Sri Lanka Bank of Ceylon expands services to refugees

Sri Lanka's state run Bank of Ceylon has expanded its services inside camps housing nearly 280,000 refugees in the north of the island, adding mobile computerized branches housed in shipping containers.

Last week the bank added four retail units to its existing branch in the Manik Farm refugee camp complex in the northern Vavuniya district.
"These are fully fledged semi-permanent banking units that even have automated teller machines (ATM) facilities," says chairman Gamini Wickramasinghe.

He said most public servants inside the camps despite receiving wages and pensions have no means of withdrawing cash. Read more ...

Banking services for displaced

Banking services for more than 200,000 account holders in IDP welfare villages were expanded with the new fully fledged Bank of Ceylon branch opened at the Arunachalam welfare village Vavuniya this week.

The newly opened BoC branch has all the facilities like any other branch but special facilities like keeping the valuables and deeds in safe custody free of charge was a unique feature and there were lot of people waiting to open new accounts with us, BOC Deputy General Manager C. Samarasingha told Daily News yesterday.

Already there are 200,000 account holders, 6,850 public servants and 1,780 school teachers among them who deal with us and we provide our services to them with 7 mobile units since they concentrated on the IDP camps. But with the new branch at Arunachalam Welfare Village the people have the ability to open new accounts and ask their parents, relatives or custodians to remit money to them Samarasingha said. Read more ...