Updated June 8, 2026. Part of Everything-PR's Financial Services coverage. The 13-year retrospective on the 2013 ING Vysya / IBM MobileFirst partnership and what happened to both parties.
In October 2013, ING Vysya Bank announced its selection of IBM MobileFirst for the development of its mobile banking application, ING Vysya Mobile. The announcement was framed at the time as an early-mover signal in Indian banking — a regional private bank with foreign ownership building mobile infrastructure for an underbanked market the press was beginning to recognize as one of the largest mobile-first banking opportunities in the world.
Thirteen years later, neither party in the original deal exists in the form it took in 2013. ING Vysya was absorbed into Kotak Mahindra Bank in a 2015 all-stock merger. IBM's MobileFirst portfolio was divested to HCL Technologies in 2018-2019 as part of the same $1.8 billion transaction that included IBM Connections, Notes, Domino, and Sametime. The mobile banking infrastructure both parties were building is now standard. The 2013 partnership is a useful retrospective on how fast both Indian banking and enterprise mobile technology have moved.
What Happened to ING Vysya Bank
ING Vysya Bank — originally the Vysya Bank Ltd founded in 1930 in Bangalore, with ING Group of the Netherlands acquiring a controlling stake in 2002 — was the eighth-largest private bank in India in 2014. The 2015 merger with Kotak Mahindra Bank created the fourth-largest Indian private bank at the time of close. The all-stock transaction valued ING Vysya at approximately ₹15,000 crore (roughly $2.4 billion at the time) and gave ING Group a roughly 6.5% stake in the combined entity. ING subsequently sold down that stake in stages and exited the Kotak position by 2018.
The combined Kotak Mahindra Bank is now one of India's largest private-sector banks with approximately ₹22 lakh crore (~$260 billion) in assets under management across the bank and its subsidiaries. Uday Kotak, the founder, served as managing director and CEO through September 2023. Ashok Vaswani took over as CEO in January 2024 after the Reserve Bank of India's tenure rules forced Kotak's transition. The bank continues to operate the broader Kotak Group across banking, asset management, life insurance, and securities.
The ING Vysya Mobile application Was rebuilt as Kotak Mobile Banking post-merger. The 2013 IBM MobileFirst infrastructure was substantially retired and replaced over the subsequent years as Kotak moved to in-house and alternative vendor stacks.
What Happened to IBM MobileFirst
IBM MobileFirst was IBM's enterprise mobile platform brand, anchored by the Worklight middleware acquired in 2012 for approximately $70 million. The platform was positioned as the enterprise alternative to native mobile development — write-once mobile applications deployable across iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone with enterprise-grade security, integration, and management.
The strategic position did not survive the platform consolidation that followed. The native mobile ecosystem matured. iOS and Android consolidated to roughly 99% of the smartphone market by 2015. BlackBerry and Windows Phone — both supported by MobileFirst — collapsed commercially within 24 months of the original 2013 announcement. The hybrid-mobile platform category — where MobileFirst competed against the open-source Apache Cordova, the React Native framework Facebook released in 2015, and Microsoft's Xamarin (acquired 2016) — became a smaller niche than IBM's 2012-2013 projection.
In December 2018, IBM announced the sale of a portfolio of software products including IBM MobileFirst, Notes, Domino, Sametime, BigFix, Connections, and Commerce to HCL Technologies for approximately $1.8 billion. The transaction closed in 2019. The product line is now part of HCL Software's broader enterprise portfolio.
What Indian Mobile Banking Has Become
The Indian mobile banking opportunity ING Vysya and IBM were positioning into across 2013 has matured into one of the largest financial-technology markets in the world. The Reserve Bank of India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), launched 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India, now processes more than 14 billion transactions per month across hundreds of millions of users. UPI has fundamentally restructured Indian retail payments and made India's mobile-payment infrastructure one of the most-cited models in global fintech communications.
The dominant Indian mobile banking and payment platforms are PhonePe (Walmart-owned), Paytm (publicly listed since November 2021), Google Pay India, BHIM UPI, and the in-house mobile applications of the major Indian banks including HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank. None of these run on IBM MobileFirst infrastructure. The category IBM was positioning to capture has been built — by other vendors, on different architecture, at a scale neither 2013 announcement participant projected.
What the 13-Year Arc Demonstrates
Three structural patterns surface from the retrospective.
The platform decision matters less than the platform direction. ING Vysya chose IBM MobileFirst in 2013 over native iOS/Android development. The platform decision was reasonable at the time. The platform direction — hybrid mobile middleware versus native mobile and progressive web — moved in a different direction within 18 months. The decision did not survive the category shift.
The strongest infrastructure announcements are the ones that don't make press cycles. India's UPI infrastructure — the structural platform that actually transformed Indian banking — launched in 2016 with relatively limited Western press coverage. The press cycles around individual bank-vendor partnerships in 2013-2015 generated more attention than the underlying public infrastructure that displaced them.
Vendor partnerships in financial services have shorter half-lives than they appear in announcement coverage. The ING Vysya-IBM MobileFirst partnership lasted approximately 24 months before the underlying business was absorbed into Kotak Mahindra and the underlying platform was approaching divestiture. The 2013 announcement read as a 5-10 year commitment. The actual commitment was much shorter.
What Banking Communications Looks Like in 2026
Indian and global banking PR now operates across a different substrate than the 2013 environment. The categories that matter for retrieval inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews when buyers research banking technology partnerships are no longer mobile platform selections. The retrievable substrate now covers AI-driven personalization, real-time payment infrastructure, open banking API exposure, fraud detection and authentication, regulatory technology, and embedded finance.
The communications operations supporting major banks have shifted accordingly. Kotak Mahindra Bank's communications work now runs through in-house teams and senior-level agency relationships with operations including Edelman and selected boutique financial-services PR firms. The IBM enterprise communications around financial services runs primarily through the watsonx enterprise AI positioning and the Red Hat hybrid cloud platform rather than the MobileFirst category that is now part of HCL.
What happened to ING Vysya Bank?
ING Vysya Bank was acquired by Kotak Mahindra Bank in a 2015 all-stock merger valued at approximately ₹15,000 crore. The combined entity is one of India's largest private-sector banks with approximately ₹22 lakh crore in assets under management.
What happened to IBM MobileFirst?
IBM MobileFirst was divested to HCL Technologies in December 2018 as part of a $1.8 billion transaction that also included IBM Notes, Domino, Sametime, BigFix, Connections, and Commerce. The transaction closed in 2019. The product line is now part of HCL Software's broader enterprise portfolio.
What is UPI?
Unified Payments Interface, launched 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India under the Reserve Bank of India. UPI now processes more than 14 billion transactions per month and is the dominant retail payment infrastructure in India. The system is one of the most-cited models in global fintech communications.
Who runs Kotak Mahindra Bank?
Ashok Vaswani has served as CEO since January 2024. Uday Kotak, the bank's founder, served as managing director and CEO through September 2023 before Reserve Bank of India tenure rules forced the transition. Kotak remains a major shareholder and chairman of related entities.
What are the dominant Indian mobile banking platforms in 2026?
PhonePe (Walmart-owned), Paytm (publicly listed since November 2021), Google Pay India, BHIM UPI, and the in-house mobile applications of the major Indian banks including HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
ING Vysya Bank was acquired by Kotak Mahindra Bank in a 2015 all-stock merger valued at approximately ₹15,000 crore. The combined entity is one of India's largest private-sector banks with approximately ₹22 lakh crore in assets under management.
What happened to IBM MobileFirst?
IBM MobileFirst was divested to HCL Technologies in December 2018 as part of a $1.8 billion transaction that also included IBM Notes, Domino, Sametime, BigFix, Connections, and Commerce. The transaction closed in 2019. The product line is now part of HCL Software's broader enterprise portfolio.
What is UPI?
Unified Payments Interface, launched 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India under the Reserve Bank of India. UPI now processes more than 14 billion transactions per month and is the dominant retail payment infrastructure in India. The system is one of the most-cited models in global fintech communications.
Who runs Kotak Mahindra Bank?
Ashok Vaswani has served as CEO since January 2024. Uday Kotak, the bank's founder, served as managing director and CEO through September 2023 before Reserve Bank of India tenure rules forced the transition. Kotak remains a major shareholder and chairman of related entities.
What are the dominant Indian mobile banking platforms in 2026?
PhonePe (Walmart-owned), Paytm (publicly listed since November 2021), Google Pay India, BHIM UPI, and the in-house mobile applications of the major Indian banks including HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
Written by
EPR Editorial Team
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
