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Alex - I dont think CG has been involved in such projects, at least in this region.

Nick Holt - Dubai Card is a card that needs either ann underlying bank account, or cash in hand to load funds, doesnt it?

Muhammad - Valid point. But a mobile based wallet platform (for instance one like Beam in the UAE) is a good replacement for plastic cards. Of course the underlying instrument continues to be a card issued by a bank of a financial institution. My point is that the mobile based payments system will be helpful on both fronts - 1. in getting rid of plastic cards and thereby fat wallets, and 2. for the unbanked masses who dont have hte privilege of having bank accounts or plastic cards. Hence, for me this is a great move by the UAE Government.

The operatibve word is the unbanked workers. They dont have easy access to the banking systems, and hence can do most of their transactions via a mobile based wallet to which their salaries are credited. It would be much easier for them to key in their mobile number and PIN.

This will be a great initiative especially to the numerous unbanked workers in the country. Even for the others, it takes away the dependency on their mobile phones being NFC enabled. Great initiative once again by UAE.

Valid Points. But I disagree with the comments that seem to indicate that co-browsing is the solution to this problem. Co-browsing is a very rudimentary way of interacting and necessiates both the customer and the bank staff to be on fairly high speed networks. The simpler solution is to equip the bank staff with a unified front end system that consumes the same services as any of the channels. That way any business related errors will be replicated to both the bank staff as well as the customer - assuming that there is no custom logic deployed on the UI Layer