've hired engineers from some of the best-known technology firms. So now within our in-house engineering team, we have a very healthy mix between engineers who come from consumer tech companies like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple, etc. and engineers that come from financial services domain backgrounds, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, etc. 

And within our in-house engineering team, we're targeting a mix of both consumer tech and financial services sort of expertise. And then we're pairing up our business product managers, who typically have deep banking expertise and understanding of sort of P&L management, pricing, distribution, compliance, etc with a deep bench of software product managers who understand how world-class software gets built. 

In addition to that, we've invested heavily over the last few years in building up our own in-house principal engineering bench. They're the ones who look at our enterprise architecture, who really provide mentorship to the rest of the engineering team. 

What were the primary challenges faced during the large-scale implementation of digital onboarding—especially as they relate to both Kotak811 and Solitaire?

I'll start with digital onboarding. One of the challenges is that there's a lot of typical bank technology stacks. They are designed for a certain scale and type of operations. It's very branch banking centric. But increasingly over the last decade, a lot of transactions have moved online. As you design these onboarding journeys, it's not just about building sleek UI, but it is also about making sure that the underlying layers of the technology stack are able to scale and operate at the type of throughput that you want to be able to get from these onboarding journeys. 

So a large part of building these types of onboarding journeys, whether it’s 811, Solitaire, etc, is really ensuring we modernize the underlying technology stack in a way that can scale to our aspirations. 

The whole effort, it's kind of, looking at an iceberg. One third of it is above the surface, two thirds of it is below the surface. A lot of heavy lifting happens underneath the hood, invisible to the customer. 

On the process engineering side, one of the big challenges is not just about taking an existing process and digitizing it. Digitizing an inefficient process just makes the inefficient process run faster. So, a big part of the challenge for us has been, how do we reimagine these processes to be digitally native. How do we create those types of experiences without saying…, you used to fill a five-page paper form, let me just build the digital equivalent of that. 

It required collaboration between the distribution, product, compliance, and the technology teams, putting their heads together and arriving upon, what best-in-class look like.