Licensed Finance Companies in Sri Lanka (CBSL Register)

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka publishes seven separate registers of the institutions it authorises, each under its own statute and each with its own “as at” date. There is no single list and no search box on the CBSL site, so a saver comparing a 14% fixed-deposit offer has to know which of the seven to open. This page merges all of them, 132 entries covering 80 institutions, of which 65 may lawfully accept deposits from the public, and answers in one keystroke pair.

The seven registers and the Acts behind them

• 24 Licensed Commercial Banks and 6 Licensed Specialised Banks, Banking Act, No. 30 of 1988.
• 31 Licensed Finance Companies, Finance Business Act, No. 42 of 2011.
• 47 Registered Finance Leasing Establishments , Finance Leasing Act, No. 56 of 2000, published in three groups (banks, specialised banks, finance companies).
• 4 Licensed Microfinance Companies, Microfinance Act, No. 6 of 2016.
• 8 Authorized Money Broking Companies and 12 Primary Dealers, authorised under the Central Bank of Sri Lanka Act.

The matching rule, in order

This is a lookup, not an arithmetic tool, so the methodology is the matching rule. Both your query and every published name are reduced to two keys. First they are lower-cased, decomposed to strip accents, and every character that is not a letter or a digit becomes a space. Then the tokens that say what kind of company it is, PLC, Ltd, Limited, Pvt, Private, Co, Company, Corporation, are dropped, because they identify nothing. What is left is joined with single spaces to give a normalised key, and joined with none to give a space-stripped key. So L B Finance PLC, LB Finance and l.b. finance plc all reduce to the same key, lbfinance.

Five steps then run in sequence, and the first that finds anything wins: exact match on the space-stripped key; exact match on the normalised key; the published name starting with what you typed; every word you typed appearing in the name in any order; and finally a Damerau-Levenshtein distance of up to two, measured against both the whole name and its beginning, which is what catches Senkadagla for Senkadagala Finance PLC and Vallible for Vallibel Finance PLC. Short queries get a budget of one error rather than two, because two errors on a four-letter query would match half the register. Below two characters nothing runs at all, and a query that reduces to nothing but company-type words says so instead of returning a false negative.

Because the keys are shared across registers, the tool then collects every register an institution appears in. L B Finance PLC is entry 16 of 31 among the licensed finance companies andentry 16 in the leasing register; Bank of Ceylon is a commercial bank, a registered leasing establishment and a primary dealer. Spelling differences between the registers do not break that, the finance-company register writes “Central Finance Co.PLC” and the leasing register writes “Central Finance Co PLC”, and both reduce to centralfinance.

Why notices outrank the register

A register page can lag a press release, and the question a saver is really asking is not “is the name on a list” but “can this company lawfully take my money”. So 20 CBSL enforcement notices are overlaid after matching, and a cancelled licence, a suspended business, a winding-up application or a freezing order is reported above register membership, even when a register row still lists the institution. Perpetual Treasuries Limited is the case that proves it: still entry 12 of 12 in the Primary Dealers register, and suspended from primary-dealer business since 2017 by an order CBSL has extended every six months. Six companies that were never CBSL licensees are listed too, because they are under freezing orders under section 44 of the Finance Business Act, and someone typing one of those names is exactly the person who needs the answer.

How the transcription is checked

Three cross-checks run every time the page renders, and their results are printed inside the tool card rather than kept private. The first compares the entries transcribed for each register against the count CBSL publishes on that register page. The second is the independent one: CBSL groups its leasing register under the banks and finance companies it belongs to, so each of its 47 entries must also resolve, through the same normalisation, to an entry in the register it is grouped under, a mistyped name on either side breaks the pairing, and the two registers were published on different dates and spell several names differently. 47 of 47 currently resolve. The third re-runs ten hand-computed examples, including the empty query, one-character input, a single over-broad word and a transposed letter, and checks the verdict, the matching step and the institution each one lands on.

Every count and every as-at date on this page is rendered from the data module, never typed into the page. That is deliberate: a figure written into page copy goes stale silently, which is how two other calculators on this site published months-old numbers before the data was centralised.

• CBSL: Authorized Financial Institutions (all seven registers)
• CBSL: Licensed Commercial Banks (24 entries, as at 31 May 2026)
• CBSL: Licensed Specialised Banks (6 entries, as at 31 May 2026)
• CBSL: Licensed Finance Companies (31 entries, as at 09.09.2026)
• CBSL: Registered Finance Leasing Establishments (47 entries, as at 09 September 2026)
• CBSL: Licensed Microfinance Companies (4 entries, as at 28 May 2025)
• CBSL: Authorized Money Broking Companies (8 entries, as at 20 February 2025)
• CBSL: Primary Dealers (12 entries, as at 05 July 2026)
• CBSL: Press releases, Non-Bank Financial Institutions (enforcement notices)
• CBSL: Non-Bank Finance and Leasing Sector overview

All 132 register entries and 20 enforcement notices on this page were transcribed from the CBSL pages above on 2026-10-02, and are re-checked quarterly. Each register keeps CBSL's own as-at date, because they are republished on different schedules. A name CBSL has not published with a notice date and a notice URL is not listed in the enforcement table at all. This page reports licence status only. It is not a credit rating, not advice, and makes no judgement about any institution's financial strength.