GovTech Digitizes Physical Government Payout To Gain Cost- and Time-Savings on AWS

GovTech developed GovWallet as a tool for different government agencies to securely conduct disbursement campaigns via existing e-payment ecosystems. Using GovWallet, GovTech aims to replace its traditional disbursement methods, such as cheques, and paper vouchers, which are costly and resource-intensive for merchants and agencies to facilitate. According to GovTech, a typical disbursement campaign can take up to 1,600 man-hours to complete on average.

With a digital disbursement process, citizens no longer need to spend time collecting physical vouchers from designated locations or risk misplacing them afterwards. Citizens can also spend their digital payouts at over 164,000 online and offline merchants across Singapore, such as restaurants, e-commerce marketplaces, local tourist attractions, and preschool education fees. 

With the goal of supporting all government agencies’ payout schemes, each with multiple payout campaigns that can serve up to 1 million Singaporeans, GovTech needed a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure. The agency chose a serverless, event-driven infrastructure to reduce the manpower needed to monitor, maintain, and operate the system.

GovTech’s Government Digital Services (GDS) team built and deployed GovWallet fully on the AWS Cloud, which allows the team to flexibly scale compute and storage capacities based on the data demands of respective payout campaigns.

For example, in 2022, the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Home Affairs jointly launched the NS55 Recognition Package (NS55 RP) campaign to disburse S$100 digital credits to more than 1 million past and present national servicemen. With AWS, the GDS team was able to process up to 1.1 million disbursements and payments simultaneously, with minimal lag and disruptions. Furthermore, aside from almost completely eliminating erroneous disbursements, a fully digital payout process negates the need for agencies to mail cheques or physical vouchers, which would typically take up to 14 days to deliver. 

Using Amazon DynamoDB, it scaled its database performance by 2,300x from a baseline of about 9 writes per minute to over 21,000 writes per minute at launch. The team also relied on AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway to automate all disbursement and payment-facilitation processes. This helped GovWallet scale seamlessly from about 125,000 invocations per week in a staging environment to more than 3.8 million invocations within the first week of NS55RP’s launch. 

With Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway, the GDS team has minimized the time required for infrastructure maintenance. Its developers can now focus on onboarding new government agencies and tailoring the system to suit each agency’s needs and campaigns. By deploying GovWallet entirely on the AWS Cloud instead of on-premises, GovTech has achieved significant cost savings on the hardware front.

The agility of the serverless infrastructure on the AWS Cloud allowed the GDS team to develop and implement GovWallet within four months. GovWallet has now replaced the 600,000 cheques and more than 1 million paper vouchers, representing more than 50 per cent of all disbursements that would have been distributed as part of various government payout campaigns. 

Adopting a serverless architecture allowed the GDS team to focus on making GovWallet more cost-efficient, performant, and responsive to traffic surges. In 2023, GovTech will drive at least two more schemes that utilize GovWallet for disbursement and payment facilitation. 

To learn more, visit https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/worldwide/asean/.