📈 Sri Lanka’s Digital Banking: Beyond the Marketing Hype

A critical review by former Central Bank officials and tech activists highlights a widening gap between "digital marketing" and actual service delivery in Sri Lanka’s financial sector. Despite government-led ICT/BPM pushes, the banking experience remains heavily tethered to manual, paper-based workflows. • The "Dead Aristotle" Gap Most local bank websites and portals are classified as "Web 1.0"—static, one-way communication tools that provide information but lack interactive functionality. This "dead" communication hinders real-time customer support and engagement. • Digitisation vs. Digitalisation Digitisation: Conversion of paper to digital (e.g., scanning a PDF). Digitalisation: Using digital data to improve decision-making. Current State: Banks often force existing customers to fill manual forms for new services, ignoring the digital data already in their servers. • Key Sector Challenges Regulatory Barriers: Service providers frequently cite Central Bank regulations as a shield to maintain archaic, paper-reliant processes. Open Banking Lag: While global peers (UK, India, Singapore) use APIs for seamless data sharing, Sri Lanka’s adoption remains in "unexplored territory." Brain Drain: Failure to adopt local innovations, such as unified API platforms for loan/deposit comparisons, has led to young tech talent migrating to more innovation-friendly nations. • Economic Outlook True digital transformation could reduce national resource waste in redundant advertising and lower "search costs" for customers. Moving toward Web 3.0 (multi-way real-time chat/AI) is deemed essential for the apparel & textiles and SME sectors to access efficient credit and trade facilities.