Q: Has your bank participated in any community assistance endeavours – and if so, could you outline them?

In order to reach out to as wide an audience as was possible, we used a combination of small trilingual YouTube clips and public talks.

And apart from our banking efforts, we increased the dissemination of information to the general public regarding COVID-19 prevention and coping with financial difficulty through a variety of media platforms.

By informing the public through both morning shows on Shakthi to platforms offered by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, we reached out to a spectrum of the population and offered clarity on the type of relief and empathy they could expect from banks and the banking sector.

While expanding the financial inclusiveness of the bank’s services, several of our teams took part in volunteering and helped the group maintain proper supply lines for food distribution throughout curfew.

While working from home (WFH) brought with it its own challenges, our largely young workforce was able to remain nimble and active despite the curfew. Nevertheless, we adopted a top to bottom system of support whereby managers maintained regular communication with their teams, trickling down to assistants and support staff.

This has been a once in a lifetime pandemic and documenting the lessons from it was a rare opportunity. Nothing is certain in life and business, but personal wellbeing and public safety are imperative.

Q: How has your organisation played a part in mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 crisis?

From a people centric perspective, Cargills Bank considered the safety of citizens, customers and staff to be paramount.

While public safety was one of our concerns, it is worth noting our role as a lending agency in the context of mitigating the impact of COVID-19 from the perspective of the banking sector – a plethora of businesses across the country needed room to breathe.

And it cannot be ignored that this opened a new paradigm for businesses to engage and conduct operations in a way they hadn’t done before.

Form a people centric perspective, we first looked at our staff and assessed who really needed to report to work and maintain physical contact with customers. Then we looked at how soon everyone else could adapt to WFH.

Within a week, we were able to switch to WFH with a whole set of operating guidelines; and as such, only 30 percent of our staff needed to be at their workplaces, thereby managing sanitization and physical distancing effectively while reducing the need for public transport.

Meanwhile, relationship teams encouraged customers to use online banking as much as possible and minimise visits to the bank.

Similarly, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka engaged the payments and settlements regulator to facilitate easier on-boarding of customers online by reducing the previous requirements – this minimised traffic to physical counters.

We witnessed online banking and payment volumes increase threefold subsequently. This was an opportunity to motivate business customers both big and small to move to e-commerce and mobile commerce.

Beginning with Cargills, we even offered small vegetable producers options to start small businesses with e-commerce, opening new mechanisms for businesses, which would be more convenient for customers and deliver new income streams to the bank.