ComBank adjudged ‘Most Innovative Business Partner in Sri Lanka’ by Mastercard

Commercial Bank Chief Operating Officer Sanath Manatunge receives the award from Mastercard Country Manager Sri Lanka & Maldives R. B. Santosh Kumar, in the presence of (from left) Mastercard Senior Specialist Account Management Sheranga Perera, Commercial Bank Deputy General Manager (Marketing) Hasrath Munasinghe, and Card Centre Head Thusitha Suraweera

The Commercial Bank of Ceylon has been adjudged the ‘Most Innovative Business Partner in Sri Lanka’ for 2017 by Mastercard International, a leading global payments and technology company. 

The Bank was recently presented this highly competed for accolade for its innovative ideas around new segments, partnerships, and technology, and its level of engagement with its customer base. 

With this award, Mastercard International also recognised Commercial Bank’s receptiveness to ideas about the future of the payments landscape of Sri Lanka.

The Bank issued the Mastercard Chip and PIN card for the first time in Sri Lanka in 2017. The card supports offline PIN verification at Point-of-Sale terminals, and is considered an ideal product for the Sri Lankan market, as most of the POS terminals in the country do not support online PIN. The card addresses security concerns of signature verification, ensures improved security to the transaction, and ease of use for customers. 

Commercial Bank has also enabled MasterCard Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) acquiring for its POS machines, to ensure that customers are not exposed to currency rate fluctuations till the settlement of transactions is performed.

The Bank’s efforts to launch a series of co-branded Mastercard affinity cards, and its success in launching the most number of innovative payments products in the banking industry, were also taken into consideration for the award.  

Commercial Bank has launched six affinity cards in partnership with Mastercard over the past two years. These included Credit Cards for the past pupil associations of Maris Stella College Negombo, St. Anthony’s College Kandy, Dharmaraja College Kandy and Dharmasoka College Ambalangoda. The Bank also issued a co-branded hybrid Debit Card for the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Sri Lanka (FCCISL), a co-branded Credit Cards for the members of the Nuwara Eliya Golf Club (NEGC), a ComBank Mobitel Data+ Credit Card for Mobitel customers, and the ComBank SLIC card for Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation policyholders. The ‘Ransalu’ Debit Card, specially designed to support the country’s apparel industry, is another ComBank product involving Mastercard.

The only Sri Lankan Bank to be ranked among the world’s top 1000 banks for eight years consecutively, Commercial Bank operates a network of 263 branches and 782 ATMs in Sri Lanka. The Bank has won more than 30 international and local awards in 2016 and 2017, and 20 international awards in the first eight months of 2018.

Commercial Bank’s overseas operations encompass Bangladesh, where the Bank operates 19 outlets; Myanmar, where it has a Representative Office in Yangon and a Microfinance company in Nay PyiTaw; the Maldives, where the Bank has a fully-fledged Tier I Bank with a majority stake; and Italy, where the Bank operates its own money transfer service.