Anu Widyalankara

Anu is a Payments Strategy and Technology Director in the UK Payments Practice at EY. She has deep expertise panning over 17 years in Financial Services, leading and delivering Payments strategy, M&A integration, complex transformation and new payments product development to financial services and cross-sector payments clients, focusing on domestic, cross border payments and Transactional Banking. She has strong leadership, strategy and change management experience gained in a variety of challenging roles.

With a focus on designing and delivering payments innovation and payments strategy, Anu supports CEOs, CFOs, CTO’s and CIO’s through technology transformation and operating model change implementation. She specialises in key payments innovations and infrastructure such as Generative AI in payments, cross border payments, interoperability of domestic rails, quantum computing, CBDCs and digital assets, APP fraud and financial crime, real-time payments, ISO20022, SWIFT gpi, RTGS, Open Banking and UK New Payments Architecture. Her experience also extends to corporate treasury services, merchant services, instant payments infrastructure and FX product development ​. She has led the growth and advisory for FinTechs in the market and has driven a number of innovation topics. She currently manages a number of Payments sector alliances for EY. She has a proven track record of leading and motivating teams to deliver large scale change within multi-stakeholder environments. Able to operate at all organisational levels to build strong working relationships and successfully develop people into high performing project teams