Sri Lanka’s digital commerce landscape is growing: Visa

Avanthi Colombage 

In this interview Visa Country Manager, Sri Lanka and Maldives Avanthi Colombage explains the growth in digital commerce and how Visa’s new initiative “Click to Pay” can help companies and consumers alike.

Q: Sri Lanka’s digital commerce landscape is growing. Why is checkout becoming so important now?

A: Sri Lanka’s digital commerce ecosystem is at an exciting inflection point, with more consumers and businesses moving online. As this shift accelerates, the checkout experience has become a critical moment of truth in the consumer journey as it sits at the intersection of experience, trust and business performance. 

Today, one of the biggest barriers to completing an online transaction is the complexity of guest checkout - manual card entry and multiple steps can slow consumers down and lead to abandoned purchases. These friction points not only disrupt consumer experience but also directly impact merchants through lost conversions. 

As digital adoption deepens, expectations are also evolving. Consumers increasingly demand fast, intuitive, secure and trusted payment experiences, while merchants need higher success rates and smoother transactions to drive growth. At Visa, we see this as an opportunity to reimagine checkout for the digital age and the digitally savvy consumer, making it simpler for consumers to pay, more secure through technologies like tokenisation, and more efficient for merchants to grow their businesses

Q: How can Click to Pay support Sri Lankan merchants and online businesses?

A: For Sri Lankan businesses, Click to Pay enables a powerful combination of higher conversions, stronger customer confidence, and improved payment performance. 

Click to Pay directly addresses a key challenge in digital commerce- lost conversions at checkout. By eliminating the need for manual card entry and reducing friction in the payment flow, it enables a faster, simpler checkout experience, which can help improve completion rates and drive higher sales.

Equally important is the role of security in building customer trust. With tokenisation at its core, Click to Pay is designed to help ensure that sensitive card details are never exposed during transactions, helping reduce fraud risk and strengthen consumer trust - an essential factor in driving repeat purchases and long-term customer relationships.

As Sri Lanka’s digital economy continues to expand, solutions like Click to Pay can help merchants scale more effectively by delivering experiences that are both seamless and secure.

Q: Why is trust such an important part of this launch?

A: Digital commerce can only scale when consumers trust it. No matter how strong demand or adoption may be, if people are not confident that their payments are secure, they may hesitate at the final step or choose not to transact at all. This is particularly relevant as Sri Lanka’s digital transaction volumes continue to rise alongside growing awareness of fraud and data security risks. For consumers to shift to digital payments at scale, they need to know their information is protected at every touchpoint. That is why trust today is more of a growth lever, making the online checkout experience even more critical.

With Click to Pay, security is embedded into the experience through tokenisation, helping ensure that actual card details are never exposed during transactions. This helps reduce risk while giving consumers the confidence to transact seamlessly across merchants.

By strengthening trust at this critical moment, we are enabling broader adoption of digital commerce, which ultimately supports sustainable growth for businesses and the Sri Lankan economy.

Q: What role does the wider payments ecosystem play in making Click to Pay successful?

A: Click to Pay is an ecosystem-driven innovation, and its success depends on strong collaboration across the payments value chain. Each stakeholder plays a distinct but interconnected role in delivering a frictionless and secure checkout experience.

While Visa acts as the ecosystem enabler, bringing together global standards, technology, security and partnerships to make solutions like Click to Pay work seamlessly at scale, the broader ecosystem helps in executing the end-to-end experience. Merchants enable Click to Pay at checkout, issuer banks support cardholders and authentication, and acquirers and payment partners power the infrastructure that helps ensure transactions are fast, reliable, and scalable.

With Click to Pay, Visa is embedding capabilities such as tokenisation into the payment experience, adding an extra layer of security by ensuring that sensitive card details are not shared during transactions. This works alongside existing processes to help deliver a seamless, consistent, and trusted checkout experience at scale, driving meaningful impact for consumers, businesses, and the broader digital economy.

Q: Which sectors are likely to benefit most from Click to Pay?

A: Click to Pay is designed to benefit the entire digital commerce ecosystem. Any sector that relies on online transactions whether it is retail, travel, e-commerce marketplaces, or digital services, one can benefit from a faster, more seamless, and secure checkout experience powered by Visa’s Click to Pay solution. 

As digital commerce expands in Sri Lanka, its impact will be broad-based, supporting businesses of all sizes and sectors in delivering better digital payment experiences.

Q: How does Click to Pay fit into Visa’s broader vision for Sri Lanka’s cashless economy?

A: At Visa, our focus in Sri Lanka goes beyond enabling digital payments - we are committed to supporting the country’s economic growth by building a more inclusive, efficient, secure, seamless and digitally connected commerce ecosystem. 

As part of this vision, the next phase of growth is about improving the quality of digital payment experiences- making them faster, simpler, and more trusted. This is where Click to Pay plays a key role, addressing three critical priorities for the digital commerce industry today: speed, security, and trust.

For consumers, it enables friction-free and safe online payment experience. For merchants, it improves checkout performance and customer experience. For the wider ecosystem, it supports more secure digital commerce through tokenization and globally aligned standards for secure digital commerce. 

Sri Lanka is at a pivotal stage in its digital payments journey and continued growth will depend on how simple, safe and reliable digital payment experiences become. Click to Pay is a key step towards that future.