To boost local consumer consumption and accelerate economic recovery, the Government, in its 2021-22 Budget, announced the Consumption Voucher Scheme to disburse consumption vouchers to each eligible person by instalments totalling $5,000. With a preparation time as short as four months, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO), under the coordination of the Financial Secretary's Office and the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau (FSTB), collaborated closely with various stakeholders to drive technology exchange and provide overall technical design and advice for the Scheme, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the entire registration and voucher issuance process.

SIMPLIFY AND ENHANCE IDENTITY AUTHENTICATION PROCESS FOR GREATER CONVENIENCE TO THE PUBLIC

To enable the public to complete registration within a short span of time, OGCIO developed an online registration platform to encourage the public to register electronically. The platform provided multiple channels, including answering security questions, using the iAM Smart App or uploading a copy of the Hong Kong Identity Card, for real-time identity authentication. In addition, optical character recognition technology was adopted to ensure the quality of the uploaded Hong Kong Identity Card copy.

MAKE GOOD USE OF TECHNOLOGY TO ENSURE SMOOTH REGISTRATION

OGCIO adopted a number of technology solutions, such as Government Cloud Infrastructure Services, virtual waiting room, content delivery network and traffic scrubbing service, to ensure efficient and secure handling of a vast number of online registrations. As a result, electronic registrations accounted for about 94% of the total number of registrants, which greatly reduced the incorrect information input arising from the use of paper forms and successfully enhanced the efficiency in the implementation of the Scheme. Besides, OGCIO unified the application programming interface to interoperate with the stakeholders’ systems to achieve data interoperability, and speed up the registration and voucher disbursement process.

CLOSE COLLABORATION WITH REMARKABLE RESULTS

The number of registrations on the day the Scheme was first launched exceeded 1.5 million, and the vast majority of registrants were able to complete electronic registration within minutes. In less than a month after the registration commenced, the first batch of about 5.5 million eligible registrants were disbursed with the first phase of consumption voucher, fully demonstrating the effectiveness of close collaboration among the stakeholders and the use of technology.