The Commercial Bank of Ceylon has been ranked No. 1 on the Business Today ranking of Sri Lanka’s Top 40 business entities in 2022-23.
Business Today has assigned Commercial Bank an aggregate score of 34.55 at the top of a list that includes the country’s biggest diversified conglomerates, banking and financial services giants and manufacturing colossi.
This is the 15th consecutive year that Commercial Bank has been ranked by Business Today as not only the best-performing bank in the country but one of the five best-performing companies in Sri Lanka overall.
“We are honoured to be ranked No 1 in the Business Today Top 40 in respect of a year that the magazine describes as a challenging period in Sri Lanka’s history, when time seemed to stand still,” Commercial Bank Managing Director and CEO Mr Sanath Manatunge commented. “Business Today has noted that companies had to contend with rising inflation and interest rates, energy security issues and tariffs, shrinking forex liquidity, currency devaluation, increasing taxation, import restrictions, and enlargement in working capital while critical economic sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and services recorded contractions. To move up the ranking in the face of such challenges attests to the Bank’s ability, not just to weather the storm, but to convert challenges in to opportunities.”
Commenting on Commercial Bank’s performance in 2022-23, Business Today said: “Commercial Bank of Ceylon is number one in the Business Today TOP 40 corporate awards, an extremely worthy achievement for the Bank, which, like the rest of its peers proved its mettle and emerged indisputably strong in a risk-elevated domestic and global backdrop. Kudos to Commercial Bank for successfully navigating the ‘perfect storm’ with forward-looking strategies and a calculated combination of taking advantage of its strengths, profiting on selected opportunities, managing risks, and minimizing the impact of threats.”
Business Today also noted that guided by the constant strategic stewardship of its Board, the Bank focused on managing forex reserves, facilitating remittances, promoting export-focused relationships, prioritizing crucial imports, and supporting threatened businesses through rehabilitation while strengthening its position in the SME and micro enterprise customer segment, especially with women-led and women-connected enterprises.
The magazine also quoted Mr Manatunge as saying that resilience and future readiness will be the dual pillars of the Bank’s plans and road maps, given that the country’s path to recovery will possess some unique challenges, while always being vigilant to seizing every opportunity to become the Bank that it has been to the nation through every changing and varying circumstance of the country.
Sri Lanka’s first 100% carbon-neutral bank and the first Sri Lankan bank to be listed among the Top 1000 Banks of the World, Commercial Bank operates a network of 271 branches and 964 automated machines in Sri Lanka. Commercial Bank is the largest lender to Sri Lanka’s SME sector and is a leader in digital innovation in the country’s Banking sector. The Group’s overseas operations encompass Bangladesh, where the Bank operates 20 outlets; Myanmar, where it has a Microfinance company in Nay Pyi Taw; and the Maldives, where the Bank has a fully-fledged Tier I Bank with a majority stake.
