Singer Finance recently crossed the Rs100 billion asset mark, a milestone built on years of sustained investment in its branch network, digital banking capabilities and data analytics infrastructure. These foundations, developed over time, have strengthened the company’s ability to serve customers, adapt to changing market needs and support its longterm growth journey. Behind that progress lies a question the company has worked through for more than a decade: how to build a brand that stands apart in a market where competitors often offer similar products and compete on little more than price and speed.
Mahesh Wijewardene, Group Managing Director at Singer Sri Lanka
The company draws on the strength of the Singer Sri Lanka and Hayleys names, two of Sri Lanka’s most established corporate brands. While that heritage provided a foundation of trust, it also presented a different challenge: building a financial services brand recognised for its own strengths. Mahesh Wijewardene, Group Managing Director at Singer Sri Lanka, and Thushan Amarasuriya, Managing Director at Singer Finance, reflect on how the company has balanced inherited brand equity with the task of creating an identity customers associate with Singer Finance itself.
For Wijewardene, the Singer name represents a legacy earned over generations. “The Singer name has earned the trust of Sri Lankans over more than a century by consistently delivering quality, reliability and value,” he says.
For Amarasuriya, the focus has been on translating that legacy into everyday customer experience. Through organisational culture, disciplined execution and a commitment to service, he believes the company has steadily earned recognition in its own right, building a brand defined not only by the names behind it, but by the experiences it creates for customers.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Wijewardene points to the strength of the Hayleys Group as a further layer beneath the Singer name, describing the combination of Singer and Hayleys as one of heritage, stability, innovation, and corporate governance, which he believes gives customers greater confidence in the institutions they choose to engage with. Amarasuriya describes the same relationship from inside the business, noting that Singer Sri Lanka and Hayleys sit above Singer Finance as two strong brands guiding the company, while adding that Singer Finance has still built its own identity under that guidance.
That distinction matters to him because the ownership structure behind Singer Finance changed in ways that shaped how much room the company had to grow. Hayleys’ acquisition of the company brought a renewed focus on maximising its potential, a brief Amarasuriya and his senior management team took as a starting point rather than a finished instruction.
What that required, in his account, began with recognising that the Singer and Hayleys names could open relationships but could not sustain one on their own, particularly in a lending environment where 32 licensed finance companies compete for the same customers with largely the same products, differentiated mainly by rate and speed of service. Brand equity in that setting has to be earned at the point of contact, he points out, not borrowed from the name above the door.
Wijewardene frames this as part of a wider pattern in how Sri Lankan consumers now relate to financial brands. He describes expectations moving well beyond competitive products and attractive rates, towards institutions that are transparent, responsive, and consistent across every point of contact, and argues that brands stay relevant by evolving alongside their customers while holding onto the values that earned trust in the first place. Singer Finance’s task, in his framing, has been to keep that balance rather than choose between heritage and change.
Trust Through Company Culture
Wijewardene frames this same instinct at the Group level. “Customers are not simply choosing a financial product,” he says. “They are choosing a partner they can rely on during important milestones in their lives, whether it is purchasing a vehicle, growing a business, achieving personal aspirations, or securing their future.”
Getting there, for Amarasuriya, took work he describes as continuous rather than complete, tracing back to a decision made a few years into his time as the chief executive. With little room to compete on product or rate, the company needed another way to stand apart, and the conclusion reached was that service, not marketing, would have to carry that weight. He draws a line between a slogan and a working culture, making the case that customer experience could not be built through communications alone and had to start with the staff who met customers first, since branch staff are typically a customer’s first point of contact with the company.
The company developed an internal programme called Make People Feel Great, built on the idea that customer experience and staff experience are connected rather than separate concerns, with training rolled out across branches and tone set from senior management downward. Getting that right internally, Amarasuriya says, meant improving how departments supported each other as much as how staff dealt with customers, since a branch experience is shaped by decisions made well behind the counter. He notes that customer service was not absent from the company before his time as CEO, only that it existed at a smaller scale, given how much the company has grown since 2018.
Part of that training extended to how staff were expected to treat customers who did not yet understand the products they were buying. Many customers who approach Singer Finance are engaging with a formal financial institution for the first time, and while they may know what they want, they do not always understand how a loan is structured or what a realistic repayment capacity looks like. Staff were trained to walk customers through those details rather than close a transaction and move on, an approach he describes as building the business in an inclusive manner rather than growing the portfolio for its own sake.
That growth has not made the culture self-sustaining. Amarasuriya describes maintaining service standards as an ongoing discipline, particularly in a consumer-facing business where every customer interaction shapes the brand’s reputation. He treats this as an ordinary part of doing business rather than a sign that the culture has fallen short, describing the training behind it as a standard the company has to keep meeting, one interaction at a time.
Widening the Foundations
As critical as company culture was, it did not build the balance sheet by itself. Amarasuriya points to three other factors that contributed, emphasising that they worked together rather than independently: the selection of branch locations, the recruitment and development of staff, and consistency in speed of service. Each was dependent on the others to hold up in practice.
Location carried particular weight given how competitive the market is, and each new branch required staff recruited, trained, and brought into the company’s culture rather than only being hired to fill a role. Existing staff were part of that calculation too. Amarasuriya describes making a point of looking inward first when opportunities for progression opened up, ensuring that staff who had performed well were given the chance to advance within the company before roles were opened to outside hires, on the view that expansion should build loyalty among existing staff rather than simply add headcount.
The years following 2018, through the outbreak of COVID-19, offered no real tailwind for the business, Amarasuriya says. The past two to three years changed that, as Sri Lanka’s broader economy stabilised and interest rates settled into a more predictable range, with the removal of import bans on vehicles adding further momentum by feeding directly into the leasing portfolio that has long been a core part of the business.
“Wijewardene points to the strength of the Hayleys Group as a further layer beneath the Singer name, describing the combination of Singer and Hayleys as one of heritage, stability, innovation, and corporate governance, which he believes gives customers greater confidence in the institutions they choose to engage with.”
In other words, timing mattered as much as placement.
Speed of service, the third factor, ties back to the development of company culture. To customers, this might be most evident in how quickly a branch processes a form, but it requires each department to coordinate smoothly behind the scenes.
Onboarding is an example of this. While credit appraisal has been digitised, much of the surrounding process remains manual, something Amarasuriya expects to change as digitisation continues. Notably, the company made it a point to prioritise growth in relation to how customers are served. Staff were trained to educate customers on loan structuring and repayment capacity, he says, rather than doing no more than adding another lease to the book.
New Roads and New Techniques
Amarasuriya is open about where the company’s technology sits today, describing it as a work in progress rather than a finished transformation. Singer Finance was among the earlier companies in its sector to introduce internet banking for its savings and fixed deposit products, and a mobile app is close to launch. Particular attention has gone into making its interface accessible and distinctive, since customers already have other banking apps to compare it against.
Behind that customer-facing layer sits a small but impactful team that has taken on a role far larger than its size suggests. Working in data analytics, the team transforms Management Information Systems data into actionable insights and reports that enable better decision-making across the business. Amarasuriya describes building this capability as a task in itself, involving not only finding the right talent but also encouraging other departments to embrace data-led decision-making. What began with resistance has evolved into a growing reliance on analytics, with branch and regional managers now actively seeking reports they can use to respond to changing conditions. Department heads receive automated performance summaries daily, while branch and regional managers have access to real-time data that helps them manage day-to-day decisions, a shift Amarasuriya credits with improving the organisation’s ability to respond faster to what is happening on the ground.
“Customers are not simply choosing a financial product. They are choosing a partner they can rely on during important milestones in their lives, whether it is purchasing a vehicle, growing a business, achieving personal aspirations, or securing their future.”
Artificial intelligence is at an early stage still, with current use revolving around enhancing efficiency in repetitive processes, while more advanced applications, particularly in areas such as credit evaluation, remain under review with technology vendors. Amarasuriya sees the technology’s immediate potential in supporting employees by improving how they process information, identify patterns and generate insights from large volumes of data. His own exploration of AI has focused on understanding how these tools can complement human judgement and strengthen decision-making, rather than replace the experience and oversight that remain central to financial services. For him, the opportunity lies in equipping teams with better tools to work faster, improve accuracy and respond more effectively to customer needs.
Adoption across the company has been uneven, with some staff seeing the technology as a threat rather than a tool, which is why his response has been to lead by example, giving department heads the means to use AI tools personally while expecting deeper integration into the company’s core systems to take longer than individual habits take to change.
Wijewardene, speaking to the same period of investment from the Group level, frames it as a matter of keeping pace with what customers now expect. “They want financial institutions that are transparent, responsive, digitally accessible, and capable of delivering a seamless experience across every touchpoint,” he says.
Trust Under Pressure
Last year, Singer Finance became one of the first finance companies in Sri Lanka to launch a five-year Environmental, Social, and Governance roadmap, and Amarasuriya describes the task now facing him and his senior team as execution rather than design. The roadmap spans environmental, social, and governance commitments, with the environmental strand tied directly to the company’s core lending activity: for every three-wheeler the company finances, it plants a tree, a programme that has produced more than 7,500 trees so far, alongside efforts to reduce paper and electricity use. Solar power for branches remains under consideration but not yet acted on, given that most branches operate from rented premises with no certainty over how long the company will remain there.
On governance, Amarasuriya describes the standard as one the company cannot compromise on, given its position within Hayleys and Singer, two groups for whom corporate governance sits close to the centre of how they operate. Where others may see this as a constraint, he positions it as a straightforward baseline the business was built on from the outset. Regulators may have high standards, he says, but Singer Finance’s decisions often follow stricter guidelines.
“Singer Finance has a specific benchmark it wants to pursue rather than a broad ambition: a place among Sri Lanka’s top five finance companies, reached over a multi-year path rather than an immediate leap, given that some competitors’ books remain six to seven times the size of its own.”
It is on the social side, and specifically in how the company treats borrowers who fall behind, that the commitment is most visible. During the COVID period and the economic difficulty that followed, Singer Finance issued moratorium loans worth around Rs2.5 billion, almost all of which have since been repaid. Amarasuriya views this as a reflection of the customer base the company serves, estimating that the large majority of Sri Lankan borrowers are responsible customers, with only a small segment facing genuine financial difficulty.
Customers have a tendency to assume finance companies will repossess property quickly if payments are missed, Amarasuriya says, and while this is a concern for all finance companies, it is not an issue customers face at Singer Finance. Repossession, in his account, is used only once other options have been exhausted, or in cases where a customer has passed the financed vehicle to a third party against the terms of the agreement, a decision he says is owed to the company’s depositors as much as anything else, given that fixed deposits fund an estimated 50–60% of the business. His approach to borrowers in difficulty rests on the same premise that runs through the culture described earlier, that patience produces a better outcome than strict enforcement, provided the credit evaluation behind the loan was sound to begin with.
The Path Ahead
Singer Finance has a specific benchmark it wants to pursue rather than a broad ambition: a place among Sri Lanka’s top five finance companies, reached over a multi-year path rather than an immediate leap, given that some competitors’ books remain six to seven times the size of its own. Amarasuriya believes the company can achieve one goal without waiting for the balance sheet to catch up: a lead on service. It costs nothing, he says, to smile or go the extra mile. The task ahead is less about setting a new standard than getting more than 1,400 staff, including those still to be recruited, to hold to the one already set.
He also points to a shift he would like to see in how the company’s own lending gets categorised. Much of what is recorded as consumption lending, particularly through gold loans, is in his experience funding some form of income-generating activity rather than personal spending. A trader pledging gold jewellery to top up stock for their shop, for instance, may still be logged simply as a consumption loan, since front-end staff often record a loan’s purpose in general terms rather than its specific economic use. He believes this distinction gets lost at the point a loan is issued, and that the company’s lending book is doing more to support small-scale economic activity than the records currently show.
As the balance sheet grows, he would like to see more lending capacity directed towards small and medium enterprises specifically. A stronger balance sheet, in his view, should translate into a greater capacity to support businesses, benefitting both the company’s standing and the wider economy it lends into.
Wijewardene’s view sits at the level of the brand rather than the loan book. But it points in a similar direction. He describes the brands most likely to last as those that hold technological progress and genuine customer relationships together, rather than treating one as a substitute for the other. “This balance between trusted heritage and continuous innovation has enabled Singer Finance to build a brand that is modern, relevant, and resilient,” he says.
That balance is, in effect, the answer to the question the company set out to solve. Singer and Hayleys gave Singer Finance a name people already trusted. What it has built since is a reason for that trust to belong to Singer Finance itself.