In the present-day world, the role of the Fintech industry has become more defined, reasonable, and vital. Financial Technology-Fintech, which cannot be taken as just another innovation, is here to stay, innovate and change the way of lifestyles.
With its roots extending well beyond 10 years, leading Sri Lankan Fintech entity and the forerunner of the country’s Fintech industry, Fortunaglobal strives to offer real-time knowledge of customer behaviors and trends, delivering astate-of-the-art experience in consumer-driven Digital banking through an Omni Channel Banking Suite.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer Suren Kohombange together with Director of Fortunaglobal Hasitha Abeywardena recently sat down with us to signify the company’s continued collaboration with financial institutions and partners and the plans for their way forward.
Following are the excerpts of the discussion.
Give us a brief outline of Fortunaglobal?
Fortunaglobal is the pioneering and leading Fintech in Sri Lanka offering breakthrough digital banking solutions to transform businesses objectives into resounding market success, tailor-made to fit the realms of innovation with our Affluence Digital Banking platform.
With more than a decade of industry experience, we started out as a fintech startup in 2008 with an assignment for LOLC. Over the years we have partnered with many leading conglomerates, mainstream commercial banks and financial institutions to offer our services in Fintech, digital banking and innovation. Seylan Bank, Cargills Bank, Pan Asia Bank, DFCC Bank etc. are few partners to name.
We started out at a period where technology was unfamiliar and digital penetration for operations was really low. Through the years we have assisted our clients in digital innovations and helped them take digitalization to grassroots levels. As a Fintech Company we were the 1st in Sri Lanka to propose internet banking and mobile banking through our collaboration with Seylan Bank.
We are also a local company with the architecture and engineering of our products fully developed in Sri Lanka. We can claim to be the largest single vendor in Digital Banking solutions in the country with our wide client base and the array of technical offerings we are capable of offering. Fortunaglobal is also credited for bringing the maximum number of Sri Lankans onboard to Digital Banking.
The term Fintech encompasses a rapidly growing industry that serves the interests of both consumers and businesses in multiple ways. In this context, what are the areas of expertise Fortunaglobal is capable of offering?
Our expertise is primarily on the offering of digital banking channel products Therefore in the present, we are identified to be the front face of banks rather than its branches. Unlike the past, leading banks in the world are now calculating their channel assets in terms of their digital properties.
Our strengths and offerings clearly lie on the array of digital products and the digital assets of Financial Institutions. Our product portfolio is capable of handling the entire digital banking journey of a user through our affluence product offering.
How would you explain the strength of Fortunaglobal in terms of technology and innovation?
Fintech is always going to be about innovation. Over the years we have completely pumped in Research and Development (R & D) for our products and their upgrading. At this point of time, we see innovation is primarily about technology. Therefore, we are trying to bring application services, hardware services and the cloud technology all together onto the banking platform. So far this has been applied to one on-premise model of a bank.
Adverts of technology are bridging major benefits such as AI, cloud, the availability of a product as a service on different application platforms of different industries. In line with this fact, we have partnered with likeminded institutions such as IBM Sydney, IBM Singapore and RedHand US in terms of bringing in innovative hardware solutions and AI related technology on our platform.
Give us a brief about the products of Fortunaglobal? Are there any unique services or benefits only customers of Fortunaglobal get to utilize?
Affluence 2.0 is a fully cloud enabled platform which allows us to tend to our local, regional and international clients. The product is recognized for its agility and the ability to build on it.
The other unique factor of Fortunaglobal is that we are very precise at understanding the market sentiment and the regulators framework. Our services comply with the demands and the regulations of the market. Our large client base and effective solutions have helped us secure the trust in our services. Clients have witnessed both short- term and long-term benefits of our products and our pricing structure have brought them better ROI and higher revenue.
With our partnership with IBM and RedHand we hope to take our offering to a new level. We will soon introduce the single window concept including hardware software security and the ability in our next generation products to manage our operations completely through standardized offerings. We are an application software vendor where our customer can fully rely to receive a completed end-to-end service.
Looking back at the progress of Fortunaglobal, how do you perceive its growth? Am I correct if I identify Fortunaglobal as the pioneer of the FinTech industry in Sri Lanka?
Yes Absolutely! Since our establishment, the company has witnessed continuous growth. We are equipped with 40 full time human strength and our products have reached international markets.
We are currently in the process of establishing ourselves in the fintech hubs of Sydney and Melbourne in order to expand our offerings and extend our services to the international market.
With the widest range of customers, we hold the largest footprint as a single operator while the entire theme revolving around our services is ‘frictionless banking’. We believe that extracting the friction in terms of global market operations, data recovery, product launching etc. adds value to the customer.
Our aim is to expand our services globally and establish Fortunaglobal as the trailblazing Sri Lankan company of the global Fintech Industry.
We sincerely thank the local industry and our clients for giving us the opportunity to work with them and allowing us to be an educator of the country’s financial sector.