Sri Lankan Offshore Accounting Dominance – with Deshaka Perera of H Connect International

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, we talk with Deshaka Perera, CEO of H Connect International. The company operates out of Sri Lanka and specializes in finance and accounting services. 

Deshaka opens us up to the accounting capabilities of the Sri Lankan workforce and how H Connect successfully evolves its offerings.  

H Connect International

After a brief introduction to the beautiful country of Sri Lanka, Deshaka explains what H Connect International is all about. 

“H Connect began in 2012 as part of a large group here in Sri Lanka. They wanted to set up a captive office here just to manage their whole global operations. 

Since then we moved into supporting global businesses and working with companies outside of Sri Lanka, especially in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada, to move companies’ back office functions, especially in the finance and accounting space, to Sri Lanka.” 

The company takes advantage of the large portion of accounting talent in the country. 

“H Connect International is in the space of sourcing these accountants and building them for global companies.” 

Sri Lanka as an accounting talent hub

Deshaka explains that the strength of Sri Lankan talent in finance and accounting goes back all the way to the year 2000. In the years since, the country has become quite proficient in the function. 

“I think one of the biggest reasons for Sri Lanka to be successful in this space is [we invite] lots of global professional qualifications like CPA, CMA, CCA to the country and have our own officers running their own qualifications.” 

He also praises higher education institutions, noting that 80,000 students select finance and accounting as a qualification. 

“That enabled an ecosystem for students,” he observes. 

Deshaka says that Sri Lanka is already deep in the BPO business, more than people probably realize. 

“Even though [Sri Lanka] is not known globally enough for the BPO business yet, in comparison to the Philippines, India, etc, a large number of captive operations for large businesses run out of Colombo.” 

He points out that many of these are finance and accounting-related processes. 

With many Indians and South Asians being visible in the IT and tech space, Deshaka hopes that the same perception will eventually extend to finance and accounting. 

“If you really see finance and accounting, it’s becoming quite strategic in every organization today. 

The accountant’s role has now changed significantly to become like a change agent to give sight to anybody.” 

Building future-ready specialists

Deshaka describes his vision for the accountants under his employ. 

“My vision for H Connect International and my team is about creating specialty. We create specialists, not generalists.” 

To achieve this, he invests in focused training that allows them to go beyond generic skill frameworks. 

“We spend quite a large number of hours in training to think like a CEO, think like a CFO, think like COO. Not just producing a set of data and [emailing] that to your clients. 

How do you add that value, looking at it and building in that knowledge base? I think that is what we are training them to think like.” 

H Connect even has a system where the teams stay up-to-date on current trends relevant to their verticals. 

Additionally, they’re on top of things when it comes to tech as well. 

“We put an entire digital ecosystem in place and we started to build a set of people called tech-enabled accountants.” 

When asked about AI, Deshaka quips that, “AI is definitely not going to replace the accountant, but AI is going to replace accountants who do not know how to use AI.” 

As with many leaders who have grown more pragmatic with the AI hype, Deshaka takes a strategic and careful approach.

“We are very careful. There’s lots of systems and tools out there, [but] data security is an extremely important segment in our operations. So we’re very protective in terms of selecting the types of tools.”   

You can visit H Connect International’s website to learn more. You can also write to Deshaka at [email protected].

If you’d like to ask us anything, feel free to send us an email at [email protected].