{"id":36303,"date":"2026-03-15T02:32:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T18:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=36303"},"modified":"2026-03-15T02:32:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T18:32:41","slug":"inside-ogp-the-little-known-tech-unit-behind-redeemsg-parking-sg-and-scamshield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=36303","title":{"rendered":"Inside OGP, the little-known tech unit behind RedeemSG, Parking.sg and ScamShield"},"content":{"rendered":"


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SINGAPORE \u2013 Breakout rooms, shelves stacked with board games and boxing gloves, and tables strewn with snacks. The aesthetic of the Open Government Products (OGP) office resembles that of a tech start-up.<\/p>\n

Desks at this little-known government unit are separated into rows by the products the young public servants are working on, with placards hanging above reading ScamShield, AskGov, FindX. <\/p>\n

The walls are plastered with papers that read \u201cEmpowering vulnerable communities\u201d and \u201cSimplifying citizens\u2019 lives\u201d. The organisation\u2019s ethos matches the decor of its fourth-floor office at Lazada One in Bras Basah Road. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur PM (product manager) is not our boss. Our PM is our peer, who consolidates the way we do everything,\u201d says senior product designer Rachel Tan, 30. She works on Pair, the Government\u2019s in-house AI chatbot. \u201cIn our immediate team, none of us is another\u2019s boss.\u201d<\/p>\n

The vibe begins in the interview room, where job applicants are asked: \u201cWhat is one thing you would change about Singapore?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ms Ashley Toh, 30, who spent four years at the Ministry of Social and Family Development before joining OGP, replied that citizen interactions with the Government can be a \u201cblack box\u201d.<\/p>\n

E-mails and residents\u2019 feedback might get no response or merely a cursory one, adds the senior manager of policy and transformation. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you use Shopee and order something from China, you get real-time updates. Sometimes, here, it\u2019s something so important and personal and you\u2019re like, \u2018What\u2019s happening?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Opinions like hers are not out of place at OGP, which has the mandate of improving government through technology \u2013 be it making the Government more transparent or improving how it communicates with people. <\/p>\n

Its work, if not its name, is familiar to most Singaporeans.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most of the Republic\u2019s drivers have abandoned paper parking coupons for Parking.sg. Nearly everyone has encountered a go.gov.sg URL, received an SMS from a gov.sg sender ID or claimed vouchers using RedeemSG. Behind the scenes, OGP has also developed the government\u2019s website builder, Isomer, and its in-house generative artificial intelligence tool Pair.<\/p>\n

OGP is helmed by director Li Hongyi, 38. The former Public Service Commission scholar spent two years as a product manager at Google before founding OGP in 2019 as a division within GovTech. <\/p>\n

Before that, OGP existed informally as his brainchild. It worked on projects like Parking.sg and Data.gov.sg with shoestring budgets. The team has since grown to about 200, doubling its headcount from 2023. Mr Li declined to be interviewed, but permitted his staff to speak to ST.<\/p>\n

What makes OGP different, staff say, is how workers are encouraged to identify problems rather than wait for directives.<\/p>\n

The most visible manifestation is its annual Hack for Public Good, which happens every January and has produced 30 of the 49 products that OGP has officially launched. Staff often spend the month before on \u201clearning journeys\u201d, shadowing and speaking to other public servants to understand what could work better.<\/p>\n

One of OGP\u2019s most notable products, Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) X, was first proposed during its 2024 hackathon as a possible alternative to ERP 2.0.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The consortium behind ERP 2.0 won a $556 million contract in 2016 to replace the older gantry-based system with one using on-board units. <\/p>\n

In contrast, ERP X deploys cameras to recognise vehicle licence plates and handles payments through a smartphone app. Its developers estimated potential cost savings of over $540 million. <\/p>\n

While ERP X is still undergoing beta testing, it seems unlikely to replace ERP 2.0, given that on-board units have been installed in all but 7 per cent of Singapore\u2019s total vehicle population as at January 2026.<\/p>\n

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OGP director Li Hongyi speaking at the Hack for Public Good 2026 in January, which featured 63 prototypes.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: KEVIN LIM<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the 2026 Hack for Public Good, another product pitched was Key Press, a password manager for public officers.<\/p>\n

The idea originated from civil servants who said multiple password resets across various services led to insecure practices like appending \u201c1\u201d to old passwords.<\/p>\n

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Speakeasy is a prototype for simplifying government texts intended for public audiences.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: TEO KAI XIANG<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another initiative, Speakeasy, aims to simplify government texts for public audiences. It assesses readability and flags unexplained acronyms and convoluted phrasing. \u201cFacilitate\u201d becomes \u201chelp\u201d. A wall of text about losing a passport becomes: \u201cHere is what you need to do to return to Singapore quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, not all their ideas are winners. Some read like technologies in search of a use case, such as a tool for finding a shaded route from point A to point B, or how to get bus timings by tapping your phone against a device at a bus stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With 151 ideas pitched from 2021 to 2025, the hackathon has produced more duds than successes, but the unit treats this as a feature, not a bug, and the best ideas are turned into strategy.<\/p>\n

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Ms Rachel Tan is a senior product designer working on Pair, a generative AI tool used by public officers.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: NG SOR LUAN<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ms Tan stresses that even though Pair\u2019s interface resembles that of commercially available chatbots, it is more than just a \u201cChatGPT clone\u201d. <\/p>\n

Pair handles information up to a restricted level of classification. It comes with a slew of custom \u201cAssistants\u201d \u2013 generative pre-trained transformers (a type of large language model) for common civil service tasks, many of them created by public officers themselves. <\/p>\n

One Assistant was created by a Ministry of Education teacher to generate multiple-choice quiz questions for Kahoot, an interactive learning tool used in class every day. That Assistant has since been adopted by teachers at other schools.<\/p>\n

As at the third quarter of 2025, Pair had 78,511 monthly active users. Singapore has around 154,000 public officers.<\/p>\n

\u201cPair\u2019s goal is to put AI in the hands of every public officer,\u201d says Ms Tan, noting that this is the metric the team has chosen to evaluate their efforts. \u201cIt\u2019s never management that comes up with the metric we have to chase and are accountable to.\u201d<\/p>\n

When OGP worked out of a WeWork office in Raffles Place from 2022 to 2024, the neighbouring Lau Pa Sat hawker centre was a testing ground. Ms Tan and her colleagues would walk over to solicit feedback from the people whom they hoped would eventually use their products.<\/p>\n

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Mr Kishen Ashok Kumar is a senior software engineer working on Postman, the Government\u2019s secure messaging system.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: NG SOR LUAN<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Senior software engineer Kishen Ashok Kumar, 28, joined OGP in 2023, fresh out of the National University of Singapore. <\/p>\n

It was his first full-time job and led to his work on Postman \u2013 the Government\u2019s tool for consolidating its sender IDs for SMSes, which were previously scattered across agencies, into a single gov.sg identity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In developing the tool, \u201cUncle, do you have five minutes to talk about government messaging?\u201d has become a regular refrain for him.<\/p>\n

The hope, says Mr Kishen, is that if citizens can recognise the gov.sg SMS service as the primary legitimate channel for government communications, they will also learn to recognise fraudulent communications from other IDs. In\u00a0the third quarter of 2025\u00a0alone, Postman\u00a0was\u00a0used to deliver 46 million SMSes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When he started, however, Mr Kishen says the initial version of Postman that the team developed was genius to them, but a complete flop with users. When tested with retirees at a community centre, the feedback they got was blunt: It was unintuitive.<\/p>\n

What happened next is illustrative of their organisational culture: The team agreed to toss out that initial work entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no ego or defensiveness about why this does not work or why we should stick to it,\u201d Mr Kishen says. \u201cThe truth of whether something works is the person on the street telling you if it works or not \u2013 not who comes up with the idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Mr Kishen Kumar and his team pitched a better way of assessing cycling infrastructure as part of the Hack for Public Good 2026.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: TEO KAI XIANG<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Former social worker Ashley Toh joined OGP after four years of working at MSF.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: NG SOR LUAN<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Workers are assigned to teams, usually of no more than five, to manage a product intended for a national audience. Everyone is expected to have an opinion and articulate it.<\/p>\n

Ms Toh, as a former social worker who came from a \u201ctraditional\u201d government department defined by hierarchy and clearly delineated responsibilities, initially experienced some culture shock.<\/p>\n

\u201cComing here, it was really: This is the problem space, this is your product, go and figure out what to do with it,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are guidelines and red lines you cannot cross. But everything within that, it is up to you to figure out. That was terrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Ms Toh\u2019s role as senior manager of policy and transformation, she helps OGP navigate the rest of the public sector. <\/p>\n

This is necessary, she says, because many OGP staff do not come from the public service or understand how it works.<\/p>\n

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Yale-NUS graduate Ruchel Phua is a product operations specialist working on FormSG.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: NG SOR LUAN<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Securing this buy-in forms the core of work done by staff like Ms Ruchel Phua, a 25-year-old product operations specialist at OGP who made the switch from big tech in 2024.<\/p>\n

She is part of the team developing FormSG, the public sector\u2019s form-building tool used to solicit responses for everything from National Day Parade ticket balloting to Covid-19 health declarations. She goes to schools and meets school leaders, teachers and administrators through workshops about digitising school processes.<\/p>\n

Ms Phua says the approach is \u201clet\u2019s just pick one process and try to digitise it and try to do it well\u201d, citing early school dismissal forms as an example. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt isn\u2019t just about digitising a form, it\u2019s also about working through age-old processes,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

This quest for culture change is why OGP posts publicly accessible \u201creport cards\u201d online every quarter, detailing how much is spent, who is working on a product and how it has been received by users.<\/p>\n

FormSG\u2019s report card states that, in the third quarter of 2025, it received 6.91 million responses across over 75,000 active forms, at the cost of around 12 cents a form submitted.<\/p>\n

Having a standard and interoperable set of metrics is especially useful for encouraging and justifying cross-government collaboration. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are trying to build products that serve the public good. How is the public going to know it\u2019s serving them if they don\u2019t know what we are tracking?\u201d says Ms Phua.<\/p>\n

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(Clockwise from top) Mr Kishen Kumar, Ms Rachel Tan, Ms Ashley Toh and Ms Ruchel Phua.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: NG SOR LUAN<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A one-third time policy \u2013 inspired by Google \u2013 means that workers can use up to a third of their working hours on projects that interest them outside their usual scope of work. A colourful mural which states \u201cFor public good\u201d stands in the pantry, designed by Ms Tan.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get a lot of energy to make the country a better place,\u201d says one OGP staffer in his 20s, who declined to give his name. He was initially rotating through OGP as a Public Service Commission scholar. \u201cPeople are passionate about what they want to see better in Singapore.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a year, he decided to convert his scholarship to one at GovTech, OGP\u2019s parent organisation, so he could continue working at OGP.<\/p>\n

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OGP workers at their 2026 hackathon with their prototype for making PayNow payments a more seamless process.<\/p>\n

ST PHOTO: TEO KAI XIANG<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On anonymous company review platform Glassdoor, OGP rates higher than 60 government ministries and statutory boards, including its parent organisation GovTech. Only 14 other ministries or statutory boards have ratings that equal or surpass it.<\/p>\n

But the same collegial qualities beloved by OGP\u2019s staff also invite scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Employee reviews call out the unit\u2019s exceptionalism, pointing out that many of the perks \u2013 autonomy, ambiguous scope of work, small teams \u2013 can just as easily become stressors and cause burnout. \u201cNot for people who are trying to coast,\u201d writes one reviewer.<\/p>\n

Other detractors say the unit\u2019s impact is because it can cut through red tape or allege that rapid growth is straining OGP\u2019s culture and question whether it can effectively scale up.<\/p>\n

At the 2026 Hack for Public Good, most of the OGP staff ST meet are articulate, opinionated and itching to prove themselves.<\/p>\n

A staff member tells ST this comes down to the unit\u2019s hiring process, which rates candidates on their ability to communicate their work and alignment with the OGP\u2019s reformist culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real selling point is the people who are here,\u201d says Mr Kishen. \u201cEveryone\u2019s very kind, very curious, but also intensely passionate about the work he or she could do. I thought that was rarer than all the other things.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the office, workers affix their names and photos to a profile wall, along with an \u201cI am\u2026\u201d prompt to complete. Mr Kishen\u2019s card reads: \u201cI am at OGP because it\u2019s harder to find good people than to find good problems.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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