By the middle of this year, transferring funds
to a colleague or stallholder can be done on a mobile phone without
having to enter their bank account number.
All you need is their mobile phone number, regardless
of the bank or banking app they are using.
Minister-in-Charge of the Smart Nation Initiative
Vivian Balakrishnan disclosed this yesterday when he said the Smart
Nation Programme Office - set up to spearhead key smart nation
projects in Singapore - is working with the industry to launch a
Central Addressing Scheme this year.
"This works like a register which maps mobile numbers
to bank account numbers or to the unique entity numbers of
businesses," he said during the debate on the budget of the Prime
Minister's Office (PMO).
He was addressing a concern of Mr Cheng Li Hui
(Tampines GRC).
Dr Balakrishnan acknowledged the frustrations of
consumers, saying: "We've all got too many cards and sometimes
incompatibility; it's really irritating."
The PMO oversees the Programme Office, which was set up
to spearhead key smart nation projects in Singapore.
Another ongoing project is on developing secure digital
identification, said Dr Balakrishnan in his reply to Mr Ong Teng
Koon (Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC), who had asked what projects are in
the pipeline.
The minister said SingPass is "not good enough" as a
secure digital identification system.
SingPass, set up for Singapore residents in 2003 to
access e-government services, tends to be vulnerable when users
adopt usernames and passwords that are easy to guess, such as NRIC
numbers or birth dates.
"We need to quickly upgrade this," he said, noting that
three key elements are missing.
These are: biometrics, such as fingerprints;
encryption; and an open Application Programming Interface (API)
which lets the private sector build their apps on it.
A solution could be found in a Mobile Digital ID, which
the Government started on in March last year, when it called for a
tender.
The Mobile Digital ID - likely to sit in a phone's SIM
card - will uniquely identify every Internet user, just like the
NRIC does, and can be used to authenticate all kinds of online
transactions with the Government or commercial entities such as
banks or telcos.
An individual's credentials are encrypted and stored in
a tamper-proof zone of a mobile phone.
Hackers will not be able to make sense of the encrypted
data even if the phone is lost or infected with malware.
TNP