Supporting Large Families through Integrated Automation

How MSF rolled out the Large Families Scheme in under a year without building a new system

Impact at a Glance

32,000+

Children supported in the first phase

$1,000

Per Child disbursement to large familes with three or more young children

1

Single consolidated view of family nucleus data from multiple disparate data sources

The Challenge

Disparate Data Sources and Manual Risk

To enable the disbursement of Large Family LifeSG Credits, the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) needed to identify families with three or more Singaporean children aged six and below. This family data has to be derived through child-parent and couples’ marital data from disparate sources.

Manually generating the family nuclei and assessing the eligibility of families is both labour intensive and error-prone that would result in delayed support to eligible families and parents.

The Solution

A Unified Technology Stack

MSF’s solution was built upon the established Singapore Government Technology Stack (SG Tech Stack) augmented with up-and-coming WOG products from GovTech:

Single Source of Truth

Optical provided a unified platform for MSF and outsourced call centre officers with a holistic view of family details and case histories, ensuring enquiries were answered quickly and accurately. Optical is also allowed customisation of database views for both internal and external officers without compromising data security. Additionally, Optical has easily configurable webhooks that enable the automatic transfer of data from other central sources.

Workflow Automation

Opus orchestrated the flow of information across various products through workflow nodes, increasing the speed of information exchange and reducing manual interventions. It also orchestrated downstream appeals processes such as creating GovWallet accounts, disbursing LifeSG credits and updating disbursement statuses on Optical for officers’ reference.

Centralised Case Management

Ownself Gather serves as a single platform for officers to handle enquiries and appeals efficiently. It allowed for workflow triggers to other central sources and automated email notifications to the public during our appeals processing.

Secured Credit Disbursement

GovWallet provided secure allocation of credits through a WOG-ready and IM8-compliant platform.

One-Stop Digital Platform for Citizens

LifeSG facilitated notifications of credit disbursement to eligible parents and allowed them to track their benefit utilisation throughout the credit validity period.

Trusted Development Environment

Analytics@Gov provided a scalable, Python-friendly coding platform that enabled complex data transformations on large datasets to derive family units and generate the scheme’s eligibility list

The Results

Delivering an Accurate and Reliable Scheme at Scale

This digital transformation and close collaboration between MSF and GovTech enabled the timely rollout of LFLC. In the first tranche (September 2025), the system identified and supported approximately 33,000 Singaporean children and their families. With the second tranche of LFLC disbursements in April 2026, MSF incorporated Opus to future-proof its design – enabling officers to focus on tasks requiring more human judgement while continuing to deliver timely support to Singaporean families through ongoing LFLC disbursements. Beyond integrating multiple WOG products, the successful rollout of LFLC was underpinned by close collaboration across multiple cross-agency teams — including PMO SG, MSF’s Family Life Group (FLG), and Information Technology Group (ITG) — to align policy, operations, data, and technology delivery within tight timelines.

Children