Are we using digital banking as advanced financial solution?

BANKS and Non-Banking Financial Institutions of our country are now endeavouring their best to actively persuade digitalisation to provide an enhanced customer service aiming to experience and boost the operational efficiency.

- By B.G. Wimalarathana Banda

No doubt, digital banking is an Unconventional Financial Solution (UFS) which practices advanced technology to provide a better service to its external customers and to arouse the internal customers to be efficient service providers.

We have experienced, that under traditional banking, customers had to queue up providing various documents even to check the balance of an Operating Account and to make a payment to another party through the account. Making a payment or settling dues or bills, transferring funds to the credit of another account of his own or to a third party either in the same bank or totally a different bank are now a fingertip job, through the digital services such as mobile banking, online banking, etc. which are available in digital banking platform. Apparently, nowadays using cheques for making payments or to withdraw money is almost lost. Online fund transfer has overtaken most of the activities done by a traditional cheque.

However, as banking customers are we in Sri Lanka, experiencing all these privileges provided by digital banking? This is a debatable point. As a result of some of the fences erected by these same banks, deliberately or without proper analytical knowledge, I feel that enjoying these privileges bestowed by digital banking have been deprived to most of the Sri Lankan banking customers.

The main objectives of digital banking are to enhance customer experience, improve operational efficiency and increase accessibility to financial services. This includes providing convenient, 24/7 access to banking services, streamlining processes and reducing costs for both customers and banks. Creating a paperless operating efficiency is one of the main aims that comes under the activities of convenient and streamlining process which is an ancillary objective of digital banking.

Using papers