K Vaman Kamath

Kamath was born on 2 December 1947 in Mangalore, Karnataka State. His family hails from the town of Kundapur in Karnataka, and his father’s name was Vishwanath Kamath. His mother tongue is Konkani and he also speaks Tulu, Kannada, and English fluently. He spent most of his early years in Mangalore and attended a Kannada-medium government school. After matriculation, he completed his PUC (Pre-University), which at that time was only one year in length, at St. Aloysius College. After completing his PUC, he joined the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal (known at that time as Karnataka Regional Engineering College) for a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. After graduating from NIT Surathkal in 1969, he joined the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) for a Post Graduate Diploma in Management.

After graduating from IIM Ahmedabad in 1971, Kamath started his career with ICICI (Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India) in the Project Finance division and moved on to different departments to gather experience, including establishing new business lines such as leasing, venture capital, and credit ratings as well as handling general management responsibilities.

As part of his general management responsibilities, he initiated and implemented ICICI’s computerization program. Substantial investments in technology from those early years have resulted in systems that are today a competitive advantage for ICICI. Kamath has generally been credited with expanding ICICI’s businesses to evolve into a technology-enabled financial organization catering to the financial needs of corporate and retail customers.

In 1988, Kamath joined the Asian Development Bank, Manila in their Private Sector department. His principal work experience at ADB was in various projects in China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. He was the ADB representative on the boards of several companies.

In May 1996, Kamath returned to ICICI as its managing director and chief executive officer. Kamath was instrumental in expanding the Group’s services to retail customers. He initiated a process of a series of acquisitions of non-banking finance companies in 1996–98 and led the way to the formation of ICICI Bank.

On 2 May 2011, he was appointed as Non-Executive Chairman of the second-largest software exporter, Infosys Ltd. (earlier Infosys Technologies Ltd.).

He currently is a Lead independent director at Infosys after having stepped down from chairmanship to make way for N. R. Narayana Murthy. He is designated to be the non-executive chairman of the Infosys Board, effective 11 October 2014. After being appointed as the first chief of the New Development Bank set up by the BRICS, he went on to step down from this post of Chairman and Independent Director effective 5 June 2015.

He is appointed as the Chairman of the newly constituted development finance institution National Bank for Financing Infrastructure and Development (NaBFID)