At a time when Sri Lanka faces unprecedented economic challenges, ‘going digital’ has become more important than ever. Digital transformation is even more crucial for banks now, with the significance of digitalizing the banking sector being accelerated due to the global pandemic, and more customers transferring to online platforms. Challenges such as the shortage and high cost of printing material has also driven banks to further digitize their services.
Given this backdrop, Sri Lanka’s largely cash based economy poses a challenge for banks and financial services to expedite transition towards a more digitally driven ecosystem. Taking this challenge head-on, Seylan Bank has positioned itself to draw in customers who are not yet integrated into digital spaces, designing its digital offerings to tap into this potential consumer base.
Delivering value through digital transformation
According to Chaminda Senewiratne, Head of Digital Banking at Seylan Bank, embracing its ethos of focusing on the customer first and offering an unmatched customer experience, Seylan’s digital transformation in all areas of its business offerings has fundamentally impacted how it delivers value to its customers today.
Enhancing customer experience and consistently improving customer satisfaction being the leading influences in driving digital transformation measures, Seylan has focused on its digital technology to adapt to the changing business environment, resulting in introducing financial services that integrate its business and digital strategies.
Identifying the heightened consumer demand for more efficient ways to access banking and financial services, Seylan Bank has been at the forefront of digitization in all areas, including front- and back-end of the banking process, ensuring that legacy systems are converted into digital friendly platforms for customers to enjoy a smooth digital customer experience.
Convenience and accessibility
As a key priority in the process of continuous digital transformation, Seylan Bank has focused on increasing convenience and accessibility of mobile and internet banking services including a revamped website that now allows overseas customers as well as locals to open new accounts online.
Accordingly, Seylan has upgraded its mobile banking service to meet the challenges of the new digital-heavy era significantly, by allowing online onboarding of new customers to this platform. Customers can now access their Seylan facilities with increased convenience, especially with seamless log-in facilities through biometrics or PINs to carry out their transactions.
The Mobile Banking App is in-built with a convenient user interface that can provide an enhanced customer experience. It includes biometric authentication for login through fingerprint and face identification, providing more secure and efficient access to the customer’s portfolio. The latest version also allows users to open Current and Savings accounts and Fixed Deposits online, making the process much more convenient. In addition, the in-built map can be used to easily locate Seylan Bank branches, ATMs, CDM and CDK points.
Having fine-tuned its digital services, digitized bank statements in the form of e-statements have also been made available, allowing customers to access bank statements securely and conveniently.
Additionally, Seylan’s QR code-based service integration allows customers to make payments simply by scanning a QR code. Through SeylanPay – the bank’s QR code-based payment solution, which will be relaunched in the 1st quarter of this year – the bank aims to enable a greater range of payment modes for customers.
Seylan Bank’s open API suite of services focus on empowering Seylan customers and merchants to do their business conveniently and securely. With open API banking, third parties can securely connect to the bank network to carry out transactions.
Relevant infrastructure and services
To ensure that customers are not blindsided by the banking industry’s massive digital transformation where online deposits, mobile apps, and e-bill payments are becoming the norm, Seylan Bank’s new digital upgrades are aimed at increasingly allowing third-party providers and fintechs to leverage the bank’s infrastructure and services, thereby providing increasingly simplified, customer friendly solutions.
Seylan Bank’s investments in technology infrastructure upgrades permit speedier processing of transactions to suit the fast-moving world of today, and the Seylan Merchant Portal forms a key component of this digital transformation. As a fully-fledged digital payment platform, Seylan Merchant Portal is part of Seylan’s measures to upgrade its overall e-commerce offerings and ease the bottlenecks faced by individual customers and merchants.
Through the portal, Seylan facilitates the integration of smaller merchants or individual customers into the payment gateway, providing customers of any bank, the benefit of a unified local platform to clear their transactions with merchants, while offering them the security of a platform that is backed by a reputed domestic bank.
Further enhancing the bank ecosystem, Seylan merchants or customers are also able to collect or settle funds using the bank’s digital channels by depositing school, insurance, utility, telephone, or mobile bills through internet, mobile banking or any other payment channel.
With the vision of offering customers cutting-edge products and innovative services, Seylan, the bank with a heart, has enabled customers to truly embrace digital banking with convenience in their daily lives, along with security, simplicity, and speed.