Bringing Dubai’s Transit Card into Samsung Wallet

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.

Client

Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), Samsung

Product Line

Mobile Credentials

Industry

Transit

Published

2024-11-05

At a Glance

Dubai's citywide nol Card entered Samsung Wallet as the mobile form of the same transit card — implemented as a DESFire-based digital card so existing validators, fare rules, and the AFC back office continued to operate unchanged. Commercial launch in 4 months; 60,000 digital cards issued in the first 3 months; 60+ Samsung models supported; 99.9% active-active SLA.

1. Customer and Project Context

RTA

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.

DUBAI × RTA × nol Card

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

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.

Key Outcomes

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

Outcomes

Commercial launch achieved in 4 months
No modifications required to RTA's existing AFC systems
60,000 digital nol Cards issued within the first 3 months
Approximately 650 daily activations after launch
60+ Samsung device models supported across the UAE market
Around 2 million addressable Samsung devices in the UAE
Platform deployed in active-active mode with SLA above 99.9%

Why It Matters

For a transit authority, mobile is rarely the difficult decision.

The difficult decision is whether mobile becomes:

a parallel operational system
or an extension of the system already running

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.

"The complexity does not disappear. It gets absorbed into infrastructure."

And once that infrastructure exists, the next city does not start from zero.

OnBoard Transit brings transit cards to mobile without rebuilding the transit system behind them.

Want to go deeper?

PRODUCT — Mobile transit credential infrastructure: OnBoard Transit →
Talk — 30-minute walkthrough of OnBoard Transit in action: Schedule a technical conversation →

Snowball Team

Team Member

Founded in 2013, committed to driving scalable and sustainable industry growth through a trusted, future-ready security infrastructure. Snowball Technology’s core team comes from NXP’s security services group, bringing over a decade of experience in device security. The company currently has more than 100 employees, with over two-thirds in R&D. Snowball Technology is certified under international standards including ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 27001.