Paying fees with e-Dirhams to be easier in UAE

Paying fees for the government departments in the UAE will become easier as the residents will have access to e-Dirham recharge cards.

A press statement by the Ministry of Finance (MoF) said it is working on recharge cards which are scheduled to launch in the near future.

The Ministry said it had added 25 new ATM and cash deposits machines to the e-Dirham network across the UAE, bringing the total number of machines to 89. These machines allow customers to easily charge and recharge their e-Dirham card. The National Bank of Abu Dhabi allocated 530 ATM and cash deposit machines offering the same services. This brings the total number of machines offering e-Dirham services to 629.

The number of PoS and e-collection machines reached 4,000, accepting all types of cards including 'Al Hasila' e-Dirham card, cards issued by other banks or cards supported by Visa or MasterCard. The current available denominations for e-Dirhams range from Dh100 to Dh5,000.

Saeed Rashid Al Yateem, Assistant Undersecretary of Resources and Budget Sector at MoF, said: "The e-Dirham system aims to raise the level of efficiency in delivering government services electronically, as well as reduce the costs and efforts needed for service providers and customers to benefit from it. In fact, results from the Ministry's statistical study on the processing time of a transaction showed that it takes less than one second per transaction with the use of POS, compared to 1.18 seconds through the website."

He said: "The studies and audits conducted by the Ministry on the e-Dirhams fees and operations enable us to keep up with the latest technologies and determine the future growth and requirements of ATM and cash deposit machines. These improvements stop customers paying extra charges when charging or recharging their e-Dirham cards."

MoF recently launched 10 advanced e-kiosks which are more sophisticated and provide more services, allowing e-Dirham customers to pay for government services.

The e-Dirham system continues to affirm its importance in the rationalisation of the consumption of government financial resources, where the number of transactions processed through the website reached 7.28 million in 2014 with a total revenue amounted to Dh2 billion. While the number of transactions processed through POS reached 26.17m transactions with a total revenue of Dh4.74bn.

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