Dubai later this year plans to extend its mobile platform for civil-service payments, an official from Dubai eGovernment tells PaymentsSource.
Dubai eGovernment provides consumers with instant online and mobile-payment facilities to pay government fees. The authority launched the ePay gateway in 2003 to provide an online channel to facilitate consumer payments to government departments. In 2009, it launched the mPay platform so that government agencies could accept payments made via mobile phones.
“Now whatever fees are accepted on ePay will also be accepted on mPay,” the spokesperson says. “This will happen by the end of the year.”
Revenues from mobile-payment transactions across three Dubai government departments jumped 325% last year, to 6.46 million dirham (US$1.75 million or 1.3 million euros) from 1.52 million dirham in 2009. The number of transactions rose 131%, to 19,433 from 8,380.
Consumers currently use the mPay service to initiate payments to the Roads and Transport Authority, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority and Dubai Police. The Dubai Municipality and the Dubai Health Authority are among agencies that also will accept mobile payments.
Consumers must register to use the service with an EMV credit card on the mPay platform, which links the card to their mPay accounts. They must then install the mPay application on to their phones to make payments limited to fixed amounts of 50, 100 and 200 dirham on the credit card balance.
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