Banking & NBFCs · Daily brief
Private bank CEO pay packages are pulling further ahead of public sector counterparts, with equity grants widening the gap beyond cash salary alone.
Kotak Mahindra Bank CEO Ashok Vaswani received total cash remuneration of ₹17.23 crore in FY26. Including the market value of stock options granted during the year, his total effective compensation package reached approximately ₹30.88 crore.
Other private bank leaders reported similarly large packages. HDFC Bank's Sashidhar Jagdishan took home ₹15.13 crore, while Axis Bank's Amitabh Chaudhry earned above ₹10 crore.
By contrast, the Chairman of State Bank of India — which runs over ₹60 lakh crore in assets across 22,000 branches — draws an annual salary capped in lakhs, governed by government pay scales.
The structural gap comes down to compensation design. Private banks use performance-linked cash bonuses combined with large ESOP grants to attract executive talent, while public sector banks rely on legacy pay structures and institutional prestige.
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