HDFC Bank FY26 annual report: Former, part-time chairman Chakraborty’s exit recorded as a ‘challenging event’

HDFC Bank, in its latest FY26 annual report recorded details of the sudden exit of former, part-time chairman Atanu Chakraborty, which took place towards the end of the financial year, on March 18. The bank’s managing director and CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan, in his message to stakeholders called his exit a “challenging event”.

“Towards the end of the financial year 2025-26, the Bank faced a challenging event with the resignation of Mr. Atanu Chakraborty, Part-time Chairman and Independent Director of the Bank, on March 18, 2026. The Bank moved quickly and appointed Mr. Keki Mistry as interim Part-time Chairman and Non-Independent Director of the Bank, effective March 19, 2026, with approval from RBI,” Jagdishan noted.

Since then, the bank appointed external law firms to conduct a review, which concluded in June. The legal review, carried out by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Wadia Ghandy, stated that “contemporaneous evidence reviewed was inconsistent” with former part-time chairman Atanu Chakraborty’s statements—that “happenings and practices” were not in congruence with his “personal values and ethics”—as mentioned in his March 18 resignation letter to the bank’s board.

With the current part-time chairman Keki Mistry set to step down from his post on September 18, HDFC Bank has announced the appointment of former finance secretary and chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar as the part-time, non-executive chairman on June 29. His appointment as the part-time chairman for three years, is awaited for clearance and approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

For FY26, the bank reported a consolidated net profit of ₹76,025.97 crore, up 7.4% from ₹70,792.25 crore in the previous financial year.

Chakraborty was paid ₹59 lakh as sitting fees and ₹48.25 lakh as remuneration, till the cessation of his role as part-time chairman.

In the annual report, HDFC Bank noted that artificial intelligence (AI) is being leveraged to simplify and reengineer operations, significantly reducing manual effort while improving speed and accuracy. “Generative AI is used to extract key fields from customer documents, seamlessly rendering data into trade system,” the bank said in the report.

“Advanced analytics and AI now enables the pre-approved loan limits to surface across net-banking, mobile banking and WhatsApp banking— reducing eligibility search effort by approximately 50% and accelerating loan processing,” it noted.

“We see AI not as a standalone capability, but as an embedded capability that will increasingly influence how banking services evolve. This calls for a focus on building systems that can adapt, learn and improve over time, supported by a unified, in-house foundation, ‘Neev’, that enables consistency, scale and the disciplined rollout of capabilities across the Bank through structured programmes,” the annual report said.

In FY27 financial year, HDFC Bank, in an exchange filing on July 4, said its average advances under management stood at ₹30.39 lakh crore during the June 2026 quarter, registering a 10.8% year-on-year (YoY) increase from ₹27.42 lakh crore in the corresponding quarter last year.

HDFC Bank is scheduled to announce its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, on July 18. By then, the board-level Governance, Nomination and Remuneration Committee (GNRC) is expected to decide on the renewing the name of Jagdishan as the MD and CEO of the bank, for the third term. Jagdishan’s second term ends on October 26, 2026.