By Supun Dias
Visa, a global leader in payments technology recently announced that it was setting up an office in Sri Lanka as it had identified the tremendous growth potential in the island. Mirror Business spoke to Visa Group Executive for Asia Pacific Chris Clarke, Group Country Manager for India and South Asia T.K. Ramachandran and the new Country Manager for Sri Lanka, Anthony Watson, the key officials behind the Visa operations in the region to discuss about its plans and objectives in 
Sri Lanka.  

Why did Visa wanted to set up an office in Sri Lanka?
Clarke : We have being planning for the last couple years, we recognized the rapid growth in Sri Lanka. The consumer growth potential was taken into account. We have a very long term deep partnership with financial institutions from the late 80’.

Visa commenced operations in Sri Lanka in 1989 and currently works with 19 local banks and nine other card issuers in the market. The new office will enable us to assist our clients and the government as we work towards unleashing the potential of this country. 

Ramachandran : The Sri Lankan office is set up as a liable entity just like our other worldwide entities. So the process took us about nine months. We have identified the tremendous growth and the potential in electronic payments along with Sri Lanka’s economic development.  We can help this course by setting up a new office in Colombo, which is the second in the region 
after India.

How is the relationship with the government and how do you plan on working together?
Ramachandran: We have being working with the new government since mid- last year. We have being working with the Payment Department of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka to secure our payments, to make sure there not hacked because we are quite serious about to 
cyber security. 

Clarke: We want to contribute to the GDP. The GDP of Sri Lanka is US $ 82 billion and US $ 45 billion of that accounts for personal consumption. According to Visa, only 4.2 
percent out of it is carried out as electronic payments.

 If we compare with the Asia Pacific level, the penetration level is very low in Sri Lanka. So we have
to grow it.
 

Did the recent aggressive marketing of Master Card in Sri Lanka taken into account in setting up an office in Sri Lanka?
Clarke: There are 16 million debit and credit cards in Sri Lanka. And Master Card is working hard; it is a positive thing for the country. 
Ramachandran: It’s not about market share, it’s about market growth. So everyone has to contribute, the rest of the players has to come in and develop it as the penetration level is very low. 
 

How can we increase the penetration level?
Ramachandran: We have to increase the number of acceptance points and we need to give the consumer more opportunities to use it to purchase products. So we are working with the government to meet these objectives. 
Payments industry is undergoing a rapid change with new technologies and innovations changing the way people pay and how they get paid. 

Visa is at the forefront of this change and we value our long standing relationship we have with our Sri Lankan partners and we are excited about the future to bring new innovations to 
Sri Lanka.

We are working closely with the Central Bank and with other government agencies to develop the e-commerce platform in the country.
Watson:  Also, technology innovation part is very important. In Sri Lanka there are 4.2 million internet users, so to increase the methodology in paying bills online, the innovation part is something is what we are looking at because there is an 85 percent growth every year on internet subscription in Sri Lanka, which is a great accomplishment.
 

What are the plans of Visa for the next couple of years in Sri Lanka?
Watson: We are trying to achieve as much as possible we can. So as we said earlier we want to increase the number of terminals across the country. 
According to Visa, during the last five years there has been an 85 percent growth in Visa debit cards and a 25 percent growth in Visa credit cards 
in Sri Lanka.

With 80 percent of households having access to financial service, Visa plans to tap this potential in order to get them access to electronic payments.
Personal consumption percentage of 4.2 percent has to grow, People have 16 million cards, so we want to work hard with the rest of stakeholders to encourage Sri Lankans to activate them and use them at a point of sale.