It started as a small finance venture in the 1980s. Decades later it is Kotak Mahindra Bank, among India's leading private lenders — and one of the very few banks of national scale anywhere that a single founder actually built rather than inherited or bought.
Uday Kotak's reputation is for saying no. Conservative risk management, disciplined growth, asset quality ahead of expansion. It looked unambitious during every boom and then looked extremely clever during every credit cycle that took out the lenders who had been braver.
In banking, survival is the strategy. Kotak's obsession with risk is why he was still standing after every cycle.
From lending the group spread into banking, broking, asset management and insurance, until its results were read as a proxy for Indian financial services generally. Along the way it made him one of the country's wealthiest self-made bankers.
Then regulation tightened around how much of a bank a promoter may own, and he stepped back from running it day to day. The test now is the one every personality-led institution eventually faces: does the caution survive without the person whose instinct it was?