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With SNOWBALL OnBoard Transit, Dubai’s citywide transit card entered Samsung Wallet as a new mobile issuance and service channel. The service reached commercial launch in 4 months and issued 60,000 digital cards in the first 3 months, without changing validators, fare rules, or back office systems.
Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) operates one of the world’s largest city-scale mobility systems. Its network spans metro, buses, tram, marine transport, taxis, parking, and shared mobility across a fast-growing global city with more than 4 million residents and a daytime population of over 5 million.
At the center of this system is the nol Card — Dubai’s unified transit card and one of the city’s most widely used mobility payment instruments.
| METRIC | SCALE |
|---|---|
| Daytime population | 5 million |
| Annual mobility ridership (2025) | 802 million |
| Average daily ridership | 2.2 million |
| Mobility coverage | Metro, Bus, Tram, Marine, Taxi, Parking |
Samsung mobile devices already had strong penetration across Dubai’s Android market.
For Samsung, bringing nol Card into Samsung Wallet created a daily-use wallet experience tied to how people move through Dubai. Transit is a high-frequency service used repeatedly throughout the day by residents, commuters, and visitors alike.
The digital nol Card had to be brought into Samsung Wallet as the mobile form of the same citywide transit card, without changing the systems already running across Dubai.
Dubai’s nol acceptance infrastructure was already deployed at city scale. Metro gates, bus validators, parking terminals, and other service points operated around the DESFire standard.
Replacing or modifying that infrastructure was not practical. It would have affected hardware, certification, field operations, service continuity, and citywide rollout planning.
The digital nol Card had to remain compatible with the existing DESFire-based environment. At every validator, the phone had to behave as a physical nol Card.
The challenge went beyond fare calculation. The nol Card was not just a stored-value card; its operating model included:
These operational behaviors were core to Dubai’s transit operating model. They could not be rewritten for mobile or implemented as a separate rule system.
The digital nol Card and its fare products had to behave consistently with the physical-card system already in place.
The existing AFC (Automated Fare Collection) back office was already live in production, so physical and digital nol Cards had to remain consistent across downstream operations:
The mobile channel could become a new issuance and service channel. It could not become a second AFC back office.
With physical cards, most sensitive operations remained inside established transit infrastructure. Once nol Card moved into Samsung Wallet, the service had to handle user data and cryptographic keys across cloud and device environments.
That made data localization and regional key control mandatory. The mobile channel also had to operate with high availability because it was supporting everyday mobility across Dubai, not a limited pilot.
SNOWBALL OnBoard Transit was selected because the project required more than a wallet integration. RTA needed a city-scale mobile issuance and service channel that could preserve the existing AFC system while meeting production, compliance, and long-term operational requirements.
OnBoard Transit served as the mobile issuance, provisioning, and lifecycle platform between RTA’s AFC system, Samsung Wallet, and the nol Pay app. It provided the operational infrastructure required to extend existing transit card services into mobile ecosystems.
OnBoard Transit introduced Samsung Wallet as a new mobile issuance and service channel without changing RTA’s validators, operating rules, or AFC back office systems.
The platform implemented a DESFire-based digital nol Card aligned with the existing nol Card specification. Applet development, Samsung Secure Element adaptation, and card data preparation were delivered as one integrated path, allowing validators to process the phone as a physical nol Card.
OnBoard Transit also extended the existing fare-product structure and operating rules into the mobile environment while integrating with the DSG payment gateway, nol Plus, RTA account systems, and clearing processes. Physical and digital nol Cards therefore remained part of the same operating model.
The project required an end-to-end delivery stack spanning device, wallet, app, platform, and transit operations.
SNOWBALL delivered the DESFire Applet, secure infrastructure, server platform, Samsung Wallet integration, mobile SDKs, and the nol Pay app as the user entry point for nol Card and transit services.
This reduced coordination complexity across device, wallet, app, platform, and back-office systems, helping the project move from engagement to commercial launch in 4 months while supporting a production service used by commuters across Dubai.
Mobile transit services could not be managed through fragmented lifecycle systems. OnBoard Transit provided one operational control layer for card status, fare products, Applets, keys, payments, and clearing-related events.
That layer coordinated the core lifecycle responsibilities behind the service:
RTA also needed the mobile channel to meet data localization, key control, and high-availability requirements.
OnBoard Transit supported localized deployment in RTA’s own data center, including HSM deployment for regional cryptographic control. The platform was deployed in active-active mode with an SLA above 99.9%. It also included operational capabilities such as configuration management, order tracking, reconciliation, customer support, and monitoring.
This gave RTA a production-grade mobile transit service with the controls required for long-term city-scale operation.
In production, OnBoard Transit connected three service layers: RTA’s AFC back office, Samsung Wallet, and the nol Pay app.
Commuters could add a digital nol Card to Samsung Wallet, top up, buy passes, and restore services through nol Pay. The same operating rules and back office processes used for physical cards continued to apply.
Once issued, the digital nol Card was presented through Samsung Wallet and processed by existing validators as a physical nol Card. Transactions continued to flow through DSG payment services, nol Plus, RTA account records, and clearing within the existing operational flow.
This made Samsung Wallet a new mobile issuance and service channel while preserving RTA’s existing AFC operating model.
Mobile issuance was the primary deployment goal, but the same platform also enabled new service capabilities for physical cards. With nol Pay, a supported Samsung phone could act as a mobile service terminal for physical-card operations including migration and top-up.
A commuter starts migration in the nol Pay app and taps a physical nol Card to the back of a supported Samsung phone. The phone reads the physical card, and OnBoard Transit provisions a digital nol Card into Samsung Wallet.
The balance, fare products, and card state are transferred according to RTA rules. RTA’s back office is synchronized, the physical card state is updated, and the phone, physical card, and back office remain consistent.
A commuter taps another physical nol Card to the back of the phone and adds value through nol Pay.
The payment is processed through DSG, and OnBoard Transit updates the card state and back-office records within the same operational flow. The transaction enters central clearing without station hardware.
RTA’s AFC system follows an L0–L4 architecture spanning card media, field systems, transaction processing, and central clearing.
The principle was simple: do not change the core system.
OnBoard Transit operated as an independent mobile issuance and service channel while preserving consistency with RTA’s existing AFC operating model.
| LEVEL | RESPONSIBILITY | ROLE IN THIS PROJECT |
|---|---|---|
| L0 | Card media | Digital nol Card in Secure Element; physical cards unchanged |
| L1 | Issuance and top-up channels | OnBoard Transit as a new mobile issuance and service channel |
| L2 | Field systems | Validators unchanged |
| L3 | Transaction processing | Existing transaction processing flow unchanged |
| L4 | Clearing and accounts | Integrated through existing AFC interfaces |
For a transit authority, mobile is rarely the difficult decision.
The difficult decision is whether mobile becomes:
In Dubai, the answer was the second.
The validators did not change.
The operating rules did not change.
The AFC back office did not change.
What changed was the service surface.
nol moved into the phone.
And the phone, in turn, became part of the city’s transit infrastructure.
This project began with Samsung Wallet, but the platform itself is OEM-neutral.
Card specifications, lifecycle orchestration, and operating rules are decoupled from any single wallet ecosystem, making additional OEM integrations possible without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure.
And once that infrastructure exists, the next city does not start from zero.
