Well known ICT industry veteran Channa de Silva took reins as the Chief Executive Officer of LankaPay in December 2015. Mr. de Silva has been instrumental in driving the innovative payment solutions introduced by the company in the recent past and for the phenomenal growth achieved by the company in driving digital payments. He is also a member of the National Payment Council of the Central Bank. He was recently acknowledged as one of the “Most impactful CEOs to Watch for in 2024” by Enterprise World Magazine. Mr. de Silva counts for over 30 years of experience encompassing a spectrum of industries across several leading multinational and local organizations.

He currently serves as a member of the Board at Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Response Team (Sri Lanka CERT), Central Depositary System of the Colombo Stock Exchange and the Vice Chairman of the Federation of Information Technology Industry Sri Lanka (FITIS).

He goes down in history as Sri Lanka’s first ever webmaster with the development of Sri Lanka’s first commercial website http://www.lanka.net/ in 1994 and the engineer responsible for establishing the first ever dedicated Internet connection to Sri Lanka in 1995. Some of the major projects implemented under his leadership include the first online newspaper in the South Asia region (Daily News in 1995); first radio station on-line (TNL Radio in 1996) and first ever Wi-Fi network in the country; He was also a member of the local language workgroup of Sri Lanka and contributed immensely towards enabling people to use technology in local languages. He also played a pivotal role in ensuring that a Language Interface Pack was built in Sinhala and Tamil for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in 2007.

Prior to joining LankaPay he headed the Sri Lankan and Maldivian operations of Singapore based ICT giant Thakral One as the Senior Vice President. He was orchestral in introducing IBM’s software universe to Sri Lanka and developed IBM’s software business during his tenure as the DGM – Software Group of IBM Sri Lanka. Mr. de Silva also served as the Director – Enterprise and Public Sector Business at Microsoft Sri Lanka where he was acknowledged for outstanding achievements with Microsoft Gold Club Excellence Award for exceptional performance and Microsoft Share Fighter Champion for winning against competition.

An Old boy of Royal Collage Colombo, Mr. de Silva obtained his BSc. (Honours) and MSc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the State University of New York, USA specialized in Data Communication. He also holds an MBA from the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM) Sri Lanka and the distinguished membership at the IEEE (USA), Tau Beta Pai (USA), Eta Kappa Nu (USA) and Golden Key (USA) for academic excellence.