Malaysia pushes for stronger DPI governance

Malaysia has ambitions to become a digital hub for Southeast Asia but the country still has some way to go, said a senior consultant working across Malaysia in digital transformation programs.

Ernst and Young Sdn Bhd deputy consulting leader Shankar Kanabiran believes Malaysia has made good progress in digital payments, but hasn’t made the same headway in data exchange and digital identity.

Digital ID and data exchange are core components of national-scale digital public infrastructure (DPI), and Malaysia is taking notes from Singapore’s Singpass, India’s Aadhaar, and Estonia’s e-residency programme in the advancement of its own DPI. Meanwhile, the Malaysian government has sought to improve data governance, security and privacy, with the Cyber Security Act 2024, the Personal Data Protection (Amendment) Bill 2024, and the Omnibus Bill which is still being finalized.

So far, Kuala Lumpur has rolled out the Malaysian Government Central Data Exchange (MyGDX) and the Central Database Hub (Padu) for its digital initiatives, along with MyDigital ID and DuitNow QR.

Kanabiran observed that digital payments such as the country’s DuitNow QR platform are “quite mature” with around 1.2 billion digital transactions completed via DuitNow as of 2022.

“However, on the digital identity front like the recently launched MyDigital ID, while it is a good start, it is still in the early stages,” Kanabiran told StarBiz.

“Moreover, with regards to data exchange, we have MyGDX, which enables data sharing across public agencies, but the scope of data is limited to the administrative data of citizens,” he added.

Introduced at the end of last year, Malaysia has high hopes for its MyDigital initiative, saying that it “represents the government’s aspirations to transform Malaysia into a digitally-enabled and technology driven high income nation, and a regional lead in digital economy,” on its official website.

However, adoption appears to be slow. Malaysia’s national digital identification system – MyDigital ID – hasn’t yet reached 700,000 registered users (Malaysia’s total population is around 34 million). The digital ID is managed by Mimos, and the onboarding carried out by PJBumi.

But MyDigital ID’s chief solutions officer Mohamed Redzuan Abdullah has expressed pride in the system’s zero false acceptance rate, which means no one has been issued with an identity certificate that doesn’t belong to them. However, he admitted false rejection rates are around 14 percent.

“What we mean by ‘false rejection rate’ is that a person may have filled in the correct information but is rejected either because the system couldn’t read the MyKad, or there was an error when entering the data,” Redzuan told Twenty Two.

Redzuan said MyDigital ID is working “closely” with its technology partner, Wise AI, to remedy the issue and said he is confident the false rejection rate can be reduced to a “single digit” by next year.

PwC Malaysia digital trust and cybersecurity leader Clarence Chan told The Star that the new policies are in the right direction. “Beyond technology, the governance framework surrounding the implementation is key,” he said. “Countries like Singapore, India, and Estonia may utilize different infrastructures and technology platforms, but a key factor in their success is the governance frameworks surrounding them.”

Chan added that strong enforcement needs to be coupled with such structures, and that integration challenges remain in Malaysia since various government agencies are using “a mix of legacy as well as modernized infrastructures and applications” in connecting to the platform, which may leave the system vulnerable to cyber attackers.

Shankar added that strong public trust will be key, and that the necessary infrastructure will need to be created first before adoption of digital ID can occur, as quoted in The Star.

Article Topics

cybersecurity  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  digital public infrastructure  |  digital trust  |  financial services  |  government services  |  Malaysia  |  Southeast Asia