As Singapore carries forward its plans to go digital, all SingPass users will receive a MyInfo profile by the end of 2017. This announcement was made by Janil Puthucheary, Minister-in-charge of GovTech today while speaking at the Innovations Labs World conference.
MyInfo is the next step towards establishing a national digital identity in the island nation. The main purpose of this service is to reduce the hassle of filling online forms for government digital services. People can provide their personal details just once and their information will be stored in a digital vault.
This service will enable the users to get their personal details-including name, NRIC and date of birth- automatically filled as they log in with their SingPass. This service will be helpful to the citizens for participating government services, such as an application for a new flat.
Speaking at the conference, Dr Janil who also holds the portfolio of Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information as well as Education, said, “We envision MyInfo to be a key part of our ‘Tell Us Once’ ecosystem, and we see this as an enabler for our Smart Nation vision.”
He added, “For transactions that involve personal financial information, such as CPF and income tax records, further steps such as giving consent will be needed before the transaction can continue.These extra steps will reduce the convenience available, but it is the right thing to do … to ensure security and trust around the most sensitive issues.”
According to GovTech, there have been close to 200,000 sign-ups since the launch of MyInfo last year. It is currently available on 24 digital services, and will be rolled out to another 140 government digital services such as applying for ActiveSG subsidies and SkillsFuture credits by next year.