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From Sigma Cards to Wallat: Why We Built a Card for Everyone

Before Wallat, we hand-built NFC profile sites for CEOs and chairmen, one at a time. Here's how that taught us the problem Wallat actually needed to solve.

By Wallat Editorial · October 28, 2026 · 8 min read

Before Wallat, in this same team, we were Sigma Cards. The idea was narrow by design: take the senior leadership of the governments and enterprises our parent company — a core software solutions provider — already worked with, and give each of them something no off-the-shelf product could.

Starting at the top, on purpose

Beginning in 2019, we built state-of-the-art, fully custom profile websites for CEOs, CFOs, chairmen — the kind of people whose public presence mattered and whose time didn't allow for a DIY website builder. One session was usually enough to understand who they were and how they wanted to be represented. From there, we built something that actually fit — their story, their stature, their visual language — and connected it to a physical NFC card: metal, gold, silver, bamboo, PVC, finished to match the premium character Dubai's business culture expects. For a lot of clients, it doubled as a gifting item as much as a working business card.

It was a genuinely premium, genuinely niche product. And it worked, for exactly the narrow case it was built for.

What a thousand cards taught us

Across more than a thousand clients, two problems kept surfacing — one about the technology, one about the business model.

The technology problem was NFC itself. It's impressive on a good tap, and unreliable the rest of the time: switched off by default on a lot of Android phones, inconsistent across the hundreds of phone brands and power-saving modes we encountered, and dependent on the recipient knowing where to tap at all. We'd studied — and in many cases used — more than 1,600 apps across this space, and most of the market was solving a narrower problem than the one we kept running into: people don't want to choose between a physical card and a working one. They want both, and they want the physical one to actually be reliable.

The business model problem was scale. The junior staff of the same companies we worked with started asking for the same thing their CEO had — a real profile, not a static page. But what we'd built for a chairman wasn't something you could just "turn into" an employee profile. Every card had meant a full round of content writing, design, and a dedicated project, priced accordingly. That model works for a handful of executives a year. It doesn't work for a sales team of forty.

The gap neither side of the market filled

The obvious alternative — a website builder — fails in the opposite direction. A template-based builder hands you a design and leaves you to figure out how your own information fits into it. Most people aren't designers or copywriters, so the result is usually a page that looks unfinished, generic, or like it's fighting its own template. We'd watched this happen from the other side for years: the burden of making a profile good was being pushed entirely onto the person least equipped to carry it.

Building Wallat

So that's what we built. Instead of generic templates, Wallat uses what you'd already put on a business card — name, role, company, what you do — to generate a full, cinematic, AI-prefilled profile from a growing library of templates matched to your profession and role. You're not staring at an empty design wondering what goes where; you're looking at a finished profile and clicking to adjust what you'd actually change. Editing feels like editing a document, not building a website — no font, color, or layout decisions forced on you, because we'd already made the ones that work.

We kept the part of the NFC-card era that genuinely mattered — a physical object people could hold — and rebuilt the delivery around something that works for everyone, not just the people comfortable tapping a phone against a card. The dynamic QR code that lives on your digital wallet pass works exactly the same way on a printed card: scan it, and it opens your real profile; change what it does anytime from your dashboard, no reprinting required. We wrote more about exactly how that works if you want the detail.

Wherever you are, whatever you do

That's the line we actually build toward. Sigma Cards proved the idea for a narrow, premium segment. Wallat exists to make the same quality of profile — and the same control over how it's shared, physical or digital — available to anyone, in any profession, anywhere in the world. Not a template you have to fight with. A card that already fits.