The rising adoption of digital payments has improved sales for businesses as consumers now enjoy superior shopping experiences. Globally, Visa has been working closely with financial institutions, businesses, and rising fintech startups to build seamless payment experiences for their customers. Even in Sri Lanka, the company has undertaken several collaborative initiatives with its partners to digitise payments. The latest was the Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka, organized in partnership with Hatch to empower Sri Lankan fintech startups. It featured a series of webinars where Visa introduced Sri Lankan fintech entrepreneurs to its vast array of products and how they can supercharge their propositions with them.
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Empowering fintechs with Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka
Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka covered BNPL, eCommerce solutions, Visa Direct, and other value-added services by the global payments leader. Working alongside Hatch to connect with local startups, these sessions raised awareness of how Visa’s products can support these companies in building something new or augmenting their existing solutions. Alongside these sessions, Visa aimed to collaborate more closely with fintech startups and help them grow with its global expertise.
Product Head – India and South Asia at Visa, Ramakrishnan Gopalan, elaborated, “Visa aims to be the preferred payment partner for fintechs in Sri Lanka. We have over 60 years of experience operating across multiple geographies. We are arguably the first fintech, having built one of the most interoperable payment systems that work for everyone everywhere. Our approach to fintech has always been about strengthening our core capabilities and solutions so our fintech partners can drive their innovation agenda unhindered on any network. This approach allows us to work with fintechs of all sizes across multiple markets. Today we do so through several ways, including investments, strategic partnerships, and the Visa Accelerator Program.”
An overview of the Sri Lankan fintech landscape by Hatch
“Hatch was founded to support entrepreneurs. We are the center for all things startups and an open innovation platform supporting the Sri Lankan entrepreneurial ecosystem. We have 4 years of working through programs specifically dedicated to the acceleration and incubation for a diverse community of technology professionals, especially tech startups,” stated, Co-Founder of Hatch, Jeevan Gnanam. One notable program was HatchX, South Asia’s first fintech accelerator.
In the current fintech landscape, local startups have faced several socio-economic challenges in the past few years and have had to find resilient business models to sustain operations. Commenting on these developments, Jeevan said, “The strength of existing Sri Lankan fintech startups is that they are future-proof and ready to scale along with the economic revival of the country. Facing several challenges head-on, they’ve risen above them. Therefore, we must support them, which is what Visa and Hatch aim to do with the Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka.”
How Visa is collaborating with innovative Sri Lankan fintechs
Speaking to participating fintechs, the Country Manager for Sri Lanka and Maldives at Visa, Avanthi Colombage, shared, “Visa has been operating in Sri Lanka for 35 years. Since we opened our office in 2016, we have continued to grow our team to support our partners better. We believe innovation allows us to create payment channels for everyone everywhere. We work closely with regulators to ensure these innovations are not just fostered but given a thriving and favorable environment to grow. We continue to deepen our partnerships with the fintechs of Sri Lanka to create innovative payment solutions enabling consumer-friendly payment channels and drive the growth of the payments ecosystem by opening up untapped cash-heavy segments in Sri Lanka.”
Even recently, Visa partnered with several local fintech startups to launch innovative solutions. WEBXPAY partnered with Visa under the latter’s Fast Track program to empower SMEs with seamless, effortless, and sustainable digital payment acceptance solutions. Listing out these examples, Avanthi stated, “Visa is an open platform for financial services innovation; it’s a series of payment assets that enable fintechs to build a superior consumer experience. And we believe that fintechs are the next frontier of digital payments growth.”
Through the Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka, the company opened the doors for Sri Lankan startups to tap into global opportunities and expertise. Primarily, the initiative gave local fintechs access to Visa’s experts, which helped validate their assumptions and finetune their strategies with a regional perspective. Secondly, the program also gave participating companies access to Visa’s APIs and other services, which are powerful foundations to build upon to create seamless payment experiences.
These two factors alone help accelerate the journey of startups in the local fintech landscape. However, this is still only the beginning. Ramakrishnan said to the participating entrepreneurs of the Visa Fintech Initiative: Sri Lanka, “We want to invest in your success. So we are happy to take you to other markets without limiting your dreams to Sri Lanka alone. We’ve done this exercise in other markets and look forward to working with several fintech startups in Sri Lanka.”
