Last week’s launch of One Fin­tech Av­enue–a plat­form that pro­vides e-ser­vices such as pay­ments–will fur­ther pave the way for a more ef­fi­cient Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion through­out Trinidad and To­ba­go as the en­ti­ty seeks to roll out sev­er­al new fa­cil­i­ties to the pub­lic.

More im­por­tant­ly, e-com­merce in­no­va­tion should as­sist in stamp­ing out cor­rup­tion in the or­gan­i­sa­tion as trans­ac­tions will be done with greater trans­paren­cy, Clive Clarke, Trans­port Com­mis­sion­er told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian.

“I can­not be the trans­port com­mis­sion­er and de­ny the fact that there are ill prac­tices re­gard­ing some of the ser­vices. And there has to be a lev­el of col­lu­sion be­tween ex­ter­nal fac­tors and prob­a­bly some of the staff at Li­cens­ing. Be­cause of poor sys­tems, this cre­ates an op­por­tu­ni­ty for cor­rupt prac­tices,” he said.

In weed­ing out these el­e­ments, Clarke ex­plained one key mea­sure for in­stance, will be self-ser­vice kiosks for pay­ments, which al­so falls in line with Gov­ern­ment’s plans of en­abling a cash­less so­ci­ety.

“At Li­cens­ing, we cur­rent­ly have kiosks to check in ap­point­ments at sev­er­al sites. Now we will be adding an ad­di­tion­al com­po­nent where there will be self-ser­vice kiosks for pay­ments.

“One of our key fo­cus­es is that of cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion at Li­cens­ing and our in­tent is to make cus­tomer wait time much short­er and a health­i­er ex­pe­ri­ence at the di­vi­sion,” Clarke ex­plained.

These kiosks are ex­pect­ed to be rolled by Oc­to­ber.

In pro­vid­ing fur­ther in­sights, the trans­port com­mis­sion­er added, “We are hop­ing to use oth­er ser­vices that come along with these en­ti­ties along with the nec­es­sary ap­provals, which is the pay­ing of bills at dif­fer­ent ex­ter­nal agen­cies.

“The in­ten­tion is when we de­ploy tech­nol­o­gy at Li­cens­ing Of­fices, we de­ploy this on a pi­lot ba­sis and sub­se­quent to the suc­cess we will then roll out as nec­es­sary. We in­tend to pro­vide this ser­vice to all the li­cens­ing sites, in­clu­sive of To­ba­go.”

How­ev­er, not every­one may em­brace change.

It is some­thing that the li­cens­ing chief is pre­pared to tack­le.

“When we are talk­ing about trans­for­ma­tion, we are talk­ing about do­ing busi­ness in a new way and this may some­times im­pact cer­tain trade, cer­tain be­hav­iour, wrong do­ing etc. There­fore, we ex­pect some op­po­si­tion with­in and al­so ex­ter­nal to the or­gan­i­sa­tion, but it is some­thing of which we, the com­mit­ted staff, are mind­ful.

“And when these ob­sta­cles come we will treat with it. For ex­am­ple, you will see when we change cer­tain busi­ness process­es it will now bring more trans­paren­cy and more ac­count­abil­i­ty and there­fore, the tra­di­tion­al prac­tices that one may be used to can no longer be part of the or­gan­i­sa­tion.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, this may anger some per­sons but at the same time you will def­i­nite­ly be pro­vid­ing an op­por­tu­ni­ty where the cus­tomer will be more com­fort­able that they can come to an or­gan­i­sa­tion and they will not have to find some means–as some per­sons say and as we know–to some­times be in­volved in bad prac­tices to get a ser­vice done,” Clarke out­lined.

He al­so de­tailed some of the re­cent ini­tia­tives the Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion re­cent­ly made to im­prove its of­fer­ings which are not on­ly more con­ve­nient but elim­i­nates pa­per and en­sure that per­ti­nent in­for­ma­tion is prop­er­ly stored in a data­base that can be re­viewed in in­stances of al­leged wrong­do­ing.

These up­grad­ed ser­vices in­clude the on­line pro­vi­sion­al per­mit sys­tem, which now makes the process eas­i­er and ac­cess­ing in­spec­tion sta­tions on­line. The lat­ter has been hailed as an im­por­tant ar­se­nal in the fight against crime.

“We now have an elec­tron­ic in­spec­tion sys­tem for ve­hi­cles and be­cause of that we have been able to iden­ti­fy a num­ber of stolen ve­hi­cles,” Clarke said.

Very soon, the li­cens­ing de­part­ment will launch a fa­cil­i­ty to al­low the on­line trans­fer of ve­hi­cles.

“We are work­ing at length with iGovTT to im­ple­ment our on­line per­mit re­new­able sys­tem by the end of the year or by the first quar­ter of next year.

“Our in­ten­tion is that peo­ple must be able to re­new their dri­vers’ per­mit with­out com­ing to li­cens­ing and there­fore have it de­liv­ered ei­ther to ei­ther a TTcon­nect cen­tre or to an­oth­er li­cens­ing of­fice at your dis­cre­tion,” Clarke said.

He added these per­mits will not be de­liv­ered to homes as the de­part­ment is still hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties in ver­i­fy­ing some ad­dress­es.

“Our in­ten­tion at this stage is not to de­liv­er that per­mit to some­one’s home be­cause we are still hav­ing some chal­lenges in terms of find­ing per­sons, as we con­tin­ue to ask for val­i­da­tion of ad­dress,” Clarke said.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, a num­ber of CCTV cam­eras have been placed with­in the Li­cens­ing Di­vi­sion, with the lat­est be­ing in­stalled last week at strate­gic lo­ca­tions such as the dex­ter­i­ty ar­eas where tests such as the “u-turn” are grad­ed.

“We have cam­eras at all of those sites to en­sure that, in the event of a stu­dent com­plain­ing that they have not been treat­ed well, we could re­trieve the footage and ad­ju­di­cate. Pre­vi­ous­ly we could not have done this,” Clarke added.

He al­so not­ed that ten­ders have been placed in the news­pa­pers for the de­part­ment to be equipped with its own ve­hi­cles to con­duct class-three dri­ving tests.

This will al­so be done on a pi­lot ba­sis.

“These ve­hi­cles will be out­fit­ted with tech­nol­o­gy to help us iden­ti­fy that the ve­hi­cle and the stu­dent would have par­tic­i­pat­ed in a prop­er dri­ving test.

“We will be able to know the dis­tance the ve­hi­cle trav­elled, the GPS co­or­di­nates to de­ter­mine ex­act­ly where the ve­hi­cle would have tra­vailed. We would now be able to re­play the dri­ving test, in the event of any dis­crep­an­cies, all of which would en­sure trans­paren­cy and min­imise cor­rup­tion,” Clarke added.

The trans­port com­mis­sion­er al­so praised the dili­gent staff at the li­cens­ing de­part­ment who are not on­ly com­mit­ted to their work but al­so to­wards the trans­for­ma­tion of the or­gan­i­sa­tion by al­ways up­hold­ing a high de­gree of in­tegri­ty.

BOX

One Fin­Tech Av­enue was launched on Tues­day and has been en­abled by key part­ners such as VISA, TSTT, Huawei, and Ama­ranth.

The fa­cil­i­ty builds and fos­ters T&T’s ecosys­tem, bring­ing to­geth­er fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions, Fin­Tech in­no­va­tors, re­search, acad­e­mia and pub­lic au­thor­i­ties, to help dri­ve for­ward the de­vel­op­ment of prod­ucts that meet spe­cif­ic in­dus­try needs.

At the launch, sev­er­al “cash­less” booths were al­so show­cased us­ing mod­ern pay­ment tech­nol­o­gy.