Gayan Kalinga

Career & case studies

Sixteen years, one thread: regulated finance.

From the lending desk to the platform team to the practice that builds them — every role on one page, the way a hiring manager would want to read it.

Timeline

  1. 2008–2011

    Banking operations · People's Bank of Sri Lanka

    General ledgers, reconciliation, clearing, back-office and regulatory compliance.

  2. 2011–2016

    Retail lending & collections · People's Bank of Sri Lanka

    Managed an LKR 1bn loan portfolio across personal, SME and business financing; built debt-recovery tooling improving collections on LKR 50M/month in non-performing assets.

  3. 2016–2022

    Assistant Manager, Digital Transformation · People's Bank of Sri Lanka

    Peoples Pay, LankaQR & JustPay, eKYC/vKYC, RLOS — the bank’s retail digital stack.

  4. 2022–now

    Senior PM → AVP → VP, FinTech & Operations · Arimac Lanka (Pvt) Ltd

    Scaled the practice 8→65+ engineers and 1→14 fintech products across South Asia & MENA. Hands-on with architecture, releases and DevOps.

  5. 2024–now

    Visiting Supervisor · Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT), Sri Lanka

    Final-year project supervision — ML/DL, FinTech systems, Agile and software project management.

Case studies

People's Bank · Digital banking platform

Peoples Pay — a 1M+ user mobile bank

Wallet and mobile banking for one of Sri Lanka’s largest state banks: 1M+ users, 4.6★ across 20,000+ reviews.

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People's Bank · Merchant acquiring

LankaQR & JustPay — 50,000 merchants in six months

National QR standard and instant-payment integration, taking the bank into merchant acquiring at speed.

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People's Bank · Digital onboarding

eKYC / vKYC — 60% faster customer onboarding

Digital and video KYC fused into Peoples Pay, cutting onboarding time by 60%.

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People's Bank · Lending platform

Morbius RLOS — a $5M loan origination rollout

Retail loan origination digitised across 100+ branches — and 1,000+ staff trained on the new way of lending.

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People's Bank · Core banking

Silverlake core banking — Loans & Collections module

Enhancing the heart of the bank: the loans and collections module of the Silverlake core.

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Arimac · AI risk platform

Sherlock — EDD & fraud risk management with AI

An AI platform for enhanced due diligence and fraud risk management: KYC onboarding, ongoing AML monitoring, video KYC, and ML-driven transaction fraud detection.

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Arimac · Leadership & regional delivery

Scaling a fintech practice across South Asia & MENA

From 8 to 65+ engineers and 1 to 14 products — payment aggregation, BNPL, wallets and digital KYC delivered with regional compliance know-how.

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Architecture

Systems designed across the stack — platform, microservices and payments. Diagrams are redrawn at the pattern level; no internal documents.

Platform · banking

Dual active-active Kubernetes platform

Two HA clusters in active-active, five-namespace tenancy isolating core banking, GPU-accelerated ML fraud detection and KYC workloads — GitOps via ArgoCD, secrets in Vault, images in Harbor, state in Oracle RAC.

HA1 · active HA2 · active core bank fraud · GPU kyc platform core bank fraud · GPU kyc platform ArgoCD · Vault Harbor · Oracle RAC

Microservices · ML

SEE — effort-estimation platform

From MSc research to running system: a hybrid LSTM–XGBoost model behind a BFF gateway with model, user-management and effort-calculation services, load-balanced. 23% RMSE improvement over standalone XGBoost; 40% over COCOMO.

frontend LB BFF model · LSTM+XGB user mgmt effort calc

Payments · pattern

Wallet & acquiring platform pattern

The shape behind Peoples Pay and Sherlock: channel apps over an API layer, with payment, KYC and risk services meeting the core bank and national rails behind compliance boundaries.

consumer app merchant app back office API gw payments kyc risk/ML core bank national rails