Mastercard has placed Sri Lankan executives at the head of an integrated South Asia operating group covering Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, the payments network said in a statement reported by Newswire.
Sandun Hapugoda, who currently runs Mastercard’s Sri Lanka and Maldives business and serves as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Sri Lanka, has been promoted to Group Country Manager with responsibility for all five markets, effective immediately. He continues to report to Division President for South Asia Gautam Aggarwal. Mahesha Amarasuriya, previously Director for Sri Lanka, has been promoted to Country Manager for Sri Lanka and will report to Hapugoda.
Mastercard framed the restructuring as a response to “growing synergies” across the five markets in tourism, cross-border trade and digital-payments innovation. Aggarwal said the integrated leadership model was designed to “unlock synergies across tourism, trade and digital payments” and called Hapugoda and Amarasuriya leaders with “deep market insight and a strong track record of execution”.
Hapugoda has supported Mastercard’s Sri Lanka and Maldives operations through the post-restructuring expansion of digital payments and has sat on committees of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, the Ministry of Technology and the National Science Foundation. Amarasuriya brings more than 23 years of corporate, retail and private banking experience along with leadership roles at the CIMA Global Council, and holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Colombo and an MBA from the Postgraduate Institute of Management at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, where she graduated valedictorian.
The appointment of a Colombo-based group leader for a five-market portfolio is a rare reversal of the more common South Asia operating template, in which regional leadership is anchored out of Mumbai or Dubai. The change positions Sri Lanka — a market with strong tourism arrivals momentum and a rebuilding cross-border payments framework — as the operating hub for Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan’s smaller but faster-growing card-payments ecosystems.
The Sri Lanka portfolio also intersects with the CBSL’s recent move on residual export proceeds, which raises the rupee-conversion floor across cross-border merchant settlements and feeds directly into the volumes Hapugoda’s group will be expected to grow.
