We distributed some of our family accts to Kotak bank a couple of years back. The only criteria for us is No.1 free unhindered multicity cheque usage No. 2 is 2-way sweep on excess balances . Of course all the other networked banks also offer these sweep-out & linking for sweep-in in some form or the other (including any ATM usage which is not so relevant now a days with RBI proposals). But Kotak is equipped with technologically far superior platform from customer oriented feature point of view marginally exceeding ICICI bank technological customer end features, where only manual sweep-out is available now. The experience is totally mixed for us though we are supposed to be Priority bla bla. Many of the guys do not know the sophisticated & precise product features and misguide even informed customers, who many times will not speak out anything but they will always weigh & keep such experiences back of their mind. And the grievance redressal procedures at Kotak are extremely poor even at Nodal officer level and the real technical problems never see light of the day as you cannot afford to waste your valuable time in repeat follow-ups. Processes at branches are also too bureaucratic and passing the buck is rampant among the channels.
One should go for this bank only if the above features are not available from their other banking relationships and most importantly if your banking channel usage is for simple regular transactions, as our experiences indicate that the bank fails in meeting the expectations of techno savvy customers with sizeable surpluses at their disposal and txns involve huge money inflow/outflow.
But the branch network penetration is very low, spread mostly in west & northern part of the country (esp Punjab & gujarat) and very scantly in Southern and Eastern parts and even in different areas within bigger cities. If the right attitude and focused resolution of customer issues evolve, the bank has all the right ingredients for a good pan India presence.