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Ministry of Digital Development and Information
Press releases

Building A Smart Nation With Tangible Benefits For Our Citizens And Businesses

28 February 2020

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Building A Smart Nation With Tangible Benefits For Our Citizens And Businesses

28 Feb 2020

  • Significant progress made to improve quality of life of citizens and support businesses with Smart Nation initiatives

    • Further enhancements of Government digital services this year

    • Launch of Smart Nation showcases and initiatives for Singaporeans to partner us in co-creation of our digital future

Significant progress has been made in delivering digital solutions that improve the quality of life of citizens, and support businesses in their operations. The Government will continue to build up the essential capabilities for a Smart Nation, and work with citizens to create more opportunities through digital transformation.

DELIVERING SOLUTIONS AND BENEFITS TO CITIZENS AND BUSINESSES

The Government has progressively built up the digital infrastructure and engineering capabilities as the foundation of our Smart Nation. These enable us to respond decisively to emerging challenges with digital technology. One clear example is our swift response to the COVID-19 outbreak. We developed digital tools to disseminate timely and accurate information to Singaporeans, and to help our fellow agencies better manage the crisis.

Responding to COVID-19 with Technology

  • MaskGoWhere – A website that helped Singaporean households find the designated location, day and time to collect their allocation of masks. Launched on 1 February 2020, the website registered more than 900,000 visits within the first two days.

  • FluGoWhere – A website to enable quick and easy search of Public Health Preparedness Clinics providing special subsidies for those diagnosed with respiratory illnesses. The website has registered more than 470,000 visits since its launch on 14 February 2020.

  • Gov.sg WhatsApp Channel – To date, 635,000 unique subscribers have signed up for this service to receive timely and trusted updates on the COVID-19 situation.

  • Ask Jamie chatbot – Since 1 February 2020, the enhanced chatbot has addressed more than 72,000 queries related to the virus, and helped to reduce overall call centre volumes.

  • COVID-19 Chat for Biz – Businesses can learn about updates to the situation and measures from Budget 2020 to assist sectors that are affected by COVID-19 through the chatbot. The chatbot has recorded about 980 sessions and answered close to 3,000 queries since its launch on 19 February 2020.

  • Leave of Absence (LOA) & Stay-Home Notice (SHN) Tracking Solution – An SMS and mobile web-based solution that allows people serving out their LOA or SHN to report their locations to the Ministry of Manpower. Launched on 10 February 2020, this served as the first level of verification of compliance for close to 12,000 foreign employees.

INCREASED SATISFACTION WITH GOVERNMENT DIGITAL SERVICES

3. Improvements to Government digital services have led to a rise in public satisfaction. The latest Government-to-Citizens and Government-to-Businesses surveys commissioned by SNDGG showed a year-on-year jump of 8% for citizens (from 78% to 86%) and 8% increase for businesses (69% to 77%) respectively. 1500 citizens and 1500 businesses participated in the surveys, which were conducted from October to December 2019. These are the highest satisfaction rates achieved since the survey started in 2012.

FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS TO DIGITAL E-SERVICES WITH CITIZENS AND BUSINESSES IN MIND

This year, we will push ahead with more improvements to our digital offerings.

Moments of Life

The Moments of Life (MOL) app currently allows parents to access services such as birth registration, baby bonus and NLB membership applications. The app has simplified the birth registration process, and cut down the time spent on birth registration and baby bonus application from 60 minutes to 15 minutes. Two-thirds of eligible births are now registered through the app. In September 2019, MOL was expanded to promote active ageing among seniors. With both suites of services, the MOL app has totalled 120,000 downloads.

The MOL app will be improved and re-organised to enable citizens to access commonly-used Government services on a single site. Citizens can expect greater personalisation as the services and information that are most relevant to them are pushed out. We will be announcing more enhancements to MOL in the coming year.

E-Payments

We have also improved our digital payment infrastructure. The take-up rate and volume of cashless transactions have been encouraging. Over 75% of Singaporeans aged 20 to 75 years old have signed up for PayNow, and monthly transaction volumes have nearly doubled over the course of 2019.

Digital Medical Certificates

DigiMC was piloted at the National Heart Centre in 2018 to make it easier for patients to submit MCs to their employers. The service has been extended to other SingHealth hospitals and polyclinics; to date, more than 400,000 MCs have been issued. DigiMC will be rolled out to the private healthcare sector in the first half of 2020, starting with Raffles Medical and Mount Alvernia Hospital. This is an example of how simple innovations can make life more convenient for our people.

GoBusiness

Similarly, we are rolling out more digital services to support our businesses. In October 2019, we launched the GoBusiness Licensing portal, targeted at the F&B sector. Over 460 F&B companies benefitted from a simpler and more intuitive way of applying for business licenses. We will launch more services to help more businesses through different phases of their operations, to improve efficiencies and achieve greater cost savings.

National Digital Identity

National Digital Identity (NDI) is a key piece of digital infrastructure we are working on to bring greater convenience and benefits to citizens and businesses. A key component of NDI is SingPass Mobile (SPM), which now has close to one million users. It provides a seamless, convenient, and secure way of identity verification for users to access Government services online. The use cases are continually being expanded. For instance, since January 2020, more than 9,000 CPF members and their witnesses have made nominations online by logging in through SPM.

Private businesses can ride on NDI services to improve their services and redesign their operations. MyInfo, an NDI service that eliminates repetitive, manual form-filling, allows online retailers such as Carousell to promote users as verified buyers or sellers when they sign up via MyInfo. This facilitates greater trust and reliability in online transactions. Businesses have reported savings of up to $50 per transaction, and an 80% reduction in transaction time when their customers used MyInfo to prefill forms.

MyInfo Business was rolled out as an extension of MyInfo. Singapore-registered businesses can log in through CorpPass, and pre-fill forms for their corporate profile, financial performance and ownership details. In 2019, there were more than 20,000 B2B transactions using MyInfo Business. Later this year, we will on-board more B2B services to benefit more businesses.

More features will be added to NDI to create an ecosystem that allows the private and public sectors to develop more value-added services on a common trust framework. We are testing the use of SingPass for private businesses, so that they need not build and secure their own identity verification systems.

SMART NATION – A PARTNERSHIP FOR THE PEOPLE, WITH THE PEOPLE

To better engage Singaporeans, the Government will create more avenues for citizens to use and appreciate the value of digital technology. The CityScape@URA exhibition, to be launched in July 2020, is a showcase of how our various Smart Nation initiatives have come together, and become integrated into our daily lives. PlayScape@Science Centre, to be opened in December 2020, will break down difficult concepts behind innovations to demystify technology, and encourage visitors of all ages to learn more.

We are taking an SGTogether approach to involve citizens as partners to build our Smart Nation. Over the last year, more than 23,000 Singaporeans have given their feedback on 13 projects through SCOPE, SNDGG’s citizen engagement platform which stands for Smart Nation Co-creating with our People Everywhere.

This year, SCOPE will be expanded to involve citizens more deeply in the development process. Instead of providing feedback at the prototype stage, citizens will be engaged upstream – from ideation and design, to testing and deployment. To bring SCOPE closer to citizens, a mobile Smart Nation Builder will be launched in May 2020. It will travel island-wide for Singaporeans to get on-board this co-creation journey. Citizens can provide timely feedback on on-going Government projects that use technology to improve their lives.

Smart Nation is about the continual transformation and renewal of our nation, for the betterment of Singapore and Singaporeans. Its success hinges on a Whole-of-Nation effort as we continue to re-engineer Government, enhance digital services to citizens and businesses, and bring everyone on-board this vision to co-create a Smart Nation together.

Media Factsheets:

Factsheet - Responding to COVID-19 with Technology (pdf - 80kb) (opens in new tab)

Factsheet - Moments of Life (pdf - 80kb) (opens in new tab)

Factsheet - DigiMC (pdf - 110kb) (opens in new tab)

Factsheet - GoBusiness (pdf - 90kb) (opens in new tab)

Factsheet - National Digital Identity (pdf - 100kb) (opens in new tab)

Factsheet - Smart Nation Showcases (pdf - 70kb) (opens in new tab)

For media enquiries, please contact:

Goh Yu Chong
Senior Manager, Adoption and Engagement Directorate
Smart Nation and Digital Government Office, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore
Mobile: 9644 1674
Email: GOH_Yu_Chong@pmo.gov.sg (opens in new tab)

Nasrath Hassan
Deputy Director, Adoption and Engagement Directorate
Smart Nation and Digital Government Office, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore
Mobile: 9001 0050
Email: Nasrath_HASSAN@pmo.gov.sg (opens in new tab)