The Dubai Department of Finance (DoF) of Dubai has partnered with the Smart Dubai Office (SDO) to launch a payment system based on blockchain. A new platform, called Payment Reconciliation and Settlement, was created specifically for government agencies, in particular for the police of Dubai, the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), and the Dubai Health Authority (DHA).
The system will allow payments between various government structures and make management processes more precise and transparent. The old payment system of the government of Dubai has one weakness — its low transaction processing speed. Before one had to wait for 45 days for the completion of operations. With the roll-out of the new system, this process will be greatly accelerated.
“Smart technologies continue to infiltrate every aspect of human life and societies; virtually everything we do today relies fully or to some degree on an advanced technology once considered ‘disruptive’. Guided by the forward-thinking vision of its leadership, Dubai has long been a trailblazer in embracing avant-garde technologies – most notably those of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – and tailoring them to meet the needs of our citizens, residents and visitors, in a bid to transform Dubai into the happiest and smartest city in the world,” said Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr, Director General of the Smart Dubai Office (SDO).
Blockchain transformation
The authorities of the largest city of the UAE conceived a blockchain transformation in order to consolidate the status of the leading business center in the region. For this, they plan to build their economy on the basis of distributed ledger technology.
Dubai entered the path of digitalization back in 1999. Then, at the legislative level, a strategy was adopted to create an e-government. Two years later, the Ministry of Finance of Dubai launched the first online service for paying taxes. Now the entire government of the emirate is a single digital platform where you can pay bills, taxes, make an appointment with a doctor, and much more.
And now Dubai has moved to a new level implementing the strategy of Smart City. The goal of the program is to create and maintain an intellectual ecosystem for the interaction of state institutions and city residents. For example, the government plans to completely abandon paper documents by 2021. According to the program The Dubai Paperless Strategy, the last official resolution on paper will be signed in 2021, after which all document circulation will be carried out only in the format of smart contracts.
For several years of work, Smart Dubai has managed to form several units dedicated to introducing the Internet of things, interactive information panels, large data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) into the life of the whole city. Last year, Smart Dubai started working on implementing blockchain. The Office is in contact with the government and private organizations to continuously determine services that can be improved most with the help of distributed ledger technology.
Also, Smart Dubai conducts an information campaign in both the private and public sectors to tell their participants about the potential of the technology. Such close cooperation is necessary to ensure the movement of the entire emirate in one direction and avoid duplication of efforts and costs.
At the same time, local residents also need to understand all the advantages of the technology. This is not a difficult task, since the percentage of young people in Dubai is very high. The young are very open to new technologies: the penetration of smart devices in the UAE is 200% in relation to the population.
It is worth noting that governments in the Persian Gulf, including the UAE, are seeking to invest in innovative technologies to reduce dependence on oil revenues. As a result, Dubai is perfectly able to match the image of a city of the future. In a sense, the emirate serves as an example of how to support the development of blockchain for other governments. As the state of the UAE has existed for only 47 years, it is only thanks to the technology that the country can compete in terms of development with the world's largest countries.