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In commemoration of International Women’s Day 2022, Just In Time Group spoke to a few of our female employees from different departments, within the organization to find out their thoughts on what ’International Women’s Day’ means to them.

This is what they had to say…

The theme of 2022’s International Women’s Day is “#BreakTheBias: Imagine a gender-equal world.”

What does that phrase mean to you when it comes to your career?

Ruwini: “Gender-Equal World” sounds like a world that is peaceful, beautiful, prosperous, and a world where women do not have to worry about the breach of fundamental rights. A world where women can conquer anything without being discriminated.  

Dulanka: If you can do better in your career with your knowledge, hard work, and your experience, then gender doesn’t matter at all. I believe, women never expect gender equality, but they expect proper respect from everyone to build their confidence and career and therefore provide a maximum contribution towards the organization.

“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish”

– Michelle Obama –

Samanmali: Considering the workplace, gender equality means to have equal opportunities, resources and rewards for both men and women alike. It also should address equal participation in the workforce and equity in leadership regardless of gender.

My job requires a lot of effort, responsibility and commitment and this is the same for all my colleagues who work with me regardless of their gender.

***

Which women support and inspire you on your career path? These examples can include leaders, celebrities, trailblazers, colleagues, family, etc.

Ruwini: Any woman who is determined, loyal, fearless, resilient, and has a beautiful heart would inspire me. It can be my mother, my boss or it can be the janitor who comes to clean my room.

I admire my beautiful mother, Anna Wintour – Editor in Chief Vogue. I love her courage and determination.

Here at JIT, it is definitely my boss, Sherene Goonetilleke, the COO of Just In Time Group. She is determined, very loyal, and has a beautiful heart.

Dulanka: It is difficult to mention only one as there are many women who supported and inspired me during my career.

For one, my mother supported and inspired me in every move throughout my life. She always guides me and shares good advice. I am happy to have my mother as my best friend who inspires me every day, every moment.

I have worked in many organizations for years, but I haven’t found such a supportive woman like Rajika Suriyapathirana in my career. She is the Head of Finance and Administration at JIT. She always shares her knowledge and experiences with the team to become a better version of ourselves.

She is an inspiration, especially when she helps us during our tough times.

“Every woman’s success should be an inspiration to another. We’re strongest when we cheer each other on”

 – Serena Williams –

Sammanmali: From my childhood, my grandmother was a huge inspiration to everything I do. She was a superwoman who always spread the “can do” attitude.

When considering my career path, I was self-inspired and self-directed.

***

What gender-specific challenges, stereotypes, or barriers have you had to overcome during your career?

Ruwini: We all face challenges in life. Challenges are there for both men and women. But what is most important is to uplift each other. Women should uplift each other. Sadly, this isn’t happening.

One of the biggest challenges I have seen is that women degrade other women. We will never be able to imagine a gender-equal world if women do not support each other. I think it’s time to break this cycle.

Dulanka: As long as a woman has mastered her line of work and has proven she is capable of her job, she can overcome all obstacles.

***

How do you think the mission of JIT ties into the theme of “#BreakTheBias: Imagine a gender-equal world” celebrated this International Women’s Day?

Ruwini: JIT has given many opportunities to women to be leaders, where we do not see any gender bias which is why I feel so at home. The only thing that I would encourage is that women should uplift each other. We should be women that fix other women’s crowns. Not the ones who break it.

Dulanka: The mission of JIT ties into the theme perfectly, as we can see women been represented in the senior management team and across department head positions. This shows equality given to women at JIT, with no bias, as well as respect for women’s ideas and decisions.

“Doubt is a killer. You just have to know who you are and what you stand for” 

– Jennifer Lopez

Sammanmali:  JIT is one of the leading ICT companies that could be considered as a role model for a gender-equal world as JIT always treats its employees well regardless of their gender. This doesn’t even come to question for me, as we are all one team and one family here.

***

Just In Time Group (JIT) announced two new appointments to its senior leadership team with great stride and abundance for future growth in the company and stakeholders.

Joining as General Manager – Delivery and Services, Raj Alagendran is a multi-faceted, manager who has proven expertise of consistently and successfully delivering large scale projects, working at multi nationals all over the globe. Raj brings with him 30 years of hands-on experience in building and operating global shared services. He has managed projects in a number of professional areas like engineering and education. American Express, International Baccalaureate and Alstom are a few examples of companies that he has been a part of and consequentially brought them immense success. Alagendran holds an Executive MBA from the Sydney Business School at the University of Wollongong Australia. He also holds a Bachelor of commerce from the University of New South Wales in the field of International Finance.

“Team JIT is very pleased to welcome strong industry experts such as Damitha and Raj into our leadership team where their wealth of knowledge, extensive experience and insights will no doubt, add greater value to our Group and contribute to our sustained growth as an organisation,” said Chief Executive Officer Chrishan Mendis.

JIT commenced operations in 1996 as a single entity in a 100sq ft. basement office – a journey which started 23 years ago. Since its humble beginnings, JIT has grown from a team of four members to a group of 290 employees with varied Information and Communications Technology (ICT) offerings ranging from systems integration to Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Furthermore, JIT was the only local company recognised in the APAC CIO Outlook magazine’s Annual Top 25 Government and Public Sector Technology Providers for 2017. With over 23 years of excellence, JIT provides cutting-edge integrated solutions to telecommunications, government, health, defence, and financial sectors.Damitha Jayawardena with a career spanning over 16 years at JIT with vast experience in strategic sales will Head the Sales Team. He is promoted from the position of General Manager – Strategic Sales. He has been instrumental in crafting the customer’s requirements to achieve the overall business objective and this skill along with his immense experience at JIT and the IT industry as a whole is a catalyst for the tremendous growth JIT has seen over the last few years. He has a proven record of success and his accomplishments span the telco, banking and government sectors. His education is rooted at University of Colombo where he received a B.Sc. in Science and Business Management and an MBA in Marketing.

Analytics to streamline anti-money laundering

Risk professionals are always concerned about the known, unknown and unknowable across their firms – especially when it comes to money laundering activities within their firms. Money laundering – the process of hiding the illicit origin of money – has been on the rise for years.

If organisations fail to swiftly detect and curb money-laundering activities, its executives and board will risk negative publicity, reputation, along with aggressive fines and penalties. Over the past few years, numerous firms have been fined hundreds of millions – and in some cases, more than a billion dollars – over AML lapses, which excludes the remediation costs of increasing staff and hiring consulting firms to assist in the effort.

Identifying threats is getting harder. It requires increasingly sophisticated analytical tools and data visualisations that make it easier to identify and understand new and evolving threats.

In response to the growth in money laundering and terrorist financing activities worldwide, regulators have stepped up compliance mandates. Firms are quickly finding themselves under oversight scrutiny. Because of enhanced regulatory pressure to continuously evaluate the firm’s risks, identify emerging trends, report suspicious activity and expediently make changes, firms are seeking out new and aggressive approaches.

Today, it’s no longer enough to use standard technologies and controls and accept any undetected money laundering as part of doing business. Rather, regulators are requiring firms to be more proactive, innovative and thorough – for example, by using big data analytics and visualisations to uncover new and emerging risks. These technologies make it easier to pinpoint more indicators of risk – including indicators that may not have been visible before. They also eliminate guesswork and enable earlier detection.

But progress toward meeting these requirements is being hindered by many challenges. For example, data is typically scattered across different systems, with no sole source of truth readily available. This makes it difficult to analyse data using traditional AML tools; the process takes too much time and resources to get the job done. By the time anomalies indicating emerging risks are detected, damage has already been done.

In addition, risk managers typically rely on static spreadsheets and reporting, which aren’t designed to help people detect anomalies and quickly find “the needle in the haystack.” Plus, static reports and spreadsheets can’t be used to provide fast answers to the complex questions being raised by executives today.

To meet these demands, the AML industry has turned to analytical/statistical methodologies to improve monitoring programs by reducing false-positive alerts, increasing monitoring coverage, and reducing the rapidly escalating financial cost of maintaining an AML program.

Already struggling to control costs, firms are continuously scrutinising the economic cost to perform AML compliance. AML officers are judged not only on their ability to react to regulatory changes and quickly implement solutions, but also their accountability for AML program expenses. AML officers are increasingly required to play multiple roles, and it takes real leadership to balance and manage these expectations.

Segmentation is the logical first step.

A typical anti-money laundering (AML) transaction monitoring program has scenarios that monitor the customers and accounts that pose the most risk to the institution. The one-size-fits-all methodology isn’t very effective. That’s because customers transact differently based on many factors.

An effective AML transaction monitoring strategy begins with a sound foundation for monitoring customer activities − and a quality segmentation model provides just that foundation. Banks can begin with segmenting the customer base by analysing customer activity and risk characteristics.

Segmentation is the primary foundation for risk-based scenario threshold setting, and the quality of the segmentation model directly affects the transaction monitoring system’s ability to perform in an effective and efficient manner.

The SAS approach – The SAS approach to segmentation generally requires three primary activities:
1. Customer, account or external entity population segmentation (or a combination thereof).
2. Further refinement of individual segments into peer groups (only needed if anomaly detection will be performed).
3. Initial threshold setting (needed to assign the scenario threshold parameter values to use initially prior to the first scenario tuning and model verification project).

In addition, SAS adheres to the guiding principles of OCC 2011-12 when developing, implementing and validating segmentation and peer group models, including the process of initial threshold setting.

Clearly, financial institutions of all types and sizes need to beef up their BSA compliance efforts. The challenge is that high transaction volumes from online and mobile banking services give criminals considerable cover for money laundering schemes. Identifying a suspicious transaction is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Saying so, Chartis Research, a leading provider of research and analysis on the global market for Risk Technology has ranked SAS as the ‘Category Leaders’ for Anti-Money Laundering Solutions in the RiskTech Quadrant 2017.

The report states how SAS supports banks across a range of fraud and financial crime risks, via a comprehensive suite of solutions delivered through a global network of professional services and system integration partners. It also mentions the differentiating elements of SAS’s solution which include the significant investment in financial crime risk management that underpins it, and its enterprise approach as well as SAS’s data aggregation capabilities, combined with analytics and visualisation, to support a holistic view of financial crime risk management.

Rapidly increasing risk – combined with evolving government regulations – requires an advanced strategy when it comes to monitoring data for illicit activity. With SAS’s risk-based approach, firms can manage alerts easily, test scenarios and comply with industry regulations:

Get quick, accurate alerts: Know if suspicious activity is happening. Manage alerts from a centralised system, making it easier to preserve data security, minimise IT support costs and promote collaboration across the enterprise

Easily track flow of funds: Enables to see debits and credits, as well as variation in volume of funds between entities.

Be transparent. And compliant: Automatically monitor suspicious behavior, document the decision process and, if applicable, file pre-populated reports with the appropriate authorities.

Find the best scenario and take the best action: SAS high-performance visualisation tools significantly reduce the time required to analyse data, visualise patterns, hypothesise monitoring strategies and validate scenario deployments.

Instantly access the information you need: In an industry that moves fast, you don’t need complicated user interfaces slowing you down. SAS Anti-Money Laundering technology has an interface that’s designed to facilitate quick, accurate decisions – which means all the information you need is one or two clicks away.

SAS is Just In Time Group’s (JIT) strategic ICT Partner in Sri Lanka, who is dominant leader in ICT Systems and Solutions Integrator to the country. JIT’s 21+ Year success with their longstanding customers, strategic principals and committed employees have been the catalyst for JIT’s success and bringing many landmark projects with cutting edge technology to the country and making Sri Lanka’s mark in the global ICT map.

JIT’s key strengths are focused on systems integration, software solutions, network and infrastructure, hardware, mobility, outsourcing IT professionals, professional services, information security services, maintenance and support services, etc.

Just In Time Group holds JIT Solutions Day 2018

Just In Time Group (JIT) held its ‘JIT Solutions Day 2018’ invitee-only event exclusively for its customers last week, at Hilton Colombo.

The objective of this event was to introduce JIT’S proven solutions to its customers and strategic partners, by providing new technologies with valueadded information specific to each industry vertical.

The event was split into two segments: the morning session, themed ‘Tech Disruption’ and the afternoon session, themed ‘Tech Space’, both of which extensively served the purpose of conveying information and guidance to JIT’S customer base.

The morning session kicked off to a welcome speech by JIT Group CEO Chrishan Mendis, followed by the first topic of the day, ‘Continuous Disruption: Are You Ready?’, hosted by CA Technologies Chief Technology Officer Asia Pacific and Japan Stephen Miles, where he covered digital transformation challenges, creating an agile business, building better apps faster, making security a competitive advantage and modernising IT architectures. Gemalto Asia President and Government Business Unit and Singapore Country Head Teck Lee Tan took over the spotlight with a presentation on ‘Enabling a Trusted Digital Environment in Sri Lanka’.

‘Next Generation Businesses Powered By APIS’ was the following topic covered by Axiata Group Chief Information Officer Anthony Rodrigo. He distinguished that “practically every industry has been or will be disrupted” and spoke on the disruption of both the banking and telco industries.

He stressed on the importance of application programming interfaces (APIS) in disruption of technology and unveiled a case study on how telcos are transforming the businesses with APIS. “An API is a very useful mechanism that allows two pieces of software to exchange messages or data in a standard format. Thus, it becomes an instrument to search for new revenue streams, open the doors to talent or automate processes in an innovative way.”

Concluding the energetic ‘ice breaker session’, Infosec Regional APJ and Risk Advocate RSA Ramon Karingal presented on ‘Are You Ready With Data Privacy?’, where he covered the risk challenge, regulatory burden, ‘what’s needed to close the gap’, a strategy to manage data privacy and the proven path to take command of risk, followed by datawerks CTO and Founder Tony Andris presenting on ‘Draining The Data Swamp’, where Andris discussed the evolution of modern data architecture, the end of data duplication, ‘Data lakes = data swamps’, Internet of things (IOT) and m2m, resulting in massive data sets and real-time enablement being key. The event moved on to a live discussion, which was moderated by Daily FT Editor Nisthar Cassim, which was on ‘Regulatory Economy Vs Disruptive Economy’, which closed the morning session.

The afternoon session, ‘Tech Space’ was entertained by technical sessions designed with six track sessions covering banking, telco, enterprise, security, government and emerging technology.

Ending the afternoon session, the evening was concluded with a cocktail evening to connect, network and celebrate with JIT Group’s stakeholders and customers.

Just In Time Group (JIT), the leading ICT Systems and Solutions Provider, commemorated their 20 years in business by launching its 20 Reading Corners Project – ‘Today a Reader – Tomorrow a Leader’, under its CSR initiative.

This project, which commenced late 2016, was an idea that emerged from the JIT workforce, to create this overall development initiative for children in children’s homes to commemorate the company’s 20th anniversary. The staff of JIT thought it would be fitting to do something sustainable and long lasting such as inculcating and promoting the habit of reading in children – our future generation rather than a celebration for the company’s 20th anniversary. This idea then transpired into the Reading Corner initiative – to develop and improve the current reading resources and spaces at children’s homes and schools in need across Sri Lanka. 20 Reading Corners Project became the commemoration of JIT’s 20-year anniversary.

Today, 20 Reading Corners Later, (the 20th having been completed this April) children’s homes and under privileged rural schools across Sri Lanka who didn’t have adequate reading resources and a conducive space – will now have access to a selected and requested range of literature at their very own special “Reading Corner”. This is thanks to the Reading Corner project spearheaded by JIT and their CSR Team, with the continuous support of the JIT Staff. The sustainability of this project was aimed at creating the right reading space conducive to inspire children to read further and develop the benefits of what books have to offer.

This is the key objective, which will create continuous value and sustainability for the project. The JIT staff gets involved from the point of selecting the homes, ascertaining their need, selecting the books, identifying the space for the reading corner to everything that goes into making that space a Reading Corner equipped with furniture, age appropriate books interior layout, stationery, etc.

“Working to create a better future every day for our country’s children is a cause JIT is passionate about. We want to inculcate and encourage the habit of reading for children across the island, thereby playing our part in shaping well rounded individuals for the future,” shared, JIT Group Manager of PR and Corporate Communications Dhanya Gunawardana.

“Thank you so much for your contribution by arranging this special and lovely Reading Corner for the Girls at St John’s Girls Home. It was so good to see the children enjoying reading and making use of the place so much..” as testified by Sister Chandrani Peiris from St John’s Girls Home, Moratuwa which was a recipient of one of the Reading Corners.

JIT was honoured that it’s CSR efforts were validated by Asia Pacific HRM Congress in 2017 by receiving the award for ‘Best CSR Practices’ in the ICT sector at the Asia Pacific HRM Congress Awards 2017 held in Bangalore, India. According to the Asia Pacific HRM Congress – the organisers of the event, the objective of the awards is to promote sustainable corporate responsibility and investment in the social development within the company and for their stakeholders at large. The award was conferred for JIT based on their commitment to the society and on the originality of the work.

For JIT, this CSR award and recognition was an unexpected honour and acknowledgement of their CSR efforts and practices implemented. “This award validated JIT’s efforts in making a difference in the lives of these children and was extremely humbled by this recognition. Whether it is our commitment to diversity, our support for future generations who need to be empowered – our steadfast approach to ethics and governance, our care for the environment in which we live, the entire JIT team has embraced CSR as the transformation that is needed to be accountable as a business leader for the future,” commented Gunawardana.

At the opening of JIT’s 20th and final Reading Corner project, at to Eventide Salvation Army Girls Home, Captain Manjula, Head Matron shared that, “It is a peaceful and fun reading space where the girls now can use their free time meaningfully. We actually wanted to create a library space for the girls, so this came as a blessing in disguise. They can now choose the books to read or re-read and call it their own. We are truly grateful for this reading corner along with all the girls.”

Furthermore JIT validated their efforts towards transformative CSR and to enter into the age of responsibility, by becoming the first corporate in Sri Lanka to be assessed with the ‘Transformative CSR 2.0 Assessment Tool’ which is an internationally recognised diagnostic tool for CSR. A team of members from CSR Sri Lanka conducted a workshop for Just In Time Group, to assess their current operations against systematic sustainability benchmarks. Just In time Group was the first corporate in Sri Lanka to use the internationally recognised diagnostic tool CSR 2.0; demonstrating their investment towards transformative CSR and to enter into the age of responsibility.

The aim of this assessment was to evaluate JIT’s current awareness to align business strategies towards achieving a long-term value creation through systematic sustainability.