New Zealand extending online government services with ID innovation

Govt-backed online identity system – ‘RealMe’ ready to go (Scoop)

From this week, New Zealanders can begin signing up for RealMe - the only online identity verification service backed by the New Zealand government.

Instead of waiting in line with paper identity documents each time they want a service requiring ID from a government or private sector organisation, people will soon be able to prove their identity online with RealMe and apply for services from home.

New Zealand seems to be quietly building a very advanced ID infrastructure that links government identity documents, government services and the postal service together through biometrics, facial recognition in this case.

New Zealand Post office to offer ID assurance services

New Zealand Post online ID system backed by lawmakers (Post & Parcel)

New Zealand has adopted legislation granting the powers for a new national online identity verification service run by the government jointly with New Zealand Post.

The Electronic Identity Verification Act was passed by the nation’s Parliament last week, allowing private sector organisations to access the RealMe ID verification service.

The service launches in 2013 to verify people that use certain services over the Internet are who they claim to be.

NZ Post is set to get even more involved in ID services (see last year's New Zealand ID Management: New Possibilities).

Around the world, enterprising postal services — who have seen their traditional business model of moving paper around steadily eroded — have been changing adding more explicit identity management services. I say "more explicit" because I believe it can be argued that the primary function of the postal service has always been identity management, the paper part was just ancillary to the ID part.

This post, The Post Office, Identity Assurance & Biometrics, expands on the theme.

Click Postal Service (or use the label in the footer) for more on post offices and ID services.

Biometrics enable micro-lending in Namibia

Namibia: Another Step Forward for Access to Banking (All Africa)

In terms of the agreement, PostFin will use the DBN credit line to finance small businesses, housing and education.

The micro-lending agreement builds on the existing relationship between NamPost and DBN. NamPost previously used DBN finance to implement electronic banking with biometric account management, which has substantially improved access to banking in Namibia, particularly in smaller centres and hard to access areas.

Read on and you'll also learn that in Namibia, like in other countries, the postal service is getting in on the ID business.

Click the 'Postal Service' label below for more examples.

UID & India Post: Delhi Edition

Lost in transit: UIDAI says cards dumped in bulk in city (Express India)

...UID cards issued to Delhi residents are being lost in transit by the postal service.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has asked India Post to immediately plug the gaps in the distribution network, Kumar Alok, Deputy Director General for Administration, Logistics and Media, UIDAI, told Newsline.

He said the UIDAI has faced such problems across the country during the project’s first phase “but the issue was bigger in Delhi”.

This has been a problem for a while now.

See:
India: UID May Ditch India Post (March 5, 2012)

Post Offices Streamlining Government Services with Biometrics

The UK Post Office is active in the ID management industry, serving as a clearing house between individuals residing in Britain and various government bureaucracies dealing with ID and now Post Office Limited has processed the biometric information of more than one and a half million applicants through its Applicant Enrollment Identification (AEI) service.

The UK Post Office serves as a customer service link between individuals and the Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) and the UK Border Agency, capturing applicant information such as fingerprints, photographs, and digital signatures and charging a fee of £19.20.

The DVLA uses the AEI service to allow drivers to renew their drivers’ licenses. By capturing drivers’ photographs and digital signatures at Post Office branches, the service has automated the renewal process that occurs every ten years. Using AEI, the renewal process takes an average of 3.5 - 5 minutes.

The UK Border Agency uses Post Office branches to record and securely transmit biometric information and other applicant data for those wishing to extend their visas. Once the digital signature, photograph, and fingerprints are received and checked by the UK Border Agency and they are satisfied with all aspects of the immigration application, the UK Border Agency issues the foreign national a Biometric Residence Permit.

Here's how it works...

National post offices are in a unique position to offer services like these. Some have been better than others at managing through the information revolution. Australia blazed a trail that the UK followed. The template is there for others to follow.

Unfortunately it'll be difficult to pull off in the United States because most ID is administered at the state, rather than at the national level. The US Postal Service does provide passport services for first-time passport requests and charges $25 for the service, but it's largely locked out of the more lucrative ID business the state's have carved out for themselves.

See also: 3M's press release about its relationship with Post Office Limited

Indian State of Uttar Pradesh Isn't Waiting for UID

Uttar Pradesh to give foodgrain via biometric cards (Thaindian News)

Uttar Pradesh will computerise the public distribution system and issue biometric smart cards to its residents, an official said Thursday.

Chief Secretary Javed Usmani said foodgrain would be provided to people only through smart cards to flush out fake ration cards from the system.

In the first phase, 18 districts would be covered as pilot project.

Uttar Pradesh Isn't Waiting for UID. Judging by the scant information in this article, they're forging ahead anyway.

We mentioned here how Nandan Nilekani was creating competition for India Post in order to gain access to better services for delivering UID numbers to individuals.

Could the shoe now be on the other foot?

Is UID going to have to improve its performance in competition with states who appear willing to set up their own systems?

ID Entrepreneurs: Criminal Background Checks

Demand is high, the business is inherently local, and the US Postal Service doesn't seem interested.

Checking backgrounds for a living (Journal-News - Hamilton, Ohio)

“There is a need now, and an even bigger need in the future, for employee background screenings,” Louderback said. “Anyone who works for the government or with kids has to have one.

“It’s a pretty untapped market,” she said. “Not a lot of people do it. There are opportunities out there. You just have to go out and get them. That’s the hardest part.”

Biometrics Help Increase Access to Banking Services & Reduce Fraud

Tiruvarur tops in biometric card distribution for pension disbursal (The Hindu)

It was a major scam unearthed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in September 2010 in the disbursement of Old Age Pension (OAP) to senior citizens that prompted the authorities to explore alternative methods to ensure disbursement of several social security pension schemes.

Traditionally, pensions have been disbursed through the Postal Department.

After the change of guard in the State in May 2011, the new government promptly announced that pensions would be disbursed through banks, a position reiterated by Chief Minister Jayalalithaa even a few days ago...

Read on.

It looks like the UIDAI isn't the only Indian institution trying to get away from the postal service.


h/t @m2sys

Namibia: Banking, ID & the Post Office

More Namibians have access to banking (The Namibian)

The 17 per cent increase in Namibia’s banked population since 2007 came mostly from low-income earners, aged 32 to 39, living in rural areas.

Better financial access was driven largely by innovative, low-cost and safer products and services by NamPost. “NamPost has changed their product and strategy which has significantly driven product uptake: the physical savings book product was terminated and a biometric smartcard aimed at low-income users was introduced,” the survey said. Significant growth in bank branches across the country also improved.

Since ID management is one of the post office's main functions, it was really interesting to see this article about how the Namibian post office NamPost is contributing to the increasing number of Namibians with access to financial services.

See: The Post Office, Identity Assurance & Biometrics from Friday.

The Post Office, Identity Assurance & Biometrics

The conception of the postal service as a natural monopoly of paper-shuffling is collapsing across the developed world. This doesn't have to be the end of the post office, though, because paper-shuffling was never where the postal service added the most value; paper-shuffling was the indispensable means to its true ends which are no longer exclusively met using paper.

Mail boxes, mail slots, mail fraud, change of address forms, return receipt signature cards, hold mail requests, postal inspectors, these aren't about paper, they are about ensuring the integrity of private communication and commerce among geographically dispersed entities. Identity assurance is and has always been the crux of making it all work.

The country that saw this most clearly and has best internalized this concept of the post office is Australia and results show that though challenges lie ahead, Australia Post business has stabilized. Letter volumes fell for the fourth year in a row declining by three percent in FY 2011, but the organization as a whole showed a pre-tax profit of $332.3 million. It appears identity assurance services were part of the reason why.

Britain's post office seems to have taken notice. Part of a proposed £1.34bn post office revamp is to be devoted to digital identity assurance services.

The Post Office knows it's in trouble; only 20m of us will visit a branch at least once a week, compared to 28m doing so at the turn of the Millennium. Key to remaining relevant is a plan to become more digitally enabled: thus the strategy announcement is big on the roll-out of biometric data capture equipment to nearly 800 branches nationwide, something it says will allow it to "compete for tenders to deliver assisted application and identity verification services". [PublicTechnology.net]

The post offices in the United States also provide more explicit identity assurance services in their role in issuing passports.

It's not the entire solution to modernizing the post office so that it may be preserved, but recognizing that postal services are more than mere paper deliverers and stamp stores is a first step. Their assets are measurable in far greater terms than delivery trucks, airplanes, and real estate holdings, though the real estate holdings are important, massive and will enable post offices to deliver the services upon which their future depends. The real value of postal services in the developed world has been their role as the venerable, reliable identity verification mechanism indispensable to the development and smooth function of the modern economy.

They can continue to be that. There is still a great and growing need.

UPDATE:
I forgot about this post from late last year... UK: Post Office wins biometric collection contract

India: UID May Ditch India Post

Of the 130 million numbers allotted so far, only around 50 million people have received letters (livemint.com)

This has been a long time coming.

Borrowing heavily from an earlier post, UID Catch-22:

♦ India's bureaucracies aren't able to serve the needs of Indians because of an accountability black hole.
♦ A more rigorous ID scheme will increase accountability and deliver better results to citizens.
♦ Implementing the ID scheme depends on the bureaucracies (see statement 1).

Thankfully, the last statement isn't quite true. If true, it dooms the UID project on the bases of both bureaucratic will and ability. There must be many bureaucrats invested in the status quo that would love to see the UID project fail, and the UID load will be difficult for some bureaucracies to bear.

If you didn't click through yet, the above-linked article informs readers that the post office is currently falling short on its responsibility to print and deliver UID numbers.

But if the post office was a model of efficiency, might that call into question the whole reason for UID in the first place?

While UIDAI has allotted Aadhaar identities to 130 million residents, only around 50 million have received letters sent by the authority through India Post informing them about their 12-digit unique identification numbers. The letters have been mailed since the the first set of Aadhaar numbers were issued in September 2010. Some 450,000 letters have been returned to UIDAI.
...
The job of printing the letters has already been taken away from the agency which, according to its website, is the world’s largest postal network with 155,015 post offices as on 31 March 2009. Three private sector firms were given the printing job in January-end after India Post wasn’t able to take the load.

I suspect that none of these contingency plans were made up on the fly*. UIDAI knew it would have to use the post office and knew it would fail. There probably isn't a private entity in India that can displace the post office entirely, but competition among government entities is better than no competition at all and UID is also entering that competition directly by communicating numbers directly to individuals who have access to the internet.

In the final accounting, UID is not about biometrics. Biometrics is a means to better ID management. Better ID management is a means to bring greater transparency and accountability to nearly every aspect of how the government goes about its allocated tasks. Is it any wonder it has so many enemies?

Identity management is about people; the challenges of UID are and will be as much managerial as technical.

*Just having the right technology is not sufficient to roll out a project on this scale. “What we need to do is create an appropriate ecosystem,” said Nilekani. In short, getting the incentives right for all those involved in the project."

See also:
The epic marketing challenge for UID
India: Is UID Under Siege?

UK: Post Office wins biometric collection contract

Network of about 100 locations from the spring of 2012 (The Guardian)

The Post Office has won a contract to take photographs and fingerprints of foreign nationals seeking biometric residence permits (BRPs).

Immigration minister Damian Green announced the plan as part of a package of measures, also including an online checking service for employers, aimed at reducing the number of illegal workers in the UK. They are included in the draft Immigration (Biometric Registration) Regulations 2012, which will complete the roll out of BRPs to all foreign nationals in the UK applying to extend their stays to more than six months.

New Zealand ID Management: New Possibilities

NZ Post's hi-tech photo capture system (Stuff.co.nz)

New Zealand Post has taken its first step towards a future in biometrics.

It is trialling a hi-tech system that takes passport and digital photos in 14 of its Postshops, including its Manners St branch in central Wellington.

The software behind the system could also let NZ Post capture fingerprints and voice samples for identification purposes.

There's also an associated "secure transactions" scheme in the works.