Jeevan receives GAFM ‘Master Fintech Professional’ certification

Jeevan Gnanam receives the ‘Master Fintech Professional’ certification from Fintech Association of Sri Lanka Senior Adviser Tissa Jayaweera and FASL President Rajkumar Kanagasingam 

Jeevan Gnanam, initiator of the HatchX: Sri Lanka’s pioneer fintech accelerator, was recently awarded the Global Academy of Finance and Management (GAFM) certification ‘Master Fintech Professional’ for his contributions towards the fintech sector at the Digital Finance Forum held recently at the Hilton Colombo.  

HatchX, the country’s first-ever fintech accelerator program having launched amidst the pandemic last year by Hatch in partnership with Lankan Angel Network (LAN), and funded by the Ford Foundation, enables local fintech startups to reach out fintech ecosystems in Sri Lanka and rest of Asia. 

Gnanam is the fifth person to receive the certification after Professor Douglas W. Arner, the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law at the University of Hong Kong, who led the development of the world’s largest massive open online course (MOOC): Introduction to FinTech, launched on edX in May 2018, now with approximately 100,000 learners spanning every country in the world; Mirna Sleiman, Founder and CEO of Fintech Galaxy, the MENA region’s only digital crowdsourcing platform that empowers fintech entrepreneurs and connects them with financial institutions, consultants, tech companies, mentors and investors both regionally and globally; Do Van Long, CEO of Vietnam Blockchain Corporation and Regional Chief Strategy Officer at Infinity Blockchain Labs, which focus on expanding blockchain knowledge across Vietnam, in an effort to make Vietnam a Fintech hub; and Takeshi Kito, Board Member of Fintech Association of Japan (FAJ) and Advisory Committee Member for the Government of Japan’s Regulatory Sandbox.  

Gnanam is an adviser to the Fintech Association of Sri Lanka (FASL), the Chief Executive of St. Anthony’s Industries Group and founder of a number of Fintech related ventures. He transformed the failed e-commerce venture into an IT-services company called ‘SAKS Global’ which employs 230 people. He recognised the lack of infrastructure in Sri Lanka for IT companies and founded the ‘Orion City’. He co-founded the ‘Lankan Angel Network’ and the crowd funding platform, ‘Crowd Island’. 

When he was the Chairman of SLASSCOM, Sri Lanka’s apex IT industry business chamber, he co-founded Hatch, a collaborative and innovative work space for start-ups in Colombo Fort. He also founded a $ 3-5 million fund called MESH to help start-ups. He founded ‘Veracity AI’, an AI company and ‘Digital Realty’, Sri Lanka’s first high-density data centre.  

The Digital Finance Forum was organised by Asian FinTech Academy (AFTA) in collaboration with Colorado, USA-based International Board of Standards (IBS), a certifying body which operates in over 40 nations worldwide, and owns the certifications and trademarks conferred by the Global Academy of Finance and Management (GAFM). The IBS is a charter member signatory to the Washington, D.C. based Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and has agreement with the Kansas, USA based Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP) since 2004.