2009.
Year Founded
Life Line Group was founded in Colombo in 2009 with a single business loan worth LKR 400,000. Seventeen years later we operate fourteen branches across the island — but the first question we ask every applicant is still the same: what are you trying to build?
Life Line Group started the way a lot of good Sri Lankan businesses start — around a kitchen table in Nugegoda, with a ledger book and the conviction that family-run shops and small manufacturers deserved better credit than the market was offering them.
Our founder, Dilshan Perera, had spent ten years inside one of the country's largest banks and had grown tired of watching good applications get declined for paperwork reasons. He set out to build a finance company where a credit officer could actually sit across from the borrower and look them in the eye.
Seventeen years later we're still privately held, still family-run, and still underwriting every single business loan the same way: with a site visit, a conversation, and a genuine assessment of character alongside the numbers.
We've grown from one office to fourteen, from three staff to 280, and from a LKR 10M loan book to over LKR 18B — but the ratio that matters most has barely moved. 92% of our borrowers come back to us for a second product.
Three founding staff. First loan disbursed to a Panadura textile shop for LKR 400,000.
Galle branch opens; fixed deposit book crosses LKR 500M.
Formally licensed; gold-loan and mortgage products launched.
Rescheduled loans for 1,800 SME customers through the pandemic without a single foreclosure.
Tenth consecutive year of profitable operations and deposit-book growth.
Kurunegala branch brings the network across all nine provinces.
Every business loan over LKR 1M gets a site visit before approval. We've never outsourced this, and we never will.
If we're not the right lender for a customer, we'll tell them in the first meeting — and point them to who is.
The people who save with us have to come before the people who borrow from us. We haven't missed an interest payment in 17 years.
Our leadership team averages 19 years of banking and finance experience across Sri Lanka. Three of the four have been with Life Line for more than a decade.