Sri Lanka: Insights into how DFCC Bank is Building a Roadmap for Digitization

The Senior Business Development Manager, Joe Bowerbank, interviewed Thimal Perera, Deputy CEO of DFCC Bank. Thimal provided a number of interesting insights into how DFCC is strategically dealing with the challenges of operating in 2020 and building a roadmap to continue delivering a first-class banking experience going forward.

Thimal has worked in both local and international banks across the globe, looking after a number of different areas from SME and retail, to digital transformation amongst others. The interview focuses on digitalization and credit risk – two areas that have been hot topics for Creditinfo’s clients this year.

Q: New digital solutions for consumers are always driven by the new technologies which a bank adopts. Could you share some insight on how DFCC are adopting new technologies to power your new customer solutions?

A: Digital for DFCC Bank is a big part of our future strategy. We put the customer at the heart of everything we do and our overarching ambition for DFCC is to be the most customer centric and digitally enabled bank in Sri Lanka by the year 2025. Digital plays a big part in everything we do today and all of our strategies going forward.

We are currently investing a lot of money in upgrading our systems. We are putting in a new core banking system which will go live in the beginning of 2021. The digital capabilities of the new core banking system was the main reason that DFCC Bank picked the solution provided by Temenos. DFCC is not a bank which does digital just for the sake of doing digital.

Digitalization for us is not just the front-end customer interface it’s also the back-end system. We want to digitalize our in-house processes as well, so that we deliver a service to the customer that is in keeping with their needs and expectations. We already use Robotic processes (RPA) in our back offices. We also extensively use Google Enterprise to streamline and automate our processes. Blockchain is currently being evaluated. We extensively use BI and Big Data. We also use scorecards developed using statistical decisioning models in our credit under writing processes.

Digitalization is deployed to enable the customer to deal with the bank at their convenience and through a device of his or her choice. Essentially, we are enhancing the ease of use and flexibility which results in convenience for our customers when dealing with the bank.

To read the entire interview click on the link below.