Digital Signature Lawfulness for Communications & Media in UAE

How to eSign a document: digital signature lawfulness for Communications & Media in UAE

it's important to move into a digital documentation digital communication as well so that will reduce the costs for everyone the digital signature is a certain level of achievement in automation today we are submitting our documents electronically which took away the the inefficiencies in the pre and post documentation of every single Import and Export that happens out of this country hello you're with echelon Sri Lanka's path towards e-governance has had several important Milestones one of which has been the introduction of digital signatures now digital signatures make it possible for documents clearly authenticated to be digitally submitted or exchanged and in the studio with us our three gentlemen who each represent agencies or companies that are critical parts of the ecosystem that has brought digital signatures into trade flows and in the studio with us today is Anand jailat who is a assistant governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and although you are also involved early on from the process when digital signatures were being enacted into law also with us is sudata Silva who is a director at Customs an agency that has pioneered digital signatures and we have from the private sector Sean van dots Sean works for Ms but he's also the chairman of the logistics subcommittee of the joint apparel Association Forum thank you gentlemen for joining us today may start with you Ananda you know uh you were certainly involved like you were saying in in setting up the laws the regulatory framework for digital signatures uh you also with the central bank this is Central Bank itself use digital signatures absolutely we have about 100 signatures right and we are using it for the safety security of the documentation process communication process all countries are moving towards digital environment it's cost efficient faster and more more convenient for the users green it will not use paper energy efficient and so that is one reason why we need to have because Sri Lanka is having a issue of productivity we need to improve productivity in all corners that reason it's important documentation digital communication so that will reduce the costs for everyone sometimes we may have a view that digital signatures are most useful in transactions you know you are authenticating a transaction you know you are giving you sign for that is that the function they are used for in Central Bank Central Bank is also regulator did signatures fulfilled two issues that encountered in digital transaction digital communication okay one is tampering with the documents sure and impersonation so these two are very significant when you have reliability on your Communications your documents your payments all sorts of activities and when digital signature is there you have integrity you have the confidence that this has not altered in between document or your email and even if they are altered you can recognize trace the source and again someone can deny that it has not sent by him sure I think features that helped The increased confidence in digital transaction among the public General Public Central Bank is no exception we also need to have a very strong communication link where we have some privileged documents privileged emails when there we go we don't want anyone to interfere in between anyone to impersonate that so it's very tried and tested way for a system to adopt these digital signatures so that everyone will have a confidence that that these documents or these communications are not tempered in between or not changing it sure so that if I may come to you you know Customs uh you were telling us was one of the the first state institution to adopt digital signatures right you are also an important agency or you know you stand at the border of Sri Lanka with the outside world and you know how how did it go down when when you decided to implement this you had stakeholders on two sides you had the internal stakeholders and the external stakeholders so uh how did you manage this relationship in fact it all started with the paperless processing of Customs clearance right as a customs is a board agency and we regulate the Prosper development of goods imports and exports and when it comes to clearance of imports and exports there are a lot of documents involved there are local initiatives as well as International initiatives for trade facilitation all right in order to do trade facilitation one of the key development we can achieve is the automation of all the processes in fact Sri Lanka Customs started the automation process way back in 1993. we have a history of over 25 years it's a long journey we during this 25 years we realized that the ultimate facilitation we can provide to the trader is to clear without documents and without asking the trade to come to customs when you mean without documents without physical without physical documents paper documents in 2011 we developed our system to receive customs declaration online but still westerns declaration is an importer saying okay this is what my cargo consists of that's right that's right so he submits a declaration to customs online but still we insisted on paper document the reason why the Customs Law requires the physical signature okay papers with signatures sure and at that time that was a great barrier for us to go for paperless since 2011 although we provided the platform we realized that we have to now develop our system and we in 2016 and 17 we started enhancing our infrastructure I.T infrastructure and in 2019 we were ready to roll out paperless clearance but however there was one more initiative we had to take that was online payment and when we were looking for a partner to help us to implement online payment we came across this unique agency called lankas Lanka CLIA is I think the parent company under which they have different sectors sign is one of their I think uh subjective companies so Lanka clear helped us to establish the platform to receive online payments with that we started moving towards payable as processing and one of the major requirements in paperless processing was the digital signature how we are going to get this electronic document sign and authenticated and at that time laka clear came forward and said okay we can do it faster so we partnered with Lanka clear and implemented digital signature uh of course we had a period to uh pilot the program of course we invited few companies uh to Pilot the program and Ms is one of the companies which came forward voluntary to do the piloting period and after successful piloting period we launched the digital signature in August last year can you clarify something for me one of the impediments you had to uh electronic document submission was you said the requirement in the law for a signature right uh now digital signatures in their current form meet that requirement or did you also have to change the law in between no not at all of course ICT agency has done the homework well in advance in 2006 they have brought the electronic transition act which enables us to accept the electronic documents and also it talks about the implementation of digital signature of course we were ready and especially when the pandemic came we had to maintain distance physical distancing we had to clear Goods without the presence of the Importer or this agent and since we had started the project to go for paperless since 2017 in the year 2020 it was a blessing in disguise for us we implemented the paperless process and the digital signature it's just by way of background for everybody I think Lanka formed what the organization that was known as Lanka clear formally is now known as Lanka pay and I'll turn to you uh Sean um so you are an organization you one of your roles a full-time role is at Ms where you know Amaze as an exporter you know deal with board agencies all the time because you import a substantial amount of your inputs and all your product is sent to overseas markets globally right you also piloting digital signatures with Sri Lanka Customs you know uh how how was that process how did it go well not just to mention Ms the total parallel manufacturers in Sri Lanka or in a continuous improvement process right and when we studied when we do a Time study of all the transactions we do although the processes that we make we found that are post pre and post documentation takes most of the time right we have brought in state of the art manufacturing techniques Etc that is a that is a given today and Sri Lanka is number one I believe in this part of the world but we had this Draconian laws with the customs uh even though that electronic act came into place we just couldn't submit our documents electronically because the Customs wanted us to see us there because of their law because of their ordinance ordinance prevented that and we had workshops continuously with customs and we finally after much to do on it it was finally ratified and today we are submitting our documents electronically which took away the the inefficiencies in the pre and post documentation of every single Import and Export that happens out of this country in and out of this country so the apparel industry itself must be accounting for tens of thousands of you know containers in and out of out of these countries so each of those containers required physically documents each and every shipment shipment whether it is shipments and all those documents have to be physically signed right we had even first started every customer customs declaration at about 18 copies wow then we came down to 11 it came to another two days just one if the Enterprise needs it we can go with zero documentation but there are zero physical documents zero physical documentation but today we can go without a single paper which we call paperless and I think it has helped us in a to a great extent to be more efficient and like he correctly said the pandemic was eye-opener right the initial resistance actually came within the Customs because the Customs officers were the fear of the unknown the fear of the unknown the I.T we knew very well about it but we had so many you know battles to fight but after that once the education started and today it's a piece of cake and we don't even have to be there when we process our documentation so another this fear of the unknown is a real thing right you know it's without being too judgmental um how did it play out at the Central Bank from your Vantage Point you know because you were one of the early adopters again right uh I think um it's everywhere you're going to maintain status quo and you can't go away from that not really very willing to do that but at some point in time you have to challenge the status quo and if something is efficient and more productive why not deduct it because our main issue is productivity so we think we have addressed it through this and as rightly mentioned kovid all these difficulties that we encountered as brought up to the this level and everyone is now geared to a deadlifting it and already adapted uh if I can come to use that with the same question you know the fear of the unknown right when you're fundamentally changing a system that you have been so used to for in the case of the Customs audience several hundred years right one and a half centuries or something old audience ordinance um how did the Customs manage to navigate this in fact it is all what you require is the enthusiasm as he correctly said there is always fear when it comes to unknown when you give the education then people will always adore it I will give you a little incident which I experienced during one of my investigations I came across a 4-H customs declaration all right but it has been signed by Customs officer and I'm familiar I was familiar with his signature I happen to go and show that document to that particular customs office and ask is this your signature you know the answer I got from that officer he said he looked at it for some time he read the content of the document he said yes this is my signature but it was not signed by me right the reason why he said yes this is my signature it's quite similar to his signature even he himself can't differentiate immediately at a glance then I managed to apprehend the person who forged the signature of the Customs officer and he admitted that he did it and I just wanted to test something in my case I have very complex ignition I told him okay can you try my signature I showed him one of the specimens of my signature nice I asked him to try my signature he couldn't he was a very smart guy but still he could not Forge my signature and the story continues one day I was chatting with a group of new Customs officers and I told this story then one young Customs officer who just joined he said sir I can't forge your signature I said what yes I can then I showed him the specify he did it exactly the way I signed so this uh the moral of the story is there are smarter people than the smartest why the digital signature is so useful that it cannot be tampered with the digital signature will give the proper security to the document the Customs is a place where you need so many documents for clearance starting from the customs declaration it beyond the Customs decoration we need the commercial invoice we need the bill of lading we need the packing list so many documents issued by various other parties and it comes to the supply chain and finally through the bank comes to the imported and they put submit systems and some documents are originated from various uh overseas agencies and when it comes to submission to Sri Lanka Customs validating the document is with the imported the law says the Importer must submit the original documents and with the implementation of the of the enactment of the electronic transaction act it paved the way for anyone to sign a document electronically and that really supersede the provisions in the Customs ordinance that is why we could implement the digital signature at customer so so when you have uh when shipper when exporters or importers have their their customers sign or well sign electronic documents shown uh in this process how did it work before digital signatures you know assume your parties you deal with overseas are capable of doing digital signatures as they possibly have been for so you would get those electronically and you'd have to print them out and submit to customs how did it go so no basically the our customers that we manufacture for majority of them were web-based sure all the documents went through the web and there was a trail that they could have given we will sign it manually but it will go be scanned and sent through the web so we that was not a problem documentation internally in Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka and that had very adverse effects on us because there were incidents where in our name people have so-called clear fabric but it was something else and then when it's a reputed apparel manufacturer generally Customs know who we are and they there's a green Channel facility that you go through but actually what was coming was Contraband right and uh because they could have forged up signature they had a vet number they had a TIN number and they just forged the signatures and it went through because of the reputation of the company but with digital signatures that eradicates that child completely replicated completely eradicated and it's actually a comfort factor for us because we could we we are now sure of what we are doing and no one can just you know ruin the reputation of reputed apparent manufacturers who is the backbone of this country right now in when it comes to exports so that's the security we had um another implementing this uh at Central Bank no doubt would have been challenging but but I suppose the real benefits of this will be its wider adoption in the financial services sector right this is this is huge there's tens of thousands of transactions happening every day every hour um from again from where you are you know how is that Journey going and what does Sri Lanka or the financial sector or Sri Lanka have to gain from The Wider adoption of digital signatures I think uh it's very pertinent question what I would say is that it's very important if we are to get the read the benefit of uh digitalization that we must preserve the confidence of the public and if you have to preserve the confidence of the public errors and omissions or frauds has to be minimized in that those could happen sure should be minimized sure and in this journey everyone need to recognize that their assets are secure their documents or Communications are secure and when you communicate with up your bank or your any other entity that you are dealing with that your documents are not tempered within between and your males are not impersonated or doc communication that's very important and that process is kind of guaranteed or insured by adopting digital signature into it because when digital signature is there the minimum you can trace to the source and identify whether it says fraud or whether it's a stampered width in between and when this kind of facility is there continuously adopting by The Wider Society because you will be safe as the other person that dealing with you is safe if majority of the the infringement of cyber or electronic security happen not by our computers themselves either happen via users misusing their Identity or the the key or else the other subsystems adapted to you like CCTV systems or those things like those in one weakness in one element would infringe the security of everything so that is why you need to have wider Wireless in wide adaptation is there by the public every one of us know that our area is secured when our area is secure we know that other person can trust on us the way we do in transaction and that is important for everyone I know for instance Central Bank has been encouraging the financial sector to adopt digital signatures widely obviously their clients also have to be then willing to do so uh can do you have a sense about how widespread it is or how big the opportunity in the financial sector is you know is is it possible to quantify um in payments I would say it's close to full 100 in payments uh whatever payment transaction if you request something from uh to do some transaction on your account sure so you're referring to a slip system that communication related to sleep sure sure but that doesn't involve a digital signature that doesn't directly inverse but communication would involve okay for example if you want your bank to transfer something for you from your account you could get you have to have authenticated email message sure that's an area where when you are sending that you can have sure okay so of course banks will have it will get a mechanism Tuesday I have to send you that particular portal but when you are communicating it's again important and even within institution if you say payment instruction is gone not not final instruction but the subordinate to that one when that is gone if it if person receiving can confirm that this is authentic this is received from the right Source this is not temporary so he has confidence it errors should be minimized and fraud would be minimized because no one can send the mail or request and personally this is these were the challenges the significant challenges that we are all financial institutions let's say Banks and finance companies how how many of them are ready for this Central Bank has a guidance or directions issued on the cyber security and how what kind of security measures that we adopted and in this guidance that we included this the security measures like things like those this automatically comes in so Banks certainly in compliance since there are here and there could be but generally in compliance we particularly in payments the finance companies also falling in life they may need some time for uh updating their the systems things like those but generally in life yes so that can you give us a sense about how the usage of digital signatures particularly in submitting Customs declarations and stuff like that right uh surely it can be it has been possible to submit these electronically for a while uh I'm just it's a it may sound like a basic question but how how many of those declarations come with digital signatures now that's a very good question as Sean said when we implemented the paperless processing and Then followed by that the digital signature there was internal resistance that was purely because lack of knowledge but we gave them the awareness and they realized the value of especially during the pandemic but at the same time there was external resistance right from the users right my uh our observation is that again beyond the knowledge Gap some of the external users were concern about some of the opportunities they are going to lose because especially the customs house agents they were they were bringing Little Resistance first thing they would like to come to customs some of them they would like to come to customs when we Implement paperless processing and digital signature they lose the opportunity to come to customs then the second thing sometimes they are not technically ready they don't have the technical infrastructure to implement digital signature we in order to overcome these challenges we had to use little bit of pressure on them and we declared that from January we will be moving totally to digital signature January 2022 but still we realize the major uh sector was not ready so we have now extended it but because of various strategies we have been using over last maybe 12 months there is a significant Improvement of the usage of the digital signature and probably are you confident that you can fully switch the things are improving very fast right but at the same time again I must admit that although we have implemented it there are certain areas where we will also need Improvement for example at the moment we have provided the facility to sign the customs declaration with digital signature Earth and also the attached documents which comes in the PDF format they have to scan and convert the document into PDF file and sign the PDF file with the digital signature upload it and attach it to the customs declaration in your system but in our system still we cannot view the digital signature of the scanned documents we have to download it and open it separately outside of as a good application so that is a little cumbersome process for the user or the Customs officer so we are in the process of improving a vascular system within the system the customs office again open the document and verify the digital signature so there are improvements coming from both the external improvements and internal improvements hopefully we will be able to achieve the greatest level at the End by the end of this year Sean if I come to you so uh from from an industry point of view from a shipper's point of view you know how far down the road do you think we are from Full realization of the benefits of digital signatures I'm sure with the big organizations like the one you work for perhaps you have already fully realized the benefit but but overall in Sri Lanka how far are we from I think even in big organizations we have only looked at the Customs documentation right uh Finance Departments of these organizations are still not using digital signature mainly purely because of the the the company's regulations and I I would I would say that the biggest transactions within an organization like us is important export and the documentation or the the accounting will probably go on through system based so there's a traceability and trackability of these transactions which does not make have a major pain point for us but overall what we are struggling is apparel manufacturers are the other Bond agencies not only Customs except Boi and Customs we have sometimes to go for other approach that we need especially with the wildlife or you know if you've been a particular button which is of course Shield or whatever is that they are still not Savvy with these things they don't have they don't have the technical infrastructure and the soft software and the hardware to deal with those so we still have the customer related shop with the company embossil and personally signed and it's it's we see that as a big bottleneck to push forward in this digital digital space in Sri Lanka given the fact even though our buyers are purely web-based and uh they're on finance platforms so they don't even want to see the see our document sure now export document they don't want to see it because I'm handing over Goods to one of their nominated people they confirm on the system that they received X number of pieces so it is all linked and we are far away from coming to that stage as a country all right so uh so while big organizations like the one you represent or their parallel sector in general dominated by big companies where you have been using a web-based system that doesn't require downloads and saving and all that you think there's uh the rest of the industry has some distance to go out how can we sort of I'm I'll ask all of you how can we nudge this forward short of ultimatums maybe you know ultimatums or deadlines maybe one way to do it you know what are the other tools available to us to realize the full benefits another probably another pandemic I'm sorry if I sounded cynical because the pandemic quickened the space sure okay and we saw the benches otherwise we yeah called to go and meet the officers whether they be or your customers or anyone so I think the the political wheel loss should be there to push this no point passing uh these resolutions and board paper the political views should be there that we should go digital you have seen what how digitalization fell on its face when the Google balloons are supposed to have gone up and we were all supposed to be Wi-Fi connected Etc but it is just a was it a gimmick or was it just another carrot in front of us to you know see the common man to make them happy and then finally the real the fact of the matter is that nothing happened so it's it's the political political bill I think is the most important thing in this space to connect most of the board agencies who are government run sure Customs potentially stands out I would you agree absolutely absolutely it stands out for having achieved what it has in that this span of time uh so that what do you think you have as lessons for wide adoption if if Customs were able to do it uh how do we propagate this further of course uh first thing is as I I agree with Sean the political will the if the political will is there of course the officials will get motivated I totally agree that other agencies related to customs clearance there are many board agencies should implement the digital signature but before moving on to digital signature digital signature is a certain level of achievement in automation some agencies are yet to even start the automation processes so first thing you have to start small first try to automate your business process then we have set the examples to them they we can always help the other government agencies to guide them how they can grow and ultimately implement the digital platforms to do their all business processes the best way is to give the the to make the people understand the value of this of course I don't wish there will be another pandemic but I agree that the pandemic has brought some uh I mean it has enlightened the people to see the value of digitization and that will really boost the confidence of the government officials uh just for some background the rcuda system the one automation system that runs Customs was introduced many years ago wasn't it was it not yes we started with the the latest uh we started in 1993 with the application available at that time but the asicoda is also growing from time to time and we have implemented the latest version which is really technology technically high in standards sure so Banks also on them they have you know sophisticated go banking systems they have world-class vendors you know when they need something on top of the co-banking system they can procure it right uh what do you think will be the spark you know that will lead to as wide adoption of digital signatures in the financial sector to me uh two elements one is awareness right kind of awareness second is willingness I don't know it's whether political law otherwise it's willingness willingness comes from the as rightly mentioned pay new fee mainly when you feel it it's costing you too much it's threatening your life your willingness is coming how to survive to survive and I think that's very important to create that environment that willingness is there because you would feel going forward entire world will be digital we Have No Escape and dinosaurs will die and those who cannot adopt to that one will have to fade away and if we want to survive we need to reduce our costs and do the way things we are doing now change the way things have been doing now improve our productivity that's very important to improve productivity that is cost and pi so you need to bring down cost and bring out time that you spent on each one a gentlemen I have to appreciate your time here you've sort of managed to lay down the landscape as from from a regulatory point of view all the way to a user point of view and government agencies I'll ask you each of you to take a maybe a minute and any final thoughts that you have uh that you'd like to leave behind uh and and approach this with a view to also say pushing the agenda forward you know how can we push this agenda forward I think it should be made mandatory by law the digital signatures will be and digitalization of all private and government institutions as with a deadline unfortunately for me in this part of my my opinion is that if you don't enforce it from some very powerful Authority or the government itself that this is not going to take place it will be the wins and fancies of the private sector who want to embrace it or do not want to embrace it but if you're forward thinking like the parallel sector who will always Embrace new technology and new ways of you know becoming efficient and becoming world class if you are to be world class we have to we have to ensure that we embrace the move and go forward so that I have a different view uh as a government servant I think we what we talk about here is e-governance so in order to go for fully governance there must be a national level e-governance policy so there must be initiatives to integrate uh all the government agencies sure into platforms those who are having linked activities they must work in some same same platform in order to do that you have to have the national level of national level approach and have the national governance policy with proper guidance from the experts and honor the final words for me so the way I think is slightly different because as far as government is concerned it's a government entity of course changing yellow and they're loving it the law to take place over everything else that's fine but as far as private citizens are concerned I think it's they are the bill and it's uh it but what we need to create this awareness to say that if you do not change the way that you have done things 100 years ago that you are not creating convenience for yourself you are struggling with same stack or documents or same track of the procedures that you had continuously is it the way that life is new and we have to communicate that and bring that the concept of convenience and comfort together with the the efficiency and productivity for the public so then that communication will have strong I know that there should be a pain to people to understand but somewhere the other day to feel this that is a forward before I suppose once you overcome that hurdle of that mental resistance to this uh the possibilities are fairly endless and you will immediately start believing in it uh thank you gentlemen for sharing your thoughts and laying down the landscape for us so clearly as far as digital signatures go from from a state agency regulatory point of view governance point of view to its operation in in the state where we have one of the best case in a cases and also for that Insight from one of Sri Lanka's largest export sectors it is the largest export sector uh apparels and how successful it has been in that sector thank you very much thank you thank you thank you everyone [Music] thank you