Kotak Mahindra Bank hires GT Bharat as external auditor to review IT system

Kotak Mahindra Bank (KMB) has appointed professional services firm GT Bharat as external auditor to check the corrective actions by the lender to address serious deficiencies in its IT system. The private sector lender has also beefed up internal teams to fix issues and tone up the working of the systems.

On April 24, 2024, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had asked the lender to stop immediately onboarding new customers through its online and mobile banking channels and issuing fresh credit cards. These actions followed significant concerns arising out of the Reserve Bank’s IT examination for the years 2022 and 2023 and the continued failure to address concerns in a comprehensive and timely manner.

Ashok Vaswani, managing director and chief executive, KMB, in a post-result virtual media interaction today, said RBI’s order relating to the bank's technology platform had an impact in three aspects - temporary disruption where the bank would go from digital journeys to physically assisted journeys, on work in the 811 business, and credit card business.

From a technology perspective, the bank has made significant progress during the quarter. In consultation with the RBI, the bank has put together a comprehensive plan to fix all the standing issues. “We have beefed up the internal team with resources from Accenture, Infosys, Oracle and CISCO and focus on relentless execution,” he said.

“We have also appointed GT Bharat as external auditor with the approval of the RBI. They have already commenced their work. The bank is in constant touch with regulators and keeps them updated on all developments,” he added.

The RBI has maintained that restrictions, which are in force, will be reviewed on completion of a comprehensive external audit and remediation of deficiencies flagged in the external audit and inspections to the satisfaction of the Reserve Bank.

The bank has also recently announced a reorganisation of the distribution channel where it wants to bring together all the ways in which the customer interacts with us, so that the bank is able to provide customers with an omni-channel resilient seamless kind of interaction, Vaswani said.

(Disclosure: Entities controlled by the Kotak family have a significant holding in Business Standard Pvt )