Here’s hoping that it will happen someday so the cai fan auntie won’t ask if I mind having coins anymore
PM Lee shared a very amusing story at Camp Sequoia, an annual tech summit organised by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital India.
According to him, the Ministers and him have lunch together once a week, and although they pay for their own lunch, one Minister will always take charge of collecting payment. But recently, the Minister had enough of collecting cash, and requested everyone to pass him cheques instead. PM Lee shared this with his Permanent Secretaries, who told him they had a better system of collecting payment: they used PayLah!, a DBS application in which you can instantly send and receive money.
The idea that Singapore is not yet a cashless society bothers PM Lee, despite the fact that our country is small and wired up. We have a good ICT infrastructure in place, which is why the government has been encouraging the growth of fintech and tech here. PM Lee has a good reason to be concerned about this issue. Singapore has an ambitious plan to join the world’s Smart Nation bandwagon. Although we have cashless payment systems installed in hotels, restaurants and supermarkets, at the grassroots level, cash is still king. PM Lee wants to see a good electronic payment system set-up even at hawker centers.
He also believes Singapore is not moving fast enough in spearheading the use of technology, despite several ongoing projects such as the national sensor network project that provides an integrated data source through pictures from cameras monitoring traffic, drains and housing estates.
PM Lee is envious of Estonia, a European country that is not on any list of major fintech hubs in the world but known to be ahead in terms of cashless payments and the use of digital access card for e-services such as banking, digital signatures and Internet voting.
He wants a similar platform for Singapore. He mentioned that the government is considering a national identity system apart from Singpass that can be used for non-government e-services. It will be a reliable digital identification service in which you can sign, identify yourself, access services and transact services online securely. However, despite the grand ambitions Singapore has, PM Lee says the problem is that there is still a lack of talent and drive to move forward.
So unless real technological changes are made at the basic, every day level – such as going cashless at hawker centers – our vision of becoming a Smart Nation is not going to be realised fully.
