The United Nations bowed to Blockchain technology to review their own pension system, and a study of that process concluded that innovation is the “final technology for the verification of digital identity”, which has stimulated the UN to extend the system and share it with other international groups.
The UN, which has explored several blockchain uses over the years, tested it in its pension fund of the United Nations ensemble (UNJSPF), according to a white document published this week that suggested its use by confirming the identities of people can help in security, efficiency and transparency. In cooperation with the Hyperledger Foundation, the UN sought to “improve and ensure the UN pension process worldwide by placing a digital identification infrastructure backed by Blockchain in production.”
The UN Pension Fund had been working on a 70 -year system to identify the beneficiaries in 190 countries, trusting a paper focus to demonstrate that more than 70,000 beneficiaries were who said they were still alive and where they claimed to be. According to the document, it was prone to error and abuse, and resulted in approximately 1,400 payment suspensions each year. Therefore, the organization changed to digital certification with Blockchain motor, starting with a 2020 pilot program and a 2021 implementation.
“The change in physical documentation has substantially reduced processing times previously dedicated to receiving, opening, scanning and archiving paper documents,” the document said.
The block chain helped to eliminate the problem of a single failure point raised by a central managed approach, according to the document that detailed the process and the results, and the authors suggest that their success could be repeated elsewhere. Its open access and usability by multiple entities reduce the repeated need for identity controls, the authors found.
The UN is exploring the dissemination of similar technology throughout its own system and sharing it elsewhere as a “public digital good”, seeking to expand the digital certificate approach to other international organizations.
“The project has provided not only a technical prototype, but also an operational model for how UN family organizations can collaborate to design a safe, scalable and inclusive digital public infrastructure,” wrote Sameer Chauhan, director of the United Nations International Computer Center, in a conclusion included in the document.
