Three weeks after Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong announced on 19 August 2001 the New Singapore Shares (NSS) as part of the Singapore Government's off-budget measures, Singaporeans were able to check how many shares they were allotted and to encash their shares – online and in real-time.

It would have taken at least six months to develop any transactional e-Government service given the many key challenges faced.

Firstly, the government has set a very aggressive dateline of less than 3 months to ensure that eligible Singaporeans were provided with a convenient way to check their share allotment in real-time and to instruct the Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) to exchange their NSS for cash.

Secondly, in order for government agencies to build transactional eServices, they need to integrate the eServices to disparate data sources and services across different government agencies. This integration process using traditional methods is tedious and requires a lot of time, skilled expertise and resources.

In late September 2001, Ecquaria was awarded the project to develop and launch the New Singapore Shares (NSS) Web site and eServices.

In order to meet the dateline, Ecquaria leveraged the Public Service Infrastructure (PSi), a ready Government-wide eServices delivery infrastructure put in place for all government agencies to enable quick development, deployment and syndication of eServices across government ministries, agencies and businesses.

Ecquaria was the Chief Architect for PSi, which was commissioned by the Singapore government in 2001. The PSi provided the background infrastructure for NSS services to be made available via the Internet, enabling information sharing, and seamless communications between the relevant agencies involved, such as the Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB), while adhering to design considerations such as multi-tier architecture, high availability, scalability, thin-client support, platform independence, and standards-based technology.

The New Singapore Shares (NSS) eServices was launched in a record time of 3 weeks in September 2001 soon after the Singapore government announced the NSS Scheme as part of the government’s off-budget measures in mid-August 2001.

Leveraging on the Public Service Infrastructure (PSi) which was later productised into the Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform™ (Ecquaria SOP™), the NSS eService launch demonstrated the extensibility and scalability of the infrastructure that enabled re-use of common applications such as authentication and payment as well as data sources across the relevant agencies while ensuring integration with existing heterogeneous legacy systems.

There was no more manual processing incurring a large amount of resources, which could be better deployed for other value-added services. Counter queues at the Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) and paperwork were dramatically reduced.

The result was a convenient online solution where eligible Singapore citizens were able to check their NSS allotment and instruct the CPFB to exchange NSS for cash - in real-time.

Not to mention that all this was made possible in just 3 weeks.