THE Jamaica Data Exchange platform is in the final stages of development, says minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister, with responsibility for skills and digital transformation, Senator Dana Morris Dixon.

“As banks try to put more products online — account opening and other products that you deliver online — it’s going to be important that they’re able to verify the data that is submitted by their clients,” she said.

Senator Morris Dixon was delivering remarks at Phoenix International’s webinar on ‘Financial Inclusion in Emerging Markets’ on Wednesday at the Jamaica National Group’s Oxford Road offices in St Andrew.

She explained that the platform will make the verification of government data “seamless”.

“You can say, ‘I want to verify a TRN (taxpayer registration number), I want to be able to verify NIDS (national identification system)’, and all of that is in one nice platform,” Senator Morris Dixon said.

She pointed out that electronic signatures work hand in hand with the increase in services available online.

“Through our NIDS interface, we are going to make it much easier for our population to do,” she said.

Meanwhile, Senator Morris Dixon urged institutions to improve the user experience of online services.

“If it is not easy for people to use, then you’ve not made their lives easier,” she stated.

“People have to be at the centre of it and this is what I say to our government entities — it’s nice to put new services online, but if you don’t re-engineer the process and make it easier for people, then we would have lost; and that is also what I say to the financial sector. It needs to be intuitive and very easy to understand or else we’ve left people behind again,” she added.