Staff reward challenge leads to creation of digital tool for government payouts

SINGAPORE - An internal challenge to figure out how to reward Government Technology Agency (GovTech) staff with cash for their work on Covid-19 projects was the genesis of a new digital tool that lets Singaporeans, including those who have no bank accounts or smartphones, easily get government payouts.

GovWallet was announced on Wednesday (March 2) during the debate on the budget for the Prime Minister's Office. It already powers some services such as one that allows people to withdraw government payouts at selected OCBC Bank ATMs by scanning their faces, or have the payouts credited into the LifeSG app.

GovTech's LifeSG app gives users access to government services, such as checking their Central Provident Fund balances.

Ms Patricia Zhao, a deputy director at GovTech's government digital services, said her team took about four months to develop a GovWallet precursor, which gave out cash rewards to colleagues through LifeSG without crediting the payouts into bank accounts.

After its development in March last year, the concept was presented to other government agencies. Many expressed interest in using it as a way to help with disbursements of household and social assistance as well as sector-specific relief.

Eight more months of work developed the concept into GovWallet to meet the needs of public agencies.

In designing GovWallet, Ms Zhao's team considered the impact of physical vouchers on people.

Having government payouts in the form of physical vouchers means beneficiaries may need to visit collection points. Many people also forget to spend the vouchers, some of which have expiry dates.

But GovWallet can replace physical vouchers with digital payouts in a phone app, which removes the hassle people face with physically collecting payouts and remembering to take the vouchers along to use them when they are out.

"It's about convenience for end users," said Ms Zhao.

To let citizens spend the payouts at merchants or transfer them into bank accounts, GovWallet was linked to the widely used PayNow bank fund transfer system.

It also means that whenever a new government scheme uses GovWallet, merchants already on PayNow do not need to be added to the scheme to enable people to use their payouts at these businesses.

This benefits recurring schemes such as those where people receive monthly government benefits.

The GovWallet team also considered issues faced by government agencies that give out paper vouchers. The process entails buying the vouchers, setting up voucher collection points, collecting vouchers spent at merchants and then reimbursing the businesses.

"It's a very long-drawn process for the agencies, so we thought GovWallet would ease the logistics process for them," said Ms Zhao.

Using GovWallet, agencies can limit which merchants the payouts can be spent at, and allow people with no bank accounts or smartphones to receive payouts as cash through ATMs instead.

One challenge the GovWallet team faced was the tight timeline to develop the tool.

The team partly overcame this by reusing elements of another tool it made earlier which was used to help distribute, keep tabs on and account for physical items given out to citizens, such as masks and antigen rapid test kits for Covid-19.

"The concept is largely similar for GovWallet," said Ms Zhao.