CIFL achieves ISO 9001: 2008 certification

Wednesday, 20 July 2011 00:58 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Central Investments and Finance Ltd. (CIFL), one of the leading financial institutions in Sri Lanka, has achieved prestigious ISO 9001: 2008 certification from world renowned certification agency TUV (SUD) Germany recently.

CEO Jayanth Wickremeratne said: “When we first start discussing the implementation of ISO 9001 standard at our company, our main concern was whether we could get any benefit by implementing these standards because we had seen many companies which had implemented many standards but never delivered or exceeded customer expectations.

Therefore I had my second thoughts about going for this standardisation.”

However, the company decided to undertake a thorough evaluation of ISO and service providers and finally decided to opt for the implementation. The CEO personally instructed the senior management to get involved in the implementation work to obtain the maximum benefit and let the certification be a by-product.

“We wanted to do is this way to give the benefit to our customers, since we always strive to delight them with the financial products and services we provide. We can only do this by streamlining our operations, getting rid of bottle necks, standardising systems, training our staff and most importantly, through excellent customer care. I believe ISO 9001 standards had provided us that tool and we had make use of it in order to meet our objectives,” the CEO added.

According to Wickremeratne, the certification has given the company and its customers the expected benefit: “All of us at CIFL should make it a point to maintain and keep on improving on what we did and this in turn will help us to maintain the standards without much of an effort.”

The company is now focusing on sustainable development given its upcoming IPO and growth in its markets. The ISO standards have provided the foundation for such growth and CIFL is commited to ensuring that the company will maintain and continually improve the systems and standards developed, while continually focusing on a customer-driven culture throughout the company.

“We take this opportunity to thank all our staff for their great effort in achieving this status and also our consultants, Nexus Business Solutions, which had guided us in implementing the standards effectively, not forgetting our auditors who gave us a very good value addition during their auditing. We will make sure that we keep on upgrading and uplifting our standards and delighting our customers all the time.”