National Democratic Front MP Ravi Karunanayake has urged the government to modernise Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange and payment systems, warning that outdated regulations are suppressing tourism inflows, digital services and SME-led exports at a time when the country is trying to rebuild its external sector.
In a special statement delivered in Parliament on Tuesday, Karunanayake said there was a “significant mismatch” between evolving global payment practices and Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange and payments framework. He said restrictions and inefficiencies in currency acceptance, payment platforms and exchange mechanisms continued to hinder inflows, distort markets and impose costs on citizens and businesses despite rising tourist arrivals and the rapid growth of digital entrepreneurship among Sri Lankan youth.
The former finance minister tabled a series of questions for the Finance Minister, asking which currencies are officially recognised as “hard currencies” for transactions, settlement and reserves, and on what criteria that classification is made. He asked why the government had not operationalised or encouraged the acceptance of currencies such as the Russian rouble, Indian rupee, Chinese yuan and Japanese yen given current tourism flows, noting that Sri Lanka’s dependence on a narrow set of convertible currencies is cutting against its own external-sector strategy.
Karunanayake’s intervention comes as President Anura Kumara Dissanayake confirmed Sri Lanka will sign an IMF staff-level agreement for a combined $700 million disbursement and as a State Ministry-led delegation prepares for the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington from 13 April. The opposition MP, who is separately leading parliamentary scrutiny of CBSL’s supervisory failure over the NDB fraud, has positioned regulatory modernisation as a core part of Sri Lanka’s broader economic recovery agenda.
