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Dukhan Bank To Launch Wristband-Based Payment Option
Qatar’s leading retail bank, Dukhan Bank, has recently published a press release, announcing the launch of its new payment platform and companion wristbands that make use of NFC technology to facilitate contactless payment.
Called Dukhan Pay (D-Pay), the new platform is intended to meet customer’s growing demand for digital banking products and services. It can also help curb the spread of the novel coronavirus by providing a safer alternative to traditional payment options.
“The Dukhan Bank wristbands are entering the market at a time when there is an increased demand in safe, contactless payment. In addition to being safe, the wearables facilitate fast and easy transactions using blended technology that is both secure and fashionable,” commended Dukhan Bank.
Dukhan Bank
The wristbands are available in three colors (gray, pink, and blue), and they are compatible with any point-of-sale terminal with support for contactless payments, allowing customers to spend up to 1,500 QAR per day without touching the terminal.
“The initiative falls under D-Pay, a key cornerstone in Dukhan Bank’s digital transformation that seeks to absorb the latest technologies and online banking solutions to make banking simple, safe, and convenient for our customers,” the bank added.
Not long ago, Dukhan Bank launched contactless credit and debit cards. Other banks in the region are being similarly digital-forward. For example, the Qatar National Bank partnered with fitness tracker makers Fitbit and Garmin to enable contactless transactions via their smartwatches.
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Even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, major retail chains had been adopting various scan and pay solutions to make shopping faster, safer, and more convenient. Airports are now widely adopting self-check kiosks to increase their capacity and reduce the number of transmission vectors for infectious diseases.
Indeed, the future seems to be contactless, and the technology to enable it is already here. The only question that remains to be answered is how well it will be received by customers.
News
NVIDIA Puts GPT-5.5 Codex In Hands Of 10,000 Staff
The chipmaker has significantly expanded OpenAI’s latest model across teams from engineering to HR under tight internal controls.
NVIDIA has started rolling out OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model through the Codex coding agent to more than 10,000 employees, extending the tool well beyond software teams and into core business functions.
The deployment covers engineering, product, legal, marketing, finance, sales, HR, operations and developer programs. Staff are using Codex for coding, internal research and routine knowledge work as companies test whether AI agents can move from demos to daily use.
GPT-5.5 is running on NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, linking OpenAI’s newest model directly to the chipmaker’s latest infrastructure push. NVIDIA said the systems cut cost per million tokens by 35 times and raise token output per second per megawatt by 50 times versus earlier generations.
Inside the company, it says the effects are immediate. Debugging work that once took days is being finished in hours and experiments across large codebases that used to stretch over weeks are now handled overnight. Teams are also building features from natural-language prompts with fewer failed runs.
In a company-wide note urging staff to adopt the tool, CEO Jensen Huang wrote: “Let’s jump to lightspeed. Welcome to the age of AI.”
Security remains central to the rollout. Codex can connect through Secure Shell to approved cloud virtual machines, allowing agents to work with company data without moving it outside approved environments. NVIDIA said it assigned cloud VMs to employees so agents run in isolated sandboxes with full audit trails.
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The company added that the setup uses a zero-data-retention policy. Access to production systems is read-only through command-line tools and internal automation layers.
The move also highlights NVIDIA’s long relationship with OpenAI. NVIDIA said the partnership began in 2016, when Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI’s San Francisco office.
The two companies have since worked across hardware and model deployment. NVIDIA also said OpenAI plans to deploy more than 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for future AI infrastructure.
For Gulf markets pouring money into sovereign AI and enterprise automation, the signal is clear: internal AI agents are moving from pilot phase to standard tooling.
NVIDIA Puts GPT-5.5 Codex In Hands Of 10,000 Staff
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