Nol card of the future: A sticker on your mobile

A Nol card in the form of a sticker not larger than 3cm by 3cm will soon be the newest version of the travel card. The sticker is currently in the development stage.

At the ongoing Gitex Technology Week, visitors got a sneak preview of the future card, which can be placed at the back of a mobile phone.

“You swipe the back of your mobile phone at the Nol card gate, and you are checked in,” explained Khalid Al Awadhi, Director of Automated Fare Collection at the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA).

The technology is currently under study for silver and gold cards.

“We are studying the compatibility of the tag with different phones, the sustainability and longevity of the sticker, as we are aiming to give it the same longevity as a regular Nol card,” Al Awadhi explained.

“We are aiming for this to become the third Nol card channel soon,” he said.

The Nol card is currently available as a physical card and as a smartphone application, where the device uses NFC technology to check in and out at the Nol card gate.

“This technology is not widely used, because it is still not available on all smartphones and it relies on NFC technology. We expect the Nol card sticker to be more popular, because it is only a sticker that needs to be placed on the phone,” Awadhi said.

When asked why the phone would be the right place for the Nol card tag, Al Awadhi explained that the tag and the phone would ‘communicate’ with each other.

“Contrary to the regular Nol card, which is an e-purse, where the top-up is only activated when the actual card is used at a check-in gate, the presence of the sticker on the phone will allow the top-up to be directly transferred to the tag,” he said.

The latter will come in handy when topping up online or through the recently launched Public Transportation app. Whereas the top-up usually requires a 48-hour waiting period, the amount will be directly added to the Nol card tag.

The Nol card sticker is expected to be launched in the second half of 2015.

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