ITA along with ROP implements ePurse solution with Bank Muscat and Gemalto

The signing ceremony will be held on the 6th of January 2009, at 11.00am, at the ROP Officers Club in Al-Wattayha and H.E. Mohammed Nasser Al Khasibi, Secretary General at the Ministry of National Economy and Chairman of ITA will be signing the MoU on behalf of ITA, H.E. Lieutenant General Malik Bin Sulaiman Al-Ma'mari, the Inspector General of Police and Customs will be signing on behalf of the Royal Oman Police, Mr. Abdulrazak Ali Issa, Chief Executive of BankMuscat will be signing on behalf of the Bank, and Mr. Pierre Servettaz will be signing on behalf of Gemalto Middle East.

The main aim of the ePurse is to permit both Citizens and the Residents to store /load money in their National ID and Resident Card and use this to make payments using electronic means, besides to credit and debit cards. Both the National Identity Card and the Resident Card are a mandatory requirement for all citizens and residents of Oman respectively. Thus even non-banking citizens and residents of Oman, who do not carry debit or credit cards can pay electronically. This scheme will bring about greater benefits for all government entities that will collect payment for their services using the credit/debit cards and the ePurse application residing in the National Identity and the Resident Cards.

ITA plays a significant role in the first phase of the implementation and is an active partner of the steering committee established for this strategic implementation. Along side the Phase 1 implementation, ITA will parallely begin the implementation of Phase 2 where it will host the ePurse application in house. During this phase wider usage of the ePurse application by all the banks in Oman whether as acquirers or issuers will be possible.

The first phase of the project i.e. the Pilot phase will be deployed with BankMuscat for a period of 7 months, BankMuscat will be responsible for the development and implementation of the Pilot phase.

The proposal of using the ePurse application in the National ID card was initiated by the ROP when it started using the Point of Sale terminals (POS) at all major police departments. The terminals were used to collect ROP revenues and accepted all the major credit and debit cards for making these payments.

ROP, ITA, BankMuscat and Gemalto started exploring the feasibility of the ePurse scheme and drafted a strategy for the ePurse application implementation. Subsequently in 2008, the team considered various alternatives and suggested the best option of the ePurse technology/software to be deployed taking into consideration that this technology and software should be open and allow all the banks in Oman to be able to join the system network after the Pilot phase period. This now is an action phase for the entire project adding momentum to the realisation of the digital society of eOman.