People’s Bank takes centre-stage at National Business Excellence Awards 2018

People’s Bank receiving the ‘Winner – Excellence in Local Market Reach’

Going from strength to strength in its journey of excellence, People’s Bank was bestowed with two prominent awards at the prestigious National Business Excellence Awards 2018 held on 5 December at the Hilton Colombo. 

The bank was awarded the prestigious accolade of ‘Winner – Excellence in Local Market Reach’ and ‘Runner up in the Banking Sector’. 

The National Business Excellence Awards are organised by the National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka to honour those Sri Lankan business houses that have excelled in their fields of business. 

The awards recognise and reward enterprises that have excelled in each of the criteria such as Corporate Governance, Capacity Building, Performance Management, Global and Local Market Reach, Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Sustainability, and Business and Financial Results.

People’s Bank was also bestowed with the Silver Award for ‘Service Brand of the Year’ at the recently-concluded 2018 SLIM Brand Excellence awards.

Taking digital banking to its next level and introducing green banking to youth, People’s Bank has established 200 Self Banking Centres equipped with the most modern ATM, CDM and Kiosks. The touch screen CDM/ATM/Kiosks are accessible 24 hours in the day, for 365 days in the year, further enhancing convenience for customers and putting them in control of where, when and how they would like to conduct their banking needs. 

In addition, the People’s Bank mobile banking app, ‘People’s Wave’ has emerged as one of the most popular financial services applications in the country, again demonstrating the Bank’s ability to understand the expectations of its customers. 

The bank has always played a pivotal role in encouraging agriculture, plantations sector, commercial, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and foreign income generation, by introducing various loan schemes to strengthen the business community. 

The credibility of being a government bank coupled with competitive interest rates has earned for itself the complete trust of the public.

Going ahead, People’s Bank plans to take digital banking to the doorstep of rural consumers so that they could conduct their transactions on mobile devices and expects to roll out more fully digitalised branches over the coming months, thus fulfilling its sustainability pledge to reduce its carbon footprint and benefit the environment by promoting paperless banking.

Since its inception 57 years ago, People’s Bank has opened its doors to customers across the country, from all walks of life, providing them with banking services that meet their unique needs and uplift their lives.  People’s Bank currently serves over 16 million customers through 738 branches and its connected network of over 4,000 ATMs is linked to the Lanka Pay gateway. 

The bank also continues to play an important role in encouraging various industries including agriculture, real estate, commercial development, small and medium enterprises and exports and this in turn has helped support communities across the country. 

People’s Bank has always been a driver of financial inclusivity and was also the first bank in the country to commence bilingual operations in Sinhala and Tamil, and thereafter also introduced Sri Lanka’s first trilingual cheque book.

People’s Bank Designate Chief Executive Officer/General Manager and Senior Deputy General Manager (Business Banking) Rasitha Gunawardena, Senior Deputy General Manager (Banking Operations) Bonniface Silva, Head of Finance Azzam A. Ahamat and Assistant General Manager (Marketing) A.U.L.A. Anzar were present at the awards ceremony to accept the awards.