People’s Bank Sri Lanka: Building a Deep Moat with Early Adoption
People’s Bank of Sri Lanka, a unionised state-owned bank, undertook a comprehensive and multi-pronged digital transformation ahead of its competitors.
Its People’s Wave app enables retail customers to complete their registration through their mobile phones and perform 50 types of transactions – including pawning and money transfers to non-account holders. When the app was launched, it was downloaded 310,000 times in seven months with four times the value of transactions that the bank would get from 250,000 customers.
While its peers have since launched apps, the bank believes that it is one of the few in the market that are truly digital with a digital core, digital applications and digital channels transformation.
"Since we have a digital platform and core banking and it is integrated with social media, we have a lot of data. Our next step is to see how we can use this big data to churn out new opportunities, business intelligence and how we can manipulate this data to give digital market offerings to customers. Customer-specific marketing is the future. "
Ranjith Kodituwakku, Deputy General Manager, People’s Bank
Building a Next-Generation Digital Core is imperative as banks strive to keep up with digitally savvy customers and to reduce tech spend in maintaining legacy core banking platforms.