Last week's speaker was Michael Hamilton.  Michael spoke to the club on the Bahamas Digital Transformation and the role that the Bahamas Gateway Portal played in that transformation.  He spoke about three important components of the digital transformation which were: 1. making sure legislative changes were in place, 2. increasing the use of ICT within government and increasing the use of ICT overall as having a digital government requires a digital society (to support this digital society, training will be provided for the general public) and 3. to operationalize the freedom of information act (which was enacted in parliament in 2018).  The aim is by 2025 to have at least ten government agencies that are equipped to handle freedom of information act requests.

One of the leaders in digital government in the world is Estonia.  The Bahamas patterned their digital transformation on Estonia's and with their assistance implemented the "Great Bahama Bank" which facilitates data sharing and exchange of information between and across government agencies.  The government also wants to onboard banks and private sector companies such as utilities onto the platform as there is massive operation for public private cooperation between the government of the Bahamas and the private sector.  He gave an example of the KYC process when opening a bank account.  If the bank was on the platform, they could perform a simple query to verify if one had any utilities and where they were located.  This would greatly simplify the process of opening a bank account.  

For security purposes, each agency on the platform also agrees which data it will share and who the data will be shared with.  Security will be further enhanced by limiting who within each approved agency can access the data.

On top of the platform is a user portal where users can interact with the various services.  There was extensive testing of the platform to ensure it worked.  There are thirty-five services presently offered on the my gateway portal with plans to expand to offer more services.  Some services are not always available on the platform because they expire.  For example, services for persons who want to apply to register for the advanced poll in the general election would not always be available.  Users need to register in order to use the platform.  At the time of the presentation there were over 48,000 users registered and over 34,000 transactions had already been processed by the platform.  Michael encouraged others to register.  He also stated that they are held to a very high standard on the platform and they ensure that only persons who are supposed to have access to the services get them.