People’s Bank creates history with launch of fully-fledged Digital Centre

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe whose vision is to enable the country with digital commerce recently inaugurated the country’s first ‘Digital Centre’ at the historic People’s Bank building at York Street, Colombo 1.

People’s Bank which is State owned with the opening of the fully-fledged Digital Centre achieves a unique milestone in its digitalisation drive and creates history in the country’s banking industry. This is a state-of-the-art banking centre on par with international standards and People’s Bank requests the public to visit and experience this revolution. 

The bank proudly launched a ‘Digital Platform’ simultaneously to allow customers to experience how its digitalisation initiatives will streamline and simplify their financial affairs by offering speed and convenience. 

The Digital Platform provides a new customer experience for account opening, transforming a traditional forms-based process into a digital, paperless process with bank staff guiding customers’ choice of product and services through electronic devices provided by the bank. 

Initially, the Bank staff will be at hand to assist customers to navigate Digital Banking until they feel comfortable to conduct transactions without assistance. The launch of this Digital Centre marks a quantum leap for the bank in its dynamic leadership to become the most digitalised bank, to unlock the benefits of digitalisation for its customers.  

The services launched through the Digital Platform use the capabilities of a tablet to enable the bank’s customers to browse the bank’s products and services and then select the required products. The tablet is then used to capture the necessary data, including use of the tablet camera to capture document images and digital signatures.

In this way, the process is paperless, the bank staff can be on the move with the customer and the customer experience is greatly enhanced by shortening the time it takes to open an account because there is no form-filling and approvals are in real-time on mobile devices.

Behind the customer experience lies a comprehensive new set of digital processes.  Each is designed as one e2e (end-to-end) real-time, straight-through process to enable timely fulfilment of customer needs.  Rules and work-flow technology ensure that accounts are opened according to centralised bank policy with no or minimum manual intervention according to the bank’s rules.

These new digital processes cut across the typical bank silo organisational responsibilities which traditionally use manual processes and cause lengthy turn-around times that frustrate customers.  As an example, a customer can open an account and apply for a debit card, personal and business loans and register for digital services at the same time in a single straight through digital process e2e.

The technology behind the digital banking platform is Silverlake’s FINTECH banking platform – a unified software that provides a new customer experience on any channel or device and a comprehensive set of re-engineered, paperless fulfilment service for commercial banking products and services.  The Bank expects to roll our more fully digitalised branches over the coming months, thus fulfilling its sustainability pledge to reduce its carbon footprint and benefitting the environment by promoting paperless banking. 

The bank’s ambitious digitalisation drive will empower it to deliver a seamless digital experience to customers and elevate Sri Lanka’s banking and financial services to an international digital fulfilment standard via its deployed digital platform within the shortest period of time.

Sharing his thoughts at the momentous occasion, People’s Bank Chairman Hemasiri Fernando commented: “People’s Bank has been an integral pillar in the nation’s development by understanding and responding to customer needs and industry trends. As the bank with one of the largest customer bases in Sri Lanka’s banking industry, People’s Bank has demonstrated its leadership status by initiating digitalisation in alignment with the latest consumer and market trends. We expect our digitalisation drive to bring untold benefits to all stakeholders across our wide customer base – ranging from the rural farmer to the country’s leading corporates. We expect our digitalisation journey to position the bank and its customers for exponential growth. As the premier State bank, People’s Bank believes that a digitalised state bank will drive rich dividends for the economy going ahead.”

Silverlake Digital Economy is a leader in providing digital processes and application software to facilitate the digital transformation of banks.  The People’s Bank digital launch is yet another one of its digital services using the Silverlake FINTECH banking platform.  This launch is another milestone in the continuing success of Silverlake’s flag-ship digital transformation business.  

Silverlake Digital Economy is a fintech company established in 2011 to transform traditional banks into Digital Banks. Their innovative platform challenges current, expensive practices of buying multiple silo applications for different channels and products. Silverlake Digital Economy offers one platform that delivers a dull range of end-end commercial banking services consistently to different segments of customers across all physical and digital channels. Furthermore this Digital Banking Platform Can also deliver both digital operating models and support modular, open software components to enable a bank to transform its customer offerings, customer experience and internal performance and so better fulfil its brand promise to customers.

Just In Time Group is the total systems integrator for the project and local partner and was responsible for integrating the technology, delivered and installed the complex infrastructure in accordance with industry standards and further contributed by project managing multiple stakeholders, to successfully deliver this project – yet another milestone in its journey of creating value differentiation in the market place and maintaining its unique identity.

JIT, a wholly Sri Lankan company, recently surpassed its two-decade milestone in the ICT landscape of Sri Lanka, as a leading ICT systems and solutions integrator to the country. This two-decade success with its longstanding customers, strategic principals and committed employees have been the catalyst for JIT’s success and bringing many landmark projects with cutting-edge technology to the country and making Sri Lanka’s mark in the global ICT map. 

JIT’s key strengths are focused on systems integration, software solutions, network and infrastructure, hardware, mobility, outsourcing IT professionals, professional services, information security services, maintenance and support services, etc.