How can the public and private sectors work together to bring innovative ideas to life and increase digital trust in our societies?

At SGTech’s Digital Trust Global Forum, Accredify’s CEO, Zheng Wei, was invited to discuss this on the Public-Private Partnerships, Co-creating Digital Trust panel, alongside Lam Yi Young (CEO, Singapore Business Federation), Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore), and moderator Annabel Lee (Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS).  These are the key takeaways from their discussion.

Harmonising the public and private sectors to create bigger value

Accredify’s CEO, Zheng Wei, opened the panel by sharing how Accredify’s first founders were immediately sold on the concept of public-private partnerships (PPPs) and their value, during the meeting: “I remember I was at GovTech’s office, and seated across me was deputy director back then, Steven. And he said: “We build the highways, we build the infrastructure. And it’s for you guys, the start-ups, the companies, to build all the different commercial entities, the different business values on top of that highway, in order to increase the overall value of it”. To be honest, I was sold back then, and the rest was history.”

Since then, Accredify has worked on several PPPs. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Accredify’s focus was on supporting academic institutes to issue tamper-proof, verifiable certifications and transcripts in the higher education and adult learning sector. However, when COVID-19 broke out, the importance and relevance of instantly verifiable, tamper-proof documents became extremely evident.

Previously, people only needed their medical test results and vaccination records to be accessible to themselves and their doctor. The emergence of COVID-19 however, created a universal need for test results and vaccination records to be verifiable by third parties for admission to e.g. event venues, restaurants or flights.

With this burgeoning need for third-party authentication of medical data, Accredify teamed up with Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH), GovTech and Temasek to harmonise the public and private sectors, as well as downstream stakeholders such as airports and airlines. Together, they co-created Singapore’s national COVID-19 standard, HealthCerts, which ensures COVID-19 medical records issued in that standard is readable and verifiable by all who need access to the information.

Zheng Wei added that many local healthcare providers may face technical and knowledge barriers to adopting such technologies that guarantee digital trust: “[adoption may be] something that is quite impossible for your mom-and-pop GPs to do on their own. You cannot expect them to have the technical capability. I actually went down to the clinics, and some of them are still using cabinets with paper files for all their patients’ records. We are not even digital yet, and we are talking about digital trust. So, these are the kind of clinics that we have to engage, because from a ministry point of view it’s always the lowest denominator we have to provide a solution for.”

The revelation that local enterprises may be facing difficulties with acquiring the right digital tools for their technical development, Accredify embarked on another collaboration with GovTech and the Infocom Media Development Authority (IMDA) on the Advanced Digital Solution (ADS) scheme that subsidises the adoption of digital trust technology to ease the adoption of it by Small-and-Medium Businesses (SMBs). Considering the importance of digital trust and the existing technological barriers faced by many local businesses, these PPP projects are crucial to accelerating awareness, accessibility and adoption of key technologies that enable digital trust.

Over recent decades, the world has been shifting from print data to digital data, and going forward it will be towards verifiable data. Zheng Wei stressed that now is the right time to transition from static data points and documents to live verifiable data, and to put the control of data back into the hands of the owner. With this, our public and private sectors can begin to meet modern challenges such as data consent, data residency, or the transfer of data across countries. “The whole idea is to transform, change and then start to put that decentralization of data control back in the hands of the individual”.

The key factors to achieve digital trust with public-private partnerships

1. Education and awareness: After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalisation quickly became a lifeline, and many businesses and new ventures went digital. However, with that came the challenge of cybersecurity and digital trust, and there has been a great increase in scams and data breaches over the last few years which has affected consumer confidence in digital platforms. As such, it is important that the private sector works together with government agencies to increase awareness among businesses and consumers about digital trust and security, to regain their confidence in digital solutions.

2. Capacity building: It is currently too difficult for SMEs to attract the talent they need to achieve the necessary expertise. With big companies like e.g. Amazon and Meta being able to compete with high wages for the best talent, SMEs fall short and are left behind. “I think there’s a lot of scope for the public and private sector to work together to uplift capability. We need to train more people, and have a greater pool of talent to handle digital trust, cybersecurity, so that SMEs can have access to such services and talent.”

3. Advocacy: Lastly, Yi Young stressed the importance of the private sector, trade associations and chambers like SBF to actively provide feedback to the government to ensure that the regulatory bodies facilitate business and have the right balance to avoid ‘strangling’ businesses with excessive regulations. However, it is also important that our counterparts in different economies give feedback to their governments to “ensure a conducive environment that continues to allow free flow of data and business”.

Connecting companies and governments through collaboration

As the CEO of Singapore Business Federation (SBF), Lam Yi Young has acquired valuable insights from engaging over 28,000 members, consisting of companies, trade associations and chambers. SBF’s role is to represent the views of the private sector as the APAC business chamber and functions as an umbrella body that brings together the views and concerns of the private sector to represent them to the government. With such an important role as the bridge between the public and private sector equipping both sides with insights and common understanding, SBF offers key points of understanding and implementing successful PPPs.

SBF plays three key roles that are important for successful public-private partnerships:

1. Bridging the private sector and the government: At the core of public-private partnerships, SBF seek to understand the needs of the business community, the challenges they face and the support that they need. SBF advocates on the community’s behalf to the government for policy changes, assistance schemes, and so on.  Their role as a bridge also involves understanding the existing policies, schemes and other regulations, and communicating these clearly to their members.
2. Facilitating companies’ growth journey: SBF works one-on-one with companies to assist them on their growth journey with internationalization and expanding to markets overseas, digital transformation, and helping with e.g. environmental, social and governance issues.
3. Acting as an enabler of a strong business ecosystem in Singapore:  SBF seeks to bring companies, trade associations, and public sector agencies together to build a stronger business ecosystem. One example of this is getting companies to work with each other to overcome a lack of resources or skills, which has proven especially helpful when companies expand overseas.

Working together to create a more ‘level playing field’

Chan Ih-Ming is the Executive Director and Head of Digital Industry Singapore – a joint office between three government agencies that deal with the digital economy: The Economic Development Board of Singapore, Enterprise Singapore, and The Infocom and Media Development Authority (IMDA). Their role is to improve the competitiveness and attractiveness of the ICT space in Singapore, by growing the tech ecosystem and supporting its enablers.

Ih-Ming described the essence of their work as a public-private partnership, as they set the interface between the role of the government and what they are building out, whether it is related to policy, physical, or digital infrastructure. On the topic of SMEs and making it easier for smaller players to build out projects to compete with resourceful, big players, Ih-Ming said: “A very important part of the ‘infrastructure’, beyond the policy infrastructure that the government can provide, is, for example, public digital infrastructure, open infrastructure.” An example of how this has been done before is Singapore Financial Data Exchange (SGFinDex), where the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Smart Nation and the Digital Government Group co-created a digital infrastructure that enables businesses and consumers alike to use their Singpass account to retrieve their financial information.

Ih-Ming also supported Yi Young’s earlier point on the need to provide more funding and resources for digital trust capacity-building, through e.g. providing research money for tech innovation, or funding talent capacity-building. IMDA and NTU did this through their partnership earlier this year, involving an investment of S$50 million in a new, national digital trust centre focused on leading Singapore’s research and development efforts in digital trust technologies through the nuturing of local talent and businesses.

Key takeaways

• Public-private partnerships are important for the acceleration of ideas and opportunities, both domestically and abroad
• The role of the public sector is to provide policy infrastructure and public digital infrastructure, and it is up to the industries to take the lead in creating use cases and finding commercial opportunities
• It is important to engage private providers as they may be still facing technical and knowledge barriers to adopt technologies that guarantee digital trust. What is required is an increase in awareness, education and assistance with adoption of digital solutions from the public sector
• After the shift from print to digital data, the path forward focuses on verifiable data and putting the control of data back into the hands of the owner – an important step in building a trustless society with true-to-source data
• The private sector, trade associations, and chambers need to be active in giving feedback to their governments in order to create a business-friendly regulatory regime
• To close talent gaps in technical skills, governments should partner with the industry to execute capacity-building initiatives that help even out the playing field more for SMEs and other smaller players

You can watch the panel in the video below:

Video by SGTech

Continue reading for the full transcript:

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much, and thank you SGtech for having us here today. I feel very, very honoured and very lucky to be on a panel with these three amazing people. As the title of the session reflects, this is public-private partnerships and everything in between. So hopefully you’re going to get a really good experience hearing about the Ws from different parts and different sectors, and different segments of society.

So, what I’m going to do today is we’re going to get everybody a chance to introduce themselves and then we’ll jump into the discussion proper. So, shall we start with Zheng Wei? Could you say a few words about yourself and what your views of public-private partnership are?

Zheng Wei (CEO, Accredify): 

Sure. Hi everyone. My name is Zheng Wei and I’m from a company called Accredify. It’s one that we started four years ago, and a lot of people don’t know this, even some of the people closest to me, but Accredify actually started as a private-public partnership.

So, the first time that we decided to start Accredify was when we were at GovTech’s office. And back then, we were in a sort of pivot in a very early stage of our startup where we were deciding on ‘what can we do going forward?’, because we were doing a change of our business model. And I remember I was at GovTech’s office, and seated across me was deputy director back then, Steven. And he basically told me that the role of the government is to build the infrastructure. “We build the highways, we build the infrastructure. And it’s for you guys, the startups, the companies, to build all the different commercial entities, the different business values on top of that highway, in order to increase the overall value of it”. To be honest, I was sold back then, and that became history.

So, to me, public-private partnership is about the ability to connect and harmonize the private and public sector to create a bigger value. And especially when it comes to digital trust, to enable not just authority or companies in a more authoritative position to be able to provide that kind of trust. How can we decentralize that and allow both the private sector, the individuals, as well as the public sector, to provide that digital trust? Thank you, Annabel.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much. And I always love hearing origin stories, so I’m feeling like this origin story actually was in a Star War-shaped building. Were you in hive when this happened? Because you want to add to this superhero-like, and coming up with this sort of amazing idea that I think is game changing, and that’s really where I think a meeting of minds makes a difference, and you really do get an acceleration of ideas and opportunities as well.

I’m going to turn to our second panelist today, Young. And so, Young obviously has been in the industry for a very long time, and he is from SBF. So Young, would you like to introduce yourself and talk to us about what you think of public-private partnership?

Mr Lam Yi Young (CEO, Singapore Business Federation): 

Yeah, sure. Good afternoon everyone, I’m Young from the Singapore Business Federation. So, SBF was set up 20 years ago to represent the views of the private sector as the APAC business chamber. We currently have some 28,000 members comprising both companies as well as trade associations and chambers. So, we’re kind of like the umbrella body that brings together the views and concerns of the private sector and to represent them to the government.

We play three key roles. The first is as a bridge between the private sector and the government, so really being at the core of public-private partnership. We seek to understand the needs of the business community, the challenges they face, the support that they need. And we advocate on their behalf to the government for policy changes, for incentive for assistance schemes and so on. But the other way, the bridge must go both ways.

We also seek to understand government policies: What is it that the government is doing, planning to do, what are the assistance schemes, the incentive schemes that the government has? And then we help to explain it to our members, to companies, so that companies can better understand what the government is doing as well as make best use of the government assistance and incentive schemes. So, I guess this seating is quite app – We are kind of between the private sector and the public sector, being APAC’s business chamber. So, that’s the first role as the bridge.

The second key role we play as a facilitator. We work with our members, we work with companies to facilitate their growth journey. We help companies in terms of internationalization, moving out of Singapore, expanding the market overseas. We help them with digitization and transformation. We help them with issues like environmental, social and governance. So, really working with companies one-to-one to help them in their growth journey.

The third key role is as an enabler of a strong business ecosystem in Singapore. We seek to bring companies, trade associations, public sector agencies – all the different parts of Singapore – to work together to build a stronger business ecosystem, including getting companies to work with each other, coming together so that they can overcome lack of economy, of skills – especially when we go overseas.

So, we like to remind many of our companies that, well, maybe in Singapore they may think they’re quite big, but when they go outside of Singapore it’s a completely different skill, and we can better compete, and we can better help our companies if we can work together when we go outside of Singapore. And just that’s what SBF does and very much at the centre of bringing the public and the private sector to work together.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much Young. And I don’t know how you handle 28,000 members, that’s literally, I think, 10% of all companies in Singapore. So, representing those views in front of government must be such a critical and important role. So, thank you for all the work that SBF does for Singapore companies everywhere.

Finally, I am turning to our public sector representative, Ih-Ming. Ih-Ming, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, DISG and how you guys contribute to public-private partnerships?

Mr Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore): 

Sure. Hi everyone. Thank you for having me, my name is Ih-Ming. I lead a group called Digital Industry Singapore. You can think of us as a joint office between three government agencies that deal in the digital economy. So that’s The Economic Development Board of Singapore, Enterprise Singapore and The Infocom and Media Development Authority (IMDA). So, this joint office basically looks at the competitiveness and attractiveness of the ICT space in Singapore and that tech ecosystem and those enablers, so that’s what we focus a lot of time on.

We account manage quite a number of companies if you will, and I was joking earlier in the pre-session that I guess our whole job is a public-private partnership. In part, because we set this interface between what the role the government is and what we’re building out – whether it’s in the policy infrastructure, the actual physical digital infrastructure, but also understanding what the needs of companies are and the fact that the government or the public sector or public sector monies can go towards enabling some of that growth, but doesn’t always need to if the market is functioning quite well. So, maybe I’ll leave it at that first and then we’ll kind of open the conversation.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much, Ih-Ming. And I mean, all of you today here, you’ve probably heard a fair amount about digital trust and what that means from different perspectives already today. And when we think about it from the perspective of public-private partnership, I wonder if there are any new angles to anything important that we need to think about when we’re actually trying to build PPP in regards to digital trust. It’s a fairly NASA area. I think me and the panellists were talking about that before we came onto the panel today.

So, I just want to turn to what I think is probably the greatest expert on this, with 28,000 members. Young, could you tell us a little bit about what are some of your thoughts in terms of where you’ve seen public-private partnerships work in the past, and more importantly that you think would be most important when we are moving into a digital trust environment or conversation?

Mr Lam Yi Young (CEO, Singapore Business Federation):   

If we look back over the past two-plus years of living with COVID, I think one of the key trends we see on the private sector side is the great push towards digitalization. What used to be good-to-have, companies realize that it’s become a must-have when employees had to work from home when retail shops had to be closed, and so on. Digitalization became a lifeline. Those that had invested in it earlier reaped the benefit of it. Those who had not found that, they had to very quickly invest in it and to get onto digital platforms in order for their business to survive.

So, that in a way benefited a lot from public-private partnership companies, benefited a lot of the schemes from the various agencies that Ih-Ming talked about – The IMDA, Enterprise Singapore and also many of our platform providers that allowed them to quickly get onto the digital platforms. But with that came the challenge of cybersecurity and digital trust, and over the past few years, we have also seen great uptake in terms of scams, in terms of data breaches, that have also affected consumer confidence in digital platforms. So increasingly, this part about digital trust, cybersecurity, is becoming more and more important as more and more businesses rely on digital platforms for doing their business.

So, I think in terms of what we can do for digital trust in terms the public-private partnership, I see three key areas. First is education and awareness. There’s a need for the private sector working with government agencies to increase awareness, both among businesses as well as among consumers about digital trust and security.

Second is capacity building. The businesses need the expertise and it’s not so easy for SMEs to build up such expertise. I suppose if you ask the SMEs they’ll say, well, in Singapore we have [companies] like Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, that pay ridiculous amounts of money because they’ve got lots of investors, so they pay huge amounts of money and grab all the talent. Then after that, they’ll say we have GovTech, government GovTech also pay a lot of money, also take a lot of talent. Then we have the large local companies. Then SMEs cannot afford the kind of money to get talent enough. So, they face a lot of challenge in that. So, I think there’s a lot of scope for the public and private sector to work together to uplift capability. We need to train more people, have a greater pool of talent to handle digital trust, cybersecurity, so that the SMEs can have access to such services and talent. So that’s the second part.

I think the third big part will be in terms of advocacy. The private sector, the true trade associations and chambers like SBF, need to be active in giving feedback to the government. On the regulatory aspect, we want to ensure that the regulatory regime is one that facilitates business, and not one that goes to the extreme of security and end up strangling businesses. So, it is important to strike a balance. We cannot have a regime where anything goes and things keep going wrong and affect trust. But we also cannot have a regime that is so stringent, or so unique, that it makes it difficult for us to do business in Singapore.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much, and that’s really insightful. I mean, the fact that with SMEs trying to figure out how do you actually get access to trusted service providers at a good price, I think that’s going to be ultimately a challenge down the road as well, as more and more SMEs have moved online and as you say, it’s not a trend that can be reversed anymore. Ih-Ming, I have a really interesting question for you. I want to know from your perspective, being on the public sector side of the house, how do you think we would be able to respond to the challenges that have been raised by Young?

Mr Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore): 

Sure. No, that’s a great question. Just to build on Young’s point, I think the various aspects, if I think about the role of the public sector government, and then I’ll maybe touch on my perspective on the role of industry. So, the first is, I think the point was made that clearly larger companies with assets, resources, there are many things they can do on their own if they decide to build something out.

Smaller companies, whether that’s SMEs or even smaller startups, we certainly want to create, I want to say a level playing field, but certainly not make it so asymmetric. So, a very important part of the ‘infrastructure’, beyond the policy infrastructure that the government can provide, is for example public digital infrastructure, open infrastructure. So, examples of this include SG financial data exchange.

This is more of a consumer example, the MAS, or this Smart Nation digital government group, creating an exchange where individuals use their own digital ID – creating a more centralized kind of consent management platform, allowing businesses and consumers to exchange financial information.

The other aspect is ‘what is the industry role?’. The government can build on infrastructure, but if we think about the co-creation opportunity, actually the value, or the new market opportunity, should be quite industry-led, right? Some of you may be quite familiar with this concept of alliances for action. For those of you who are less familiar, in Singapore several years ago there was several industry-led consortia. Industry-led consortia, large and small, would identify business opportunities, or problem statements, that were very difficult to coordinate around or that no individual company, large or small, would be able to resolve. And then the government would think about its own role.

One example where there was some sort of public-private partnership, there is SGTraDex, right? That’s more to address sharing of documentation and data in the trade and logistics space. So, I think that’s certainly a role for government to think about the policy infrastructure, public digital infrastructure, and then a lot of the use cases or where the commercial opportunity might be, in my perspective ought to be a bit more industry-led. Otherwise, you will kind of be pushing on a string.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

So, I really like the idea of ‘what is the policy infrastructure that we need to build to enable better public-private partnership but also better access?’. Because I think that was Young’s point, it’s access to the right service providers. That’s a bit of a challenge. I also want to point to, because I know IMDA for example did a lot of work around things like accrediting certain companies and also with SG going digital, subsidizing certain trusted service providers.

And I’m going to look a little bit to Zheng Wei here with Accredify, because obviously, you offer a particular service where I think often your client base is SMEs, or maybe more in some large local enterprises as well. So, could you maybe speak a little bit about what you think, from a PPP perspective, on how Accredify can benefit from certain mechanisms that could be made available so that your customer base whom you’ve not been able to access actually know you exist, have a product that you can offer at a very reasonable price that is highly trusted? I’d love your point of view on that 

Zheng Wei (CEO, Accredify): 

I think what Young and Ih-Ming said was very real, because if we bring ourselves back two and a half years, during the peak of the pandemic, I remember back then Accredify was a company that was providing certification for academic institutes. So, our clients, with the likes of NUS, SMU, NTU, so on and so forth, we helped them to issue verifiable degrees and diplomas.

But when the pandemic came, we got in touch with MOH, as well as the other way around, to start to see the importance of healthcare records for third-party authentication. Because traditionally with medical records, if you do a test you basically consume it yourself, you understand what you need to do and that’s it. But when COVID came, that changed. Your COVID-19 test result, vaccination, so on and so forth, now requires a third party to authenticate – be it going into a venue or flying home to visit your family.

So back then we started a PPP with MOH, GovTech and Temasek to create a standard to issue a COVID-19 medical record so that we can harmonize the public sector, the private sector, as well as all the downstream stakeholders – including your airports, your airlines, to able to be able to read that single document. So, I mean that in itself is something that is quite impossible for your mom and pop GPs to do on their own. You cannot expect them to have the technical capability. I actually went down to the clinics, and some of them are still using cabinets with paper files for all the patients’ records. We are not even digital yet, and we are talking about digital trust. So, these are the kind of clinics that we have to engage, because from a ministry point of view it’s always the lowest denominator we have to provide a solution for.

So, after creating that we followed on to work with GovTech and IMDA again, to have what we call an ADS scheme – an Advanced Digital Solution if I remember correctly, to subsidize the adoption of such technology and ease the SMBs into adopting such digital trust, because there’s just such importance. So, we do see this kind of initiative going forward in a lot of different industries, especially with Ih-Ming and EM’s support.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much for that. And I think, again, co-creating those opportunities, I feel it’s amazing that it happens, but at the same time it’s quite ad hoc. So, at some point later in the conversation, I’d love to hear from everybody on this panel about what they think is the one thing that we could do to make it a bit more mechanized. AWS loves its mechanisms, so I’m going to borrow a term that we’re very familiar with and just talk about what is the one or two things we could do.

But right now, I do want to just ask one more question to Ih-Ming before we move on to a different topic. So, when Young mentioned that one of the challenges is capacity gaps, capacity building gaps I’m very interested to know what the government is thinking about how to close some of those gaps. Do you think that from a skills perspective there’s more that the government can be doing? Is this a PPP thing as well?

Mr Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore): 

Sure. I think there are two aspects by quick reaction. The first is more in the technical space. So, if one of the areas in talent is there, if there’s a lot of talent or very specific technical skills or there’s a role for public monies to go into. So, an example would be research money that would go into trust tech, or trust tech innovation. So, the example of this, IMDA partnered with NTU on this in June, early this year. So, investment of public monies into the technical space and some of the capacity building, either in an academic institution or setting, but really capacity building for talent.

And the second area is a little less technical but no less important. And that’s really in the point about norm setting and governance and know-how in that area. I suspect that given how nascent but fast growing this space is, the demand for talent in that space is going to far our strip supply. And so my thought is how can the government partner with the industry? Because the government can’t be the only receptacle for this capacity building. How can we partner with the industry to actually build larger community practice for example, or just capacity built of individuals who are not just familiar, but actually operating at a particular level of sophistication – especially if the ambition is regional or global.

[Technical difficulties with video recording]

Mr Lam Yi Young (CEO, Singapore Business Federation): 

[…] Wai Meng, the president of SGtech, is one of the other members, and he’s been working very hard at APAC level across the 21 economies to push the issues about digital trust and to ensure that we can have a regulatory regime that is harmonized, or at least consistent, across the different economies, and so that businesses don’t have to worry about dealing with different rules and different regulations in every single different economy that we have to deal with that makes doing business very complicated.

I think that’s where the private sector feedback is very important – not just Singapore businesses giving feedback to the Singapore government, but we need our counterparts in the different economies to also be giving feedback to their government, and nudge the governments to come together on this very important topic of the digital trust and ensure that there is a conducive environment that continue to allow the free flow of data and business.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much. On that note, I want to really turn to Zheng Wei here. Zheng Wei, I know Accredify recently joined a new alliance of SMEs and startups from all over Asia. And I think the point that you made there about how different companies in different countries need to be also saying the same things and raising this issue to governments areas. So, I want to just ask you a little bit about some of your thoughts around that, whether that alliance in particular is a way in which some of these messages get out as well?

Zheng Wei (CEO, Accredify): 

So the alliance is called Digital Prosperity for Asia. It’s made out of a bunch of companies, startups and different people in the organization. We have different members from different countries as well. And it’s a road show base. We started in Singapore, went to Korea, the next stop should be India if I’m not wrong. And the whole idea is to promote digitalizations in the different countries – especially in empowering the SMBs.

But just taking a step back to reflect on what Young said about different countries, different markets and sharing of data. I think everyone here probably heard this phrase where they say ‘data is the new oil’, right? It’s not wrong from a value perspective, but what I find very wrong with that statement is that oil or any other physical asset is usually exhaustive. So, if I use the oil, you don’t get any oil. But when it comes to data it’s very different. So data actually gets even more powerful when they are cohorted, aggregated, shared and used in different manners, and analyzed. Then later on, the insights are used to generate more data.

So, to me, maybe the concept of ‘data is the new oil’ is something that we need to try to not be too hard on, so that countries or markets stop thinking that they need to protect their own data. And when that happens, then I think there’ll be a lot better flow of different data. But again, just to add on a bit on that: To us in the company there’s this concept called trusted, but there’s also this concept called trustless – trusted versus trustless – and I think digital trust has to be a combination of these two things.

When I talk about trusted, I think of a set of entities where I can do certain things like certification, trust mark, where I can make you a trusted person, a trusted counterparty. But I believe that processes have to be trustless. And I think this morning, if you guys were around DBS’, Piyush Gupta said that blockchain, DLT will be the back office of the world. That’s the whole idea. Processes have to be trustless, right? Today when you send a WhatsApp, when you send an email – if you really drill down on the different stakeholders, that particular message and packet of data goes through, you’re going to find a lot of trouble. So there’s this concept of trust versus trustless as well.

Perhaps I can just end it off with sharing that we built everything on AWS and that has made our life really easy because in different countries where there’s data residency, data protection and so on and so forth, we always have AWS as the partner that can help us ensure that in the different localities we have the right certification and protection in place. Not because Annabel is here, <laugh>, just my honest statement.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Well thank you for saying that and, well you’ve thrown me a little bit because I wasn’t exactly that statement, so I really did not set him up to say that. And thinking out loud, cause I really love that idea of trusted and trustless, I wanna come back to that later on. When we think about perhaps whether or not from a PPP perspective, that’s something that can also be pushed as a concept.

But I wanna just take a moment to actually turn over Ih-Ming. Ih-Ming, I’m very interested to hear from you. I know there were other sessions today where people already were talking about trusted data flows, but kind of at a G2G or G2B level or maybe even a G with, pushing it, B2B. Is there anything on your end that you think you’d like to see more from a PPP perspective to ensure trusted data flows?

Mr Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore): 

It’s a good question. I’m not an expert in that space. My response as far as what the private sector plays and the public sector players can do is hopefully not too non-PC. I think actually G2G work takes a long time, and I actually would urge and maybe even look to encourage very clear use cases. B2B and very industry-led I think is our approach. So, as far as kind of DISG’s concerned, actually our work directly with companies is to tease out some of these actual pain points and actual use cases and then to try and support some of these companies to tackle and address these. So, that would be our approach and certainly that will come in parallel with many of the broader, larger multi-led work that Young had talked about. I think we need both tracks.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much. And I think and I completely agree with you and already there are these mechanisms like ABEC is a great mechanism in parallel track where companies can be working together to also push some of these ideas and these frameworks out. Agreed that GTG takes time, but Singapore has actually done an amazing job at pushing out DEAs, DEPAs all across the world already.

So, you’ve got quite a few of them down and I do think that that’s a great model. So, it’s something that even as a company, we’ve actually been talking to a lot of governments in other parts of the world to [encourage to] think about doing something like that. Because it really helps us, but it also helps more importantly our customers who are SMEs and startups who don’t have a lot of time to sit down and try and figure out whether the laws actually match up or resources to be able to do that.

Mr Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore):   

I think on that point, just to build on that, I would say one of the focuses is we’re talking about digital trust per se is in interoperability. I don’t think we are there yet, I think as many of these different systems evolve in different theaters globally, interoperability will be extremely important for us all to collectively realize this value. Otherwise, it’ll end up being a bit more narrow

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much for that. We have just a little bit of time left, so I really want to take this opportunity to pick all these wonderful panelist brains. I want to ask you, as we kind of leave this conversation, each of you give me one idea on what you think could be a new mechanism we could create coming out of this digital trust form – maybe looking at SGTech for them to come up a new work stream next year for us to work better together at PPP. So, I’m going to start with Young first. I wonder if you have any immediate thoughts.

Mr Lam Yi Young (CEO, Singapore Business Federation): 

Well maybe I focus more on the area of capacity building and how we can build up a greater talent pool to support businesses in the area of digital trust. I think one thing that the private sector can work with support from the public sector will be in terms of developing the capability and manpower. And I think this is one area that in our experience the Singapore government is never stingy about with money. But it’s not something that money alone can solve because we do need the training capacity, we need the expertise and that’s where I think perhaps trade associations like SGTech working in the industry can bring in big players like AWS to conduct the training so you can train a lot more than what you need. If you need 50 you can train 100, and the other 50 can go to your competitors and to SMEs that eat the talent. And if more companies can do that, and actually some are already doing it, then I think we can build up a bigger pool of tech talent of digital trust talent in Singapore that will benefit the ecosystem as a whole.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Thank you so much for that, and I think that is a great point and at AWS we have been trying to scale that. So, we do a lot of digital and remote training and that’s something that’s already available, but really targeting specific groups of companies or people, I think that might be the next stage. So, I think that’s a great idea and something that we would love to work with SGTech on the new year and maybe SBF as well cuz I’m sure you have some very important data points on the kinds of companies who would best be able to use that support. I’m going to turn over to Zheng Wei next. Zheng Wei what’s your one suggestion for us?

Zheng Wei (CEO, Accredify): 

The hypothesis of our company is that we are shifting. The world is shifting from print data to digital data and going forward it’s about verifiable data. So we believe that companies and public sectors align. Now is the right time to do the transition to turn what used to be static data points and documents into live verifiable data, so that you can then pass on that responsibility to always control that interaction downwards to the industry, or at the end of the day, put that control the data and documents into the hands of the individual or the company that actually owns the data.

And from there on, that’s when we can solve a lot of problems like data consent, data residency or transfer of data building countries, so on and so forth. So, the whole idea is to transform, change and then start to put that decentralization of data control back in the hands of the individual. So that’s what we think will work.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

That’s great. I mean that’s an amazing vision and I think trust and accountability is one of those things that we always talk about on the abstract, but I think to be able to put some technology behind that and think about how do we then push that down to even the individual end user, I think that would be amazing. So that’s a vision.

I don’t know SGTech, if they’re in the room somewhere, but it would be wonderful to see if we can figure out how do we actually enable that at scale. Because I think the challenge is that’s going to be the next challenge is how do you ensure that that’s a scalable technology that everybody can use and has access to, and understand as well. Because I think education is probably that last bit.

Finally, last but not least, definitely, Ih-Ming. I would love to hear maybe one thought from you about what would be this special mechanism we could have

Mr Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore): 

For sure. I made a mention earlier about capacity building and the governance and compliance space. I think that’s certainly, whether you want to call it a convening communities practice etc, I think that could be one.

I’m also going to cheat and maybe build on Young’s point about this idea of talent that can circulate. If I flip it a little and think a little bit about what the employee value proposition might be in this space, and it’s quite observable. We observe this too, a lot of government employees who have that policy acumen. They move into industry because they want to build their own kind of functional depth, they want that practitionership.

But does it really have to be so binary? Could there be opportunities for either companies to be receptacles for people, not so much revolving door, but circulate if you will, and not just be large companies but with smaller companies too. So that would be a raw idea, I don’t not sure how we would operationalize that, but that could be something to think about.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):  

I mean I almost think that if you look at a lot of other industries, especially some of the more traditional industries in the legal services or for example in accounting services, you often have a list of people who are certified and authorized to practice. And I think to some extent maybe part of building a digital trust framework is that, right? It’s talking about trusted professionals. So maybe that’s a way that we could do that.

Mr Chan Ih-Ming (Executive Director and Head, Digital Industry Singapore): 

Yeah, exactly. Professionalizing this space, what does proficiency look like? What does being a digital trust professional mean? You need to develop both some industry and domain depth maybe, and not just have handled local more narrow issues, but regional cross-border related issues, but also maybe some policy experience.

Annabel Lee (moderator, Regional Head of Digital Policy and ASEAN Affairs, AWS):

Yeah, I mean we’ve talked about that I think in the data protection space, in the cybersecurity space, even in the AI space. But I almost see this is all coming together in one, it goes beyond that. I think you mentioned use cases several times and I think it is that it’s almost down to maybe use case specificity. So, something to think about.

I think we’ve given SGTech three ideas. I’m going to shove in a fourth one just for fun. I think Ih-Ming mentioned something about interoperability, and I know Young, you also mentioned something about convergence. And I think we always hear these terms being thrown around, and that’s incredibly important for startups and SMEs in particular, but even for larger companies who are operating globally, it’s a huge headache when we try and figure out how all these laws and regulations work together.

So, I think from AWS’s perspective, something that we’ve been thinking about, and we’d love to see how we can partner with everyone on this panel, everyone in the room as well, is really to think about how do we actually have global certifications for trusted digital infrastructure? Because at the end of the day, as you say G2G, that’s going to take a while. There’s complexity around that, but business still has to run underlying that.

I think when we are increasingly in a world where we are more and more digital and we’re facing more and more new threats, part of it could be how do we make sure that the digital infrastructure and services layer is secure and that it is certified globally so we don’t have to fight over all the small things, and people can actually do business and focus on building great applications and services and thinking about trust from a more holistic perspective. So that’s my final thought.

With that, I think we’ve more or less come to the end of our panel. So, thank you so much to all my fellow panelists here today, and thank you again to everybody in this room for joining us for, I guess, the inaugural digital trust forum. We look forward to hopefully being able to do this again next year. But in the meantime, if you have any thoughts about digital trust please feel free to reach out to me or anybody else on this panel. I think we’d love to hear your perspectives as well. So, thank you so much. Thank you all for your time.