From company chop to a single login: How Singapore digitised business-government transactions

Most Singapore offices over a decade old might still have a company chop stashed somewhere. A drawer, usually near the printer, with a rubber stamp inside it, ink slightly dried out, used maybe twice a year but kept around just in case. For decades, that little block of rubber was a business’s proof of legitimacy, with the company chop being a legal weight on a page. 

Today, many Singapore businesses transact, file, and get paid without ever reaching for one. The rubber stamp has become optional, largely symbolic, and gradually a relic of the paper-based age. Here's how Singapore built the digital identity infrastructure that made that possible. 

The company chop era 

A company chop is a rubber stamp bearing a business name, Unique Entity Number, and registered address. For decades, it served as the standard authentication mark on invoices, letters, contracts, and official correspondence in Singapore. 

There was also the common seal: an embossed metal stamp used for deeds, share certificates, and contracts requiring heightened legal force. Between the two, businesses kept enough physical authentication tools to fill a small drawer. 

The turning point came in 2017. Under amendments to the Companies Act, the company stamp and common seal were officially made optional, an acknowledgement that digital authentication had quietly replaced physical endorsement. The chop did not vanish overnight, but its days as a functional necessity were numbered. 

The fax and the form 

From applying grants to filing taxes, there are many administrative transactions that corporate entities need to perform. Licence applications were mainly handled via fax, and forms were collected from agency counters in person, and documents had to be witnessed, endorsed, and physically delivered to whichever office needed them next. 

Compounding the friction, each agency had its own process, forms, and definition of what counted as authorised. For an SME without a dedicated admin team, a single licence renewal could be a tedious process. 

Streamlining processes and going digital 

Corppass: one login to transact with the whole government 

As part of Singapore’s Smart Nation vision, GovTech set out to build the right products well and fast, with the goal of simplifying how businesses interact with the Government. This led to the birth of Corppass, the business equivalent of Singpass. It gives organisations a single corporate digital identity that authorised employees can use to transact with government agencies on their employer's behalf. Before it existed, businesses needed separate logins and credentials for every agency they dealt with: IRAS for tax, MOM for employment passes, CPF for contributions, and so on. 

The mechanics are straightforward in practice. A business owner assigns digital access rights to specific employees, scoped to specific agencies, with full auditability. A finance manager can file GST returns without ever touching employment pass applications, and HR can run hiring submissions without seeing the tax dashboard. By the late 2010s, Corppass had become the default login method across nearly every government-to-business transaction in Singapore. This serves as a prime example of how GovTech has embedded itself into everyday transactions: the services you rely on every day, built, secured and improved. 

GoBusiness: from licence maze to guided journeys 

For decades, getting a business licensed in Singapore meant first figuring out which agencies you needed to approach, in what order, and with which supporting documents. GoBusiness changed the calculus, building infrastructure that businesses in Singapore need. The platform guides business owners through the licensing process based on their business type and location, automatically surfacing the relevant agencies, and lets the entire application process happen in one place. 

The simplification has been measurable: GovTech's work on food business licensing reduced the number of form fields by 90%, from 845 to 90, a drop steep enough to change the entire experience of licensing. Around the licensing tool sits a wider suite: startup guides, grant eligibility checkers, and the Business Grants Portal. All are built to remove the orientation cost that used to swallow weeks of a new founder's life. 

InvoiceNow: getting paid and paying out 

The final piece of the paperwork puzzle was the invoice. For years, even fully digital businesses still exchanged invoices as PDF attachments, emailed back and forth, with someone on the other end manually keying the figures into an accounting system. Inevitably, errors crept in, payments slipped, and the bottleneck stayed firmly in place. 

InvoiceNow, the nationwide e-invoicing network launched by IMDA in 2019 and built on the international Pan-European Public Procurement On-Line (Peppol) standard, was designed to remove it. Businesses connected to the network send and receive structured invoice data directly between their accounting systems, with no re-entry required. Since 2024, GST-registered businesses have been progressively phased onto the network, with the full mandate set to take effect by 2028. 

What this means for your business today 

Pulled together, Corppass, GoBusiness, and InvoiceNow form one of the world's most integrated business-to-government digital transaction ecosystems. The businesses that benefit most are not the multinationals with their own administrative teams, but the SMEs whose owners used to lose hours each week to paperwork that now takes minutes. 

The rubber stamp is not making a comeback and for most businesses, that is very good news.