People’s Bank employee, Priyantha S. Edirisinghe was recently bestowed with the ‘Sri Lanka Digital Maestro 2018’ accolade by Sri Lanka Digital Dialogue.
As Head of IT/CIO of People’s Bank, Priyantha was awarded for being one of the 25 exceptional technology leaders recognised for their game-changing digital transformation initiatives. The award ceremony took place during the ‘Dynamic CIO’s Sri Lanka Digital Dialogue’ program at Hotel Taj Samudra, Colombo.
Priyantha has been a key pillar of People’s Bank’s digital transformation as it strives to achieve its vision of being the most digitalized bank by 2020. Leading a 148-strong IT Team, Priyantha has implemented the bank’s ambitious digitalization vision, which is aligned to the government’s vision for the nation. His leadership has driven People’s Bank to achieve many firsts - the first to launch fully digitized branches in July 2017 and introduce the concept of fully paperless banking services, to become the first state bank to receive the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification for its information security systems.
In view of scale and breadth of network, People’s Bank is equipped with all ATMs, POS terminals EMV compliant to safeguard customer financials and data. In its next stage of growth, it established the country’s first fully equipped IT Centre at York Street, Colombo 2, which houses the industry’s first state of the art Network Operations Centre. Subsequently, People’s Bank was awarded the “Asia Pacific Award” for Best Branch Digitization, Application or Program at the Asian Banker Financial Technology and Innovation Awards 2018 for the entire Asia Pacific.
While leading IT developments, Priyantha has to focus on customer centricity to drive value for customer via IT deployments by collaborating with bank marketing and business development teams to identify customers and segments where IT can create more value relative to competitors. Simultaneously, he has ensured that the IT deployments truly meet customer needs and benefit them.
One of his most innovative implementations was digitally customer on boarding/ account opening via Tablet by a Digital agent, which helped to attract customers to the concept.