By Sal Laher

Every new market decision eventually becomes a test of confidence: can the country supply the talent, can the work scale, and can the rules hold long enough to matter. That is the lens through which we have looked at Sri Lanka, and across IFS and now IGT I, the answer to each of those questions has been the same.

For more than three decades, Sri Lanka has built a serious technology services industry with real depth, real clients and real global relevance. The Export Development Board identifies ICT services as the country’s second-largest export earner, supported by more than 500 companies and a workforce of around 146,000 people.

In 2025, ICT and BPM export earnings reached US$1.64 billion, overtaking tea as an export earner for the first time. That is worth pausing on. A knowledge industry has surpassed the country’s most iconic export, and it did so the hard way, with firms setting up where they could, growing as they could manage, and scaling within the limits of the space and infrastructure available in Colombo. If that was possible in a fragmented, piecemeal environment, the more useful question is what becomes possible when the physical, legal and financial architecture is built deliberately to support that kind of ambition. That is what Port City Colombo is for.

Most people in the industry will tell you the real figure runs higher still, because a great deal of the work is invoiced through offshore entities and never fully recorded here, and that tells you something important: the capability is world class and globally competitive, and what has been missing is an operating environment built to keep more of that value inside the country.

As someone with real skin in the game, I can say with confidence that Port City Colombo is that environment. IGT I moved early in March 2024 into the zone, and we had our first client shortly after. Since then we have grown to just over 500 people, with new clients and open offers that take us beyond our initial growth, serving international clients across the Americas, Europe, and Middle East, and we expect to pass our budgeted target for the year. I have opened operations in many countries over my career, and I have rarely seen one move at this speed.

The story did not begin from zero. It came from what we had already seen building IFS in Sri Lanka, where we experienced first-hand the quality of the talent here and the role this country could play inside a high-growth international technology company. The investors behind IFS then asked whether the same model could work for other companies in their portfolio. It was that question, on top of the experience we had built in Sri Lanka, that sparked IGT I: Ignite Global Talent. We understood that the capability already existed. It just needed the right commercial, flexible, and independent structure around it.

Port City Colombo is foundational to this in ways that are sometimes underestimated. Operating in a designated foreign currency environment removes layers of friction that global service businesses feel immediately, because payroll, client invoicing and procurement all become easier to manage when the currency framework is consistent. For a company serving global clients, that matters in ways that go beyond accounting tidiness, reducing hedging pressures and the small inefficiencies that accumulate across a business operating in two currencies at once.

The zone also empowers companies to think differently about talent. Where a role requires international expertise, the framework allows that conversation to happen more practically. At the same time, the pull for Sri Lankan professionals is real. Much of our hiring has come from professionals choosing to build their careers here, drawn by the scale of the work, direct exposure to international clients, and the chance to be part of something built from the ground up. That kind of pull is not something a financial model captures easily, but it is one of the strongest signals a new business district can send, particularly when it draws back talent that might otherwise have built its career overseas.

There is a wider point here. For years the best people have left for opportunities abroad, taking their skills and their earnings with them. Port City Colombo offers a way to keep more of that talent at home, in work that meets global standards and increasingly pays at a level that reflects it, with the contribution staying inside Sri Lanka’s economy.

None of this is guaranteed to continue on its own. The confidence that has brought companies like ours into the zone, and the talent that has followed, now needs protecting, and what it mostly comes down to is predictability. An investor can work with rules that are demanding and rules that are clear. What no one can plan around is a rule that keeps moving, and the sharpest example right now is how employees are taxed. The treatment of employee tax in the zone changed under the 2026 amendment to the Colombo Port City Economic Commission Act, moving from an open-ended exemption to a transitional period for existing entities and standard rates for new entrants. Whatever the merits of that specific change, the cost of leaving the position unsettled is higher than the cost of any particular rate, because uncertainty over employment costs is what stops an investor committing.

The same need for predictability runs through the everyday machinery of operating here. Port City Colombo is a world-class development still partly tethered to paper, physical signatures and processes that move more slowly than a global business expects, and that is not about any one institution but about the systems of the zone and the systems of the wider country learning to work together. A business environment built to attract international companies cannot ask them to run on manual processes where digital workflows should exist. Singapore launched TradeNet in 1989 and cut trade document turnaround from days to minutes. Dubai made its government fully paperless by 2021. That is the distance Sri Lanka still has to cover, and it is well within reach. I still spend a good part of my week on wet signatures, company seals and manual form entry, and closing that gap has to start somewhere. Digital signatures within Port City Colombo would be a logical first step.

I want to be fair about where things stand. The Cabinet approval of 77 Businesses of Strategic Importance in April 2026 is a meaningful public signal that the zone is moving from promise to activation. The foundations are real and the direction is right.

Which is why the question itself has changed. For years the doubt was whether a zone like this could work in Sri Lanka at all, and from where I sit, that question has begun to answer itself. The more important question now is how quickly the country makes it easy for the next ten companies to reach the same conclusion I have, and to find what we found when we looked properly: that the talent was always here, waiting for somewhere worthy of it, with the innovation, speed and digital ambition, including AI, to match, and that combination will set Port City Colombo apart in the years to come.

The author, Sal Laher, is Group CDIO and EVP at IFS, and Managing Director of IGT I Outsourcing Lanka.