Seylan Bank Leads with Responsible Banking and Digital Innovation

Customer Convenience and Safety as Core Priorities

Seylan Bank, the Bank with a Heart, has customer centricity at the core of its operations. Named “Number One in Customer Service Excellence” for the third consecutive year, the Bank has earned its stripes by monitoring trends, anticipating customer needs and innovating for the future. Even as the pandemic swept the world, resulting in limited mobility and enforced social distancing making conventional banking inconvenient, Seylan Bank was ahead of the times with a host of digital, internet, and mobile banking platforms. The Bank was fully geared to meet the homebound customer’s unique needs, enforcing the concept of ‘Responsible Banking’.

Responsible Banking

From the very outset of the pandemic, when lockdowns became crucial to arrest the spread of the then little understood virus, Seylan Bank stood tall as an advocate for ‘Responsible Banking’. One of the first corporate entities in Sri Lanka to move its Annual General Meeting to a fully virtual platform in June 2020, the Bank signaled its commitment to using technology to ensure business as usual, whilst maintaining strict health measures for pandemic control.

Upgrading services to allow customers to access their bank remotely became a matter of immediate priority so as to include a host of services such as online onboarding, and remote verification, which made making those online fund transfers and online utility bill payments a breeze. Seylan Bank strengthened its online banking facility to ensure customer convenience was not compromised even as responsible banking was encouraged in the new normal. Furthermore, revamping www. seylan. lk to encourage remote onboarding of customers new to the bank, further confirms Seylan Bank’s pledge to continue to fast-track its digital innovation efforts with uninterrupted banking and financial services to support the national efforts currently in place to create a digital economy.

Enabling Customer Convenience and Safety

Globally, the shift towards a more ‘digital’ banking system accelerated in the past two years with great speed, courtesy of the Coronavirus. Locally, Seylan Bank responded to this, by setting out a wide array of digital banking options facilitating a safer and convenient method for customers to carry out financial transactions remotely.

Seylan Bank offers a range of digital banking platforms including Internet Banking, Mobile Banking, Internet Payment Gateways, Merchant Portal Services, Pay Roll Services, nonphysical and paperless transaction, ATM and Kiosk channels. Furthermore, the bank enhanced its E-Statements, and SMS Alerts to ensure safety and convenience for its customer. The services are intended to ensure utmost convenience to all Seylan customers, corporate and retail, and enables them to carry out responsible banking, safeguarding themselves and others.

Internet and Mobile Banking

With an all-new, feature-packed, and personalised online banking experience, Seylan Inter net Banking offers customers easy access to manage their finances online from any web- enabled device with internet access.

Further, those who wish to carry out their financial transactions on their mobile are treated to a streamlined and simplified user experience through the Seylan Mobile Banking app. The application offers extensive features enabling customers to carry out financial transactions ranging from fund transfers to utility bill payments, checking account balances, and many more, right at their fingertips on any Android or iOS mobile device.

E-commerce & SMEs

Seylan Bank has seen a marked increase recently in consumers shifting to e- commerce, initially prompted by need and continued due to convenience, and a preference to use less cash and more online payments. Meanwhile, many traditional Small and Medium Sized Enterprises have had to make the switch from physical to online to keep businesses alive, and are in need of both support and guidance.

The Seylan Internet Payment Gateway (IPG) service benefits all customers and Seylan merchants with a range of features that deliver a streamlined user experience, eliminating the need for cash payments. This allows e-business merchants, online retailers, and other enterprises to accept consumer payments through the gateway.

Alongside the IPG service, Seylan Bank offers the ‘ Seylan Merchant Portal’, the first fullyfledged multipurpose Digital Payment Platform in Sri Lanka, which is a fully customisable mobile friendly payment platform that can be enabled within a day of the customer’s request. The service is open to merchants with or without a website that do not have an online payment acceptance mechanism, social media-based business page owners, and shop owners with only email, looking to enable digital transactions to accept payments.

The Bank with a Heart also actively engaged SMEs from around the country during lockdown periods through webinars aimed at increasing their awareness and knowledge on a variety of business- related topics ranging from product innovation to international sales and exports. Seylan Bank also partnered the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce ( CCC) to revive the SME sector, offering a comprehensive range of business development services through a dedicated hotline at the CCC Centre for SMEs, in order to increase its outreach of business development services and facilitate an active dialogue on constraints, challenges, and operational issues faced by SMEs.

In addition to these, Seylan Bank rolled out the “Seylan Payroll” solution for organisations to manage a wide range of financial transactions, remotely and in an efficient manner. Seylan Payroll covers a variety of services including salary disbursement, EPF remitting, facilitating supplier payments, and disbursing commissions and dividends, all in a convenient environment, without the need to visit a bank branch.

Seylan Bank recently announced the launch of ‘ SeylanPay’, a QR code-based payment solution to the digital product range of the bank, in partnership with LankaClear.

The service allows current and savings account holders of Seylan Bank to make payments using their smartphone at LANKAQR certified merchants. In addition, SeylanPay customers can link their Credit or Debit Cards and enjoy the convenience of card-less and cashless payments for their day- to- day; with security, convenience, simplicity and speed being key factors in their payment experience.

The launch marked a key milestone in the Bank’s strategic direction towards a cashless, paperless and branchless banking model and contributes to an enriched payment ecosystem in Sri Lanka

Strategic Partnerships

Last year, the Bank joined hands with PayHere, Sri Lanka’s preferred payment gateway service; to empower Sri Lankan small businesses with online payments. The strategic partnership adds convenience to their businesses removing the bottleneck PayHere merchants had of needing to have a specific bank’s account; by enabling the use of their preferred business bank account to start accepting online payments via PayHere.

Always alert to the shifting consumer needs, Seylan Bank understood that another key requirement for customers in the current context was getting best for the money in hand. This led to the revolutionary par tnership between the Bank and Mintpay, a platform that is the first to offer customers the option to Buy Now, Pay Later for any product or service offered by merchants powered by Mintpay’s AI- driven payment platform. The proprietary t e ch n o l o g y developed by Algoredge ( PVT) LTD, provides both merchants and consumers across the island with a novel online shopping experience. Customers will be able to use the Mintpay payment platform with any of their merchant partners to split their shopping cost into 3 interest-free payments over a payback period of two months. In addition, the Machine Learning and Data Analysis based approach enables the Mintpay Operational Platform together with the Decisioning Engine to make predictive judgements to ensure that all stakeholders are secured. The platform also provides customers with information about their transactions for future online purchases.

Seylan Bank also entered an exclusive partnership with ’SUPERBOX’ the country’s latest, fully integrated online supermarket specialising in groceries, to provide a secure payment gateway service for its customers to carry out safe and secure transactions. The user-friendly site was designed and developed based on research conducted to understand the Sri Lankan consumer behaviour to ensure an easy, hassle- free shopping experience.

Changing the Rules of Engagement

Experts across fields and industries are unanimous in the agreement that there is no going back to ‘the way things were’. Whilst traditional methods give us comfort, it is innovation that will light the way ahead. The only way forward is to change the rules of engagement, to unlearn previous best practices and create new rules.

With a present that is hyper hygiene conscious, and a future set to be tech-dominated, Seylan Bank is already ahead of the curve, with responsible banking to meet the needs of today and innovation to cater to the wants of tomorrow.