Transformational innovator in life insurance honoured at Global CEO Forum

Rumesh Modarage

Rumesh Modarage, Chief Operating Officer and Specified Officer of Union Assurance PLC, and Senior Vice President of John Keells Holdings PLC, was honoured at the Global CEO Awards held at the Hilton Colombo, where he was distinguished as a high-performing leader under the age of 45. 

This recognition marks the culmination of a career shaped at the intersection of technical depth, strategic ambition, digital transformation, and a firm belief in the continued evolution and potential of Sri Lanka’s life insurance industry.

A company that earns its distinctions

Awards that recognise individuals rarely stand alone; they are often a reflection of the institutions that shape and support them. Union Assurance PLC has, over the years, cultivated a culture defined by ambition, continuous improvement, and a commitment to raising the bar within the industry, of which Rumesh Modarage stands as a powerful embodiment.

As a subsidiary of John Keells Holdings PLC, Union Assurance is anchored in one of Sri Lanka’s most respected conglomerates, while continuing to define its own trajectory of excellence. Under leaders like Rumesh, it has proactively advanced technology, elevated customer experience, and built future-ready talent, contributing meaningfully to the industry’s continued progress.

The Platinum Award is the latest milestone in this journey, underscoring Union Assurance’s contribution to shaping the future of Sri Lanka’s financial services sector.

Rethinking what insurance is for

Ask Rumesh why he entered insurance and he will not give you the answer most people expect. His entry was not incidental,  it was a deliberate choice anchored in a recognition of what the sector, at its best, represents: a commitment to protect individuals at their most critical moments. What drew him in and has sustained his commitment over the years is a deep conviction that the promise at the heart of insurance can always be delivered at its very best, through sharper systems, empowered people, and bold, forward-thinking approaches.

That perspective went on to shape everything that followed. “Insurance is not a product,” he says. “It is a promise. And the strength of that promise is defined by the strength of the systems and the people behind it.” It is a philosophy he has pursued not in boardroom presentations, but in the operational fabric of Union Assurance itself,  forging it through every process he has rebuilt, every team he has developed, and every standard he has raised.

Over 14 years, this philosophy has translated into meaningful operational transformation, not through rhetoric, but through outcomes that have steadily gained recognition across the industry. His brand of thought leadership is not declarative; it is demonstrable, grounded in tangible results that influence how progress is defined.

At the heart of his journey is a simple but powerful question: how can this be made better? It is a mindset that has informed every major initiative he has led, consistently contributing to the ongoing evolution of standards within Sri Lanka’s Life insurance landscape.

From Management Trainee to Industry Architect

Rumesh’s career began at one of the most valuable starting points - on the ground. His early years as a management trainee in finance provided him with a strong and practical foundation, offering a first-hand understanding of how the industry operates. This early exposure equipped him with insights and perspective that continued to inform his leadership journey, complementing his growth into more senior roles.

What he chose to build on that foundation was particularly distinctive. Rather than progressing within a single function, he cultivated a strong cross-functional perspective that would later define his leadership approach. He consistently sought to understand how different parts of the business connected, how underwriting shaped customer experience, how operational decisions influenced commercial outcomes, and how technology could be leveraged to enhance and evolve established practices.

The pivotal appointment came in 2020. At just 32, Rumesh became the youngest Specified Officers to lead a technical division in Sri Lanka’s life insurance industry, a milestone that reflects not accelerated progression alone, but the deep institutional trust placed in his governance capability, technical judgment, and forward-looking perspective on digital transformation as a strategic enabler of business value, alongside his readiness to lead highly regulated functions at scale.

The role carried expectations that extended beyond stewardship, calling for fresh thinking and progressive direction. It was a responsibility he approached with focus and intent.

His academic pursuits ran parallel to his professional ascent. Pursuing his MBA from the Postgraduate Institute of Management (PIM), University of Sri Jayewardenepura, alongside his operational responsibilities sharpened the strategic lens through which he approached every decision. And his attainment of Fellowship of the Chartered Insurance Institute UK (FCII) placed him among the youngest Sri Lankans to achieve the global profession’s most rigorous individual distinction, a deliberate signal that his ambitions were calibrated to international standards, not local ones.

In 2024, he was appointed Chief Operating Officer, a role that expanded his mandate across the full operational breadth of a modern life insurer. Today, he leads a team of over 100 professionals, and as Senior Vice President of John Keells Holdings PLC, he carries broader responsibilities within one of Sri Lanka’s leading conglomerates.

‘The industry-firsts’ that defined a career

The clearest measure of a leader’s impact is not the roles they have held, but the problems they have solved that no one had solved before. By that measure, Rumesh’s record is striking.

In partnership with Munich Re, he engineered a transformation of financial underwriting decisioning that compressed what had been a manual, multi-day review cycle into a process completed in under five minutes for qualifying cases. The project required not just technical architecture but the organisational will to challenge a process that had been considered immovable.

More consequential still was the digitalisation of medical examiner workflows, undertaken alongside Medihelp and Durdans Hospital. What had existed as a fragmented, paper-based clinical process was rebuilt as a fully integrated, technology-enabled underwriting model, a first for Sri Lanka’s life insurance industry. The achievement required cross-institutional trust-building, clinical credibility, and an absolute insistence that convenience and rigour were not in conflict.

The cumulative impact of these and related process innovations is best evidenced in a defining operational metric: straight-through processing rates increased from 30% to 70% under his leadership. This is not a marginal gain, but a structural step-change more than doubling processing capacity while driving improved efficiency, consistency, and scalability across the operation.

His sustainability credentials are equally grounded in substance. The e-policy initiative he spearheaded eliminates the paper equivalent of 286 fully grown trees annually, a measurable outcome that reflects the integration of responsible thinking into core operational design, rather than a focus on environmental optics. For Rumesh, sustainability and operational excellence are not competing priorities; they are inherently interconnected, each reinforcing the other.

Collectively, these industry-first initiatives earned him the Disruptive Innovation Award at the 2024 JKH Chairperson’s Awards, a recognition reserved for ideas that fundamentally reshape how value is created. They also position Rumesh Modarage as a defining force in the operational transformation of Sri Lanka’s life insurance sector, with innovations that extend beyond organisational impact to contribute to the continued elevation of industry standards.

He has also been instrumental in strengthening Union Assurance’s relationships with world-class global reinsurance partners like Munich Re, Hannover Re, RGA, and Partner Re, elevating the company’s standing within the international insurance community and ensuring its risk architecture reflects global best practice.

Where service excellence becomes the standard

Operational transformation, in isolation, is a technical achievement. What Rumesh has pursued at Union Assurance is something more ambitious: the alignment of process efficiency with customer meaning. The enterprise-wide implementation of the Net Promoter Score framework, anchored in deep, function-by-function customer journey mapping, was not a metrics project. It was a cultural one.

By embedding NPS not as a reporting instrument but as a continuous improvement mechanism, Rumesh ensured that every function within Union Assurance remained accountable to the customer experience its work produced. It is a model that recognises what the most effective service organisations have always known: that excellence cannot be mandated from the top. It has to be built into the way every team understands its purpose.

The trailblazer 

Beyond the titles and transformation milestones lies a defining aspect of Modarage’s leadership, one that extends beyond metrics: a consistent and intentional investment in people. At Union Assurance, talent development is not a structured initiative alone, but a lived practice, evident in how he leads, develops, and empowers those around him.

That conviction shapes how he has approached talent development within Union Assurance. The leaders he has mentored and developed represent, in his view, one of his most significant contributions, and he is equally clear that his own development as a leader owes everything to the people who invested in him. “Who I became,” he has reflected, “is inseparable from the leaders who believed in me before I had fully believed in myself.”

It is a philosophy of leadership that looks backward with gratitude and forward with obligation,  the understanding that every standard you set, you set for the generation of professionals watching how you operate.

The Platinum Award, in that sense, is more than a personal recognition. It is a statement about what leadership looks like when it is done with both excellence and integrity, and an invitation to the next generation of professionals in Sri Lanka’s Life insurance industry to raise their ambitions accordingly.