Venkat Krishnan, CIO of Karnataka Bank, shares how the 101-year-old institution is driving an exponential digital transformation by modernising its technology stack, improving efficiency, and strengthening governance—while preserving strong customer service. The conversation highlights how technology is being aligned closely with business outcomes to support long-term growth and resilience.
Mubina Kapasi: Hi everyone, I’m Mubina Kapasi and today I have with me Mr. Venkat Krishnan, the CIO of Karnataka Bank, a bank that definitely needs no introduction. But sir, I’d like to understand from you, what exactly have been the digital initiatives that you have taken charge of since you joined the bank?
Venkat Krishnan: So, thank you for having this interview with me and what I’m in charge for is this is a 101-year-old bank which is more than, you know, probably it’s older than even the regulator and the role for the bank is to probably move them from a very traditional banking setup to a digitalized setup and what we are doing there is transformation rather than having an incremental kind of an approach in terms of transforming, we are having an exponential way of doing things.
So, what do you mean by that is, we do have our own legacy but the legacy, how can we overcome that legacy without any kind of an interruption to the bank and how are we going to go about that exercise of leapfrogging the whole journey is the, you know, probably the major challenge for me as a CIO and, you know, the testament for the progress what we made is, you know, last year even for the IBA recognized us for six of the areas where we were working on the, we were awarded with, you know, recognition from IBA themselves like and that proves that, you know, we are doing something right, that means you’re not doing anything wrong so that’s the biggest testament which I can talk about and this is the best ever which Karnataka Bank has ever done and it’s probably 101 years of existence so we are doing that quite well.
Mubina Kapasi: You know, that’s the thing, right? I mean, with the technology and finance things change so rapidly that you have more choice also with to grow exponentially. Now, I want to know that how have you primed Karnataka Bank in such a way that it differentiates itself from other banks digital setup and stack?
Venkat Krishnan: So, what we are doing probably better than the other people is, you know, we are concentrating on or rationalizing our portfolio in terms of, you know, not rationalizing the product or, you know, that what we are doing is optimizing the enterprise architecture to an extent wherein we do not grow the portfolio much because tomorrow the banks are going to be measured based on how efficient they are on even on the how they run their IT per se because, you know, IT is in the banking segment is the most cost, you know, probably it’s a cost center for the organization and how you’re going to optimize that cost is going to be very important and from that sense it is very important that how you’re going to attack that problem of improving the ratios with respect to cost to income ratio, operational efficiency, productivity. Those are the major criteria based on which, you know, they are the drivers for us to ensure that the business drivers are being supported by the technology drivers.
So, that’s how we are going to go about it and at the same time performance per se how we have done. So, the number of transactions you know about the UPI transactions which are increased sevenfold in probably in last three years our transaction decline rates are at 0.07 percent which has been recorded consistently for the last six months which is probably we are still the fourth in the segment but, you know, fourth in 38 banks in India is still a good achievement that’s what I can say and we build a lot of resiliency across our net. We are also optimizing by using both our data center DR and the Nearline site and optimizing it by using all the infrastructure at one go okay which actually makes us more efficient than the other banks because most of the banks run on one production site.
We actually are using all the resources which we have spent so it is like sweating your resources to that extent. You know, I recently read about the partnership that you’ll enter into with IBM which is essentially to transform your API stack.
Mubina Kapasi: Could you tell us a bit about that and what it’s going to all cost you?
Venkat Krishnan: Yeah, so the API, you know, the journey for the API bank you started a API, you know, API was already there in the bank but there were different types of integrations which we had done.
There were, you know, because over a period of time over the last probably a decade, you know, peer-to-peer connections were there. A lot of, you know, technologies which came and which resided in the bank and we had to make it more efficient, transparent to our partners, transparent to the regulator which was a driving factor for us in terms of, you know, building in more security into the whole API banking for safe. So what we have done is incorporating all these three parts of it, you know, making it more secure, more, you know, even the, you know, when the data is in transit, you know, when the we have encrypted that data also and also from an efficiency perspective now I will be able to tell how many transactions I was initiated by a fintech company, how many got successfully done and I will have a real-time monitoring by which, you know, I can say that, you know, how many transactions failed and how am I correcting those things.
So it gives in more transparency to the fintech partner, transparency to the bank and there will be less of what I call it as a fear of the unknown, right? So we are trying to put that kind of a structure by which the overall technology governance process and compliance are attacked by the same API itself.
Mubina Kapasi: What do you think are the day-to-day challenges that you face? It could be, you know, budgetary related because let’s face it, you also have these humongous banks that have these huge budgets. It could be talent pool related as well because getting the right kind of talent that can work efficiently with you. If you could walk us through that.
Venkat Krishnan: So, budget related challenges are like, if I want to call it as, I don’t feel that as a problem because, you know, the board and the bank and, you know, people associated with the technology functions and the senior management are all aligned towards, you know, what needs to be done as from a road mapping perspective. And we’ve been able to, it’s not about, you know, nothing is good to have, right? It’s a must to have.
So we are ensuring that, you know, we do not spend money into or, you know, we are not investing into technologies just to be present in the ecosystem, but we have to do well and it has to make a commercial sense or, you know, either to the customer or to the bank or to the regulator and to ensure that all these three factors are taken care of once an initiative is taken. So without that, we don’t want to start any project and the management and the board has been very supportive in ensuring that, you know, we do not get into issues of not being investing in technology now. So we don’t have that challenge per se, but obviously there is talent because there is a competitiveness is there in the market.
So we have to be always be better than the ecosystem per se. And that is what the CIO will get paid for, right? Finally. And that’s the best part of it.
It’s always a bane for a CIO as well as a credit for the CIO. So it is like that.
Mubina Kapasi: I’d like to understand that when Karnataka talks about its maybe five, ten year vision and vote map, I’m sure as a C-suite executive, it’s shared with you.
If you could share a little bit about what the bank envisages to be and what, of course, your role as a CIO and your department takes care of.
Venkat Krishnan: So Karnataka Bank actually, you know, as when they had this centenary celebration last year, we said that, you know, it’s Bharat Ka Karnataka Bank. So we want to not be termed because it’s nothing to do with the term Karnataka per se, but it is more to do with how are we being present and it does not have a connotation to a state called Karnataka or, you know, a state called Karnataka per se.
But, you know, we want to give that experience to the customer wherever they are. And we’ve been able to serve the customer and being, you know, our best part is we are, you know, though we were having a lot of legacy systems, our customer service scores were very good. You know, an index, anyone who banks with us has got a personal touch.
Even when you go, when they go to the branches, they ensure that, you know, the customer does not become angry. Most of the banks suffer from footfalls in the bank branches. We do not have that problem.
So most of the problems which the other banks have in terms of business problems, we do not have that, which is like customer success, customer happiness, and customer satisfaction. We have a fair degree of, if I want to call it as comfort, that, you know, whatever we are doing, it will just enhance that proposition and take it to the next level from a technology perspective.
Mubina Kapasi: All right. Well, great. Thank you so much, Mr. Krishnan, for your time and all the very best. Thank you.