Frontier Research appoints Thilina Panduwawala Executive Director

Wednesday, 11 November 2026 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Thilina Panduwawala

Frontier Research yesterday said it has appointed economist Thilina Panduwawala as Executive Director, effective 1 January 2027.

He will lead the firm’s strategy and research agenda. His mandate is to deepen the conviction of its macroeconomic research on Sri Lanka, strengthen relationships with institutional investors, Boards, treasury teams and trading desks, and develop Frontier Research’s next generation of research talent.

The appointment marks Panduwawala’s third stint at Frontier. Recruited and trained by the firm’s late founder, Amal Sanderatne, he first joined in 2016, where his work included embedding political analysis into the firm’s forecasting. After 18 months with the Asian Development Bank’s Sri Lanka Resident Mission, he returned in 2022, at the height of the economic crisis, and led the firm as Head of Research through the sovereign default and debt restructuring.

Over that period he steered Frontier’s views on the exchange rate, interest rates and inflation through the rupee’s collapse, record inflation and sharp policy tightening, and then through the domestic debt optimisation and the restructuring of Sri Lanka’s external debt.

For the investors and trading desks Frontier Research serves, his research offered a steady, independent read of an economy in flux.

Since October 2025, Panduwawala has served as Senior Consultant to Parliament’s Committee on Public Finance. There he has supported the Committee’s oversight of fiscal and monetary policy across Budget 2026, the ongoing Budget 2027, and the fiscal packages that followed Cyclone Ditwah and the Middle East conflict. The role has also given him a view from inside the fiscal machinery of the State, the economy’s single largest participant.

Director Chanakya Dissanayake said: “Thilina has seen Sri Lanka’s economy from every vantage point that matters: a multilateral lender at the ADB, investors and treasury teams at Frontier Research, and now the State’s finances from within Parliament. That breadth, together with the rigour Amal instilled in him, makes him the right person to lead Frontier Research into what will be its strongest chapter yet.”

Amal Sanderatne founded Frontier’s Macroeconomic Research Service on the conviction that getting the macro call right is essential to superior investment returns in Sri Lanka, and that a firm should do one thing with depth and conviction. Founded in 2003, Frontier is not a think tank or an advocacy institute. It delivers independent, high-conviction macroeconomic research for institutional investors, boards, treasury teams and trading desks. It serves as the independent macro research provider to most of the country’s asset managers and its largest banks, and its clients together represent more than a third of the Colombo Stock Exchange’s market capitalisation.