56 business services now use MyInfo, after bank trial: GovTech
The government portal helps the public do away with time-consuming paperwork and online forms
Singapore
SOME 56 business services have tied up with a digital government vault for personal information, about a year after a pilot scheme was rolled out in the banking sector.
The new corporate partners join 100 public services available through the MyInfo platform, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore said, after a closed-door ministerial session on Thursday morning.
The platform can be used to automate electronic applications for services such as public housing, based on the personal data of Singapore's 3.3 million SingPass holders.
Business adoption of the MyInfo system follows a trial in May last year, when four banks let customers use the cache of personal data to open accounts and sign up for credit cards.
Financial institutions got the go-ahead this February to use biometric identification or other secure digital signatures - such as MyInfo - to meet "know your customer" security rules.
Since a software developer portal was set up last year, more than 150 companies have expressed interest in moving onto the platform, Smart Nation Minister-in-charge Vivian Balakrishnan told Parliament in March.
And, amid the expansion into the private sector, the data-sharing platform snared its first telco partner on Thursday. M1 has integrated SingPass-based MyInfo authentication with its one-year-old M1 Remit money transfer service. This does away with the need for remittance service customers to register in person at one of just two available branches.
Meanwhile, real estate website SRX's myHome Finance loan platform, also released on Thursday, taps MyInfo to automatically fill in mortgage applications, even as an artificial intelligence engine helps would-be buyers to pick out a loan product.
SRX chief technology officer Jeremy Lee said in a media statement that the new process takes the sting out of "vast amounts of paperwork or online forms". "All you need is your SingPass and you're on your way to saving money in a matter of minutes".
Other businesses now using MyInfo include insurer Aviva and peer-to-peer lender Funding Societies, which aims to serve small and medium-sized companies' financing needs.
Singapore Press Holdings, which publishes The Business Times, holds a 13.45 per cent stake in M1 and owns 60 per cent of SRX parent StreetSine.
The government's goal is to have 160 public services linked to the system by the end of the year, which is also when the SingPass Mobile two-factor authentication app is expected to be ready. Such initiatives are meant to pave the way for a planned national digital identity service, slated to be operational by 2020.
