India’s banking sector turned into a corporate game of musical chairs this week, with Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis Bank, Bandhan Bank and LIC all confirming top level departures within days of one another.
The most consequential shuffle is unfolding in HDFC’s corner office. Axis Bank’s long serving Chief Financial Officer Puneet Sharma, who spent more than six years steering the lender’s finances through its Citibank integration and a significant balance sheet expansion, tendered his resignation on 28 June. By the following evening, HDFC Bank had confirmed his next move, naming Sharma as CFO designate from 1 September, with full charge from 1 December, succeeding incumbent Srinivasan Vaidyanathan.
That left Axis with a vacancy to fill, and Bandhan Bank obligingly supplied an answer. Within hours of Sharma’s resignation becoming public, Bandhan announced that its own CFO, Rajeev Mantri, a veteran of Citi India and TransUnion CIBIL, had also resigned, citing a career growth perspective. Industry watchers were quick to connect the dots. Mantri is widely tipped to step into Sharma’s vacated seat at Axis once his notice period ends in September.
HDFC Bank’s reshuffle did not stop at the CFO’s desk. In a separate filing, the bank named Rajiv Kumar, a former Finance Secretary and ex Chief Election Commissioner credited with engineering the consolidation of India’s public sector banks, as an Additional Independent Director with effect from 30 June. The appointment is widely read as a precursor to Kumar formally taking over as part time Chairman, a role left unsettled since Atanu Chakraborty’s abrupt exit earlier this year over what he called matters of principle and compliance issues, and briefly steadied by interim chairman Keki Mistry.
Kotak Mahindra Bank delivered its own jolt over the weekend, when Managing Director and CEO Ashok Vaswani announced he would not seek reappointment once his term concludes on 31 December. It marks the bank’s second CEO transition in under three years, since Uday Kotak’s exit in 2023, and has already triggered a board led succession hunt, with whole time directors Paritosh Kashyap and Anup Saha understood to be in contention. The news sent Kotak’s shares tumbling more than three per cent on Monday.
State run LIC added a fourth thread to the week’s churn. The insurer’s CFO, Sunil Agrawal, who joined in 2022 from Reliance Nippon Life, resigned on 24 June to pursue better prospects, with his exit effective from 14 July.
Taken together, the exits paint a picture of an industry recalibrating at speed, whether through succession planning, governance repair, or plain talent poaching between rivals. For an investor base already weighing rate cycles and credit growth, the question now is less about who is leaving, and more about who lands where next, and what each new face signals about the institution’s direction. The merry go round, it seems, is far from done spinning.
