Consolidating its position as a digital financial services provider, People’s Bank set the benchmark for digital financial services in Sri Lanka at the recently concluded National IT Conference 2018 (NITC 2018).
Organized by the Computer Society of Sri Lanka (CSSL), NITC 2018 was held for the 36th time on October 2-4, at the Shangri-La Hotel, Colombo, with the participation of the crème de la crème of the country’s ICT sector. One of the largest ICT events to be held in the country, NITC 2018was inaugurated byPresident Maithripala Sirisena, with over 500 IT professionals from diverse fields of specialization attending the event.
NITC is a premier platform for knowledge sharing among ICT professionals in Sri Lanka, and acts as a channel to transfer international and new knowledge into the country.
The event, which also had, Minister of Telecommunication, Digital Infrastructure and Foreign Employment, Harin Fernando as the guest of honor, enables discussion and sharing of ICT experiences and challenges, which contributes towards enrichment of the national ICT knowledge base.
Addressing the august gathering at this premier ICT event, the Head of IT at People’s Bank, Priyantha S. Edirisinghe gave a very enlightening keynote speech, sharing the Bank’s journey of transformation from a traditional state bank, into a modern, digitally enabled financial services provider that has lifted thousands of rural consumers onto digital platforms.
Edirisinghe, who spearheaded this national scale transition, made it clear that People’s Bank has continued to remain true to its core values and its core customer base of rural consumers, throughout this process of modernization.
“If you talk about our values, our values are interwoven into our rurals. That’s our DNA. If you think about our base, 74% of the market is rural. So what People’s Bank serves, is the rural. That’s where our strength is, and that’s where we have tried to reduce our digital divide,” said Edirisinghe.
Edirisinghe noted that customer responses on a daily basis clearly shows the rapid pace of technology adoption by Sri Lankan consumers, with ongoing channel migration from traditional bank tellers to digital units, including ATMs, CDMs and KIOSKs.
He noted that for the last 6 months the number of self banking transactions have increased by 68%,with counter transactions amounting to the value of Rs 207 bn, in the last 9 months. Cash deposits via the Bank’s CDM units have increased by 67%, amounting to Rs 145 bn.
Edirisinghe noted that this move to dig deeper into the Bank’s own human resource pool has contributed towards greater employee empowerment, while enhancing the Bank’s value creation capabilities.
Looking to the future of Sri Lanka’s techno revolution, he called for greater emphasis on business analysis skills, which the country is still lacking. He noted that subjects such as data mining, should be introduced to industries to make use of the massive volumes of data collected through digital systems, to continually improve and innovate digital products and services.
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