Sri Lanka

The chief executives of People’s Bank and Bank of Ceylon have both been ousted as part of the government’s new hard line on state-owned banks it considers are not doing enough to help the struggling economy.

In Sri Lanka, corporate social responsibility has played an important role for years, as the country has struggled with poverty, decades of civil war and, more recently, a home-grown terror attack. But Commercial Bank of Ceylon’s CSR initiatives make it stand out from the crowd.

Small and medium-sized enterprises make up an important part of the Sri Lankan economy, representing more than 75% of the total number of enterprises. To reach these companies, particularly the newest up-and-coming businesses, it’s necessary to venture outside Colombo and find plucky entrepreneurs in the furthest reaches of the country.

The digital banking landscape in Sri Lanka has become increasingly competitive. Each year Asiamoney finds more banks eager to talk about their advances in digital offerings to their clients, as well as their implementation of new technologies in-house.

For a relatively small country, Sri Lanka has a large number of banks. Domestic banks have reached most parts of the country’s population, seizing market share that once belonged to internationals. But HSBC has refused to be muscled out.

NDB Investment Bank, led by chief executive Darshan Perera, is rather brazenly described by its staff as the Goldman Sachs of Sri Lanka. It raised SLRs62 billion ($340 million) for its clients in 2019, and increased its fee income by 69% over the previous year.

Sri Lanka’s banks have had a tough year: the Easter Sunday bomb attacks in April 2019, which killed more than 250 people, disrupted daily life, hit tourism and hurt economic growth overall, while a presidential election later in the year put a further brake on activity. So it is all the more impressive that a number of contenders for this award kept their businesses growing. Of those, NDB Bank stood out as the best domestic bank in the country.

Rare is the Sri Lankan lender that fails to take corporate social responsibility seriously. It often feels like CSR is hard-wired into the industry, although perhaps that should not come as a surprise.