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The Wallaby Card
- d0m 13y agoAs it goes "It's all in the execution", good luck!
- alternize 13y agoso, what's their business model? data mining?
- gesman 13y agoHacker News suddenly got under attack from onecard and alikes ...
- jesalg 13y agoAt first glance, this seems to have a better value proposition for the consumer compared to Coin.
- saadshamim 13y agocoin takes in debt and gift cards - which is more convenient for me, wallaby seems to be only for credit - I only have one credit card, I didn't even know you got rewards for using them.
- nayefc 13y agoIs bonuses such a big problem? I've never had any card had a bonus for a limited time.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- RandallBrown 13y agoMy Citi card has special categories that give me double cash back every few months.
- fpgeek 13y agoI have several with time-varying bonuses (Discover and at least one other change their bonus categories quarterly and there are other specials for other cards). Beyond that, many of the bonuses have caps and other interactions (e.g. sometimes Discover's bonus on Amazon transactions is better than the original card). Something that manages the transaction routing for me is valuable, even beyond consolidating cards.
- derstang 13y agoCard rules vary frequently, down to daily. Also, many rewards have limits (both min and max). Wallaby helps you keep track.
- null_ptr 13y agoSorry, but ccTLD domain hacks and financial services don't mix well. Financial services should be stable and secure, their front page even embeds a Vimeo video over plain http.
- maxvu 13y agoLooks like they fixed it just for you!
- kintamanimatt 13y agoRegarding domain hacks: times are changing and it's becoming more mainstream, evidently even for financial services; perhaps only the cooler ones though.
- dm2 13y agoI don't think there is a way to fix the https Vimeo issue. It's been a problem on a couple of the sites I've worked on for years and Vimeo acknowledges the problem but refuses to fix it.
- sciguy77 13y agoSo I've got 3 so far: Coin, Wallaby, and Echo. Hell, I think I'll build one this weekend, just to be included. :)
- antonius 13y agoSeriously. What's with the sudden surge of all of these one-card-fits-all startups?
- res0nat0r 13y agoSomeone posted Coin, so everyone who knows of already in the works competitors are going to flood the homepage while the getting is good.
- cardaggregator 13y agoI'm going to build a service that let's you combine your combined cards
- gbelote 13y agoSomeone posted Loop in another thread: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop While not as close to Coin as Wallaby and Echo, it feels like it belongs in the group. Can't wait to see these all in the wild!
- elmin 13y agoI don't understand how this could work. How can they 'forward the purchase' to the appropriate card in such a way that the receiving card still sees your purchase as being from a 'gas station', or 'grocery store'.
- HelloMcFly 13y agoMaybe similar to how Paypal does it when I pay through PayPal with my credit card?
- dangrossman 13y agoPayPal doesn't do any passing-through. The entity you are paying is PayPal, and separately PayPal is putting money into the recipient's PayPal balance. You wouldn't get a gas station discount even if a gas station created a PayPal account and accepted your card with a PayPal terminal.
- gbelote 13y agoIt's impressive to see the collection of Coin competitors hit the HN frontpage and comments today. Best of luck to all of them!
- gfosco 13y agoI was more surprised at the incredible amount of buzz generated for Coin as if it were some totally new idea. I couldn't think of the name for most of the morning (Protean Echo,) but I remembered seeing this concept a year ago... Very happy that the others have been posted so people can realize it's not new or unique. As for the idea itself, I find it hard to believe the market for extreme-first-world-problem-users is large enough for any one of these companies, let alone all three. My morning commute photoshop: http://bit.ly/1at9PLO http://bit.ly/1at9PLO
- atwebb 13y agoYou don't have to be new or unique, you just have to be better (but no competition would help).
- troymc 13y agoSometimes, you don't even have to be better (e.g. VHS vs. Betamax).
- aidenn0 13y agoVHS was better than betamax; it cost less and could record football games.
- jbigelow76 13y agoIt also helps to be advertising, sorry releasing, on a site owned by your financial backer.
- ekorz 13y agoFor me, and for many others I'd imagine, maximizing my credit-card-rewards does not trump having control over which account I'm using. Coin is better suited to my needs.
- memracom 13y agoNo chip and pin? How could this possibly work?
- nationcrafting 13y agoSomebody should come up with a service to unify Coin, Echo and Wallaby cards into a single card.
- meowface 13y agoBut naturally there should be at least one other competitor for a service like that. Then we'll need another service to combine the two aggregator-aggregators into a single super ultra card.
- hack_edu 13y agoIts perfect, and the future business model of 2014: The product that helps startups help startups that help startups... help startups. Sign up for more details!
- nickpinkston 13y agoStartups as a Service
- gaze 13y agomustmayostardayonnaise
- tehwebguy 13y agoHah! Seriously though, you could link all of your cards to Wallaby and then store all of them + Wallaby on your Coin. That way you could use Wallaby's optimization when you want to or manually choose the card to use.
- dangrossman 13y agoI'm stumped as to how this can work. The logic can't be embedded in the card, as the card doesn't know what you're charging to it -- the merchant's category code (i.e. gas station, restaurant) isn't programmed into their terminals, that data gets relayed through the various backend networks between banks. So this can't be sending a card swiper the number of one of your cards, which means it must be a valid credit card itself. It has to be issued by some Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Discover member-bank to be widely accepted, though none of those logos appear on the website's mockup. If that's the case, I still haven't a clue how they turn a capture against their card into a capture against one of your "real" cards based on the type of store you used it at. They can't be charging your real cards themselves, as all the charges would come from a single category code, whatever one was assigned to their own merchant account, so you won't get the right rewards. They'd also lose money on every transaction that way, as they'd have to pay card-not-present fees to charge your cards themselves, while only collecting lower card-present fees when you use the Wallaby card. Puzzling. They must be trying to get some kind of relationship somewhere else in the network that no other company has (either direct relationships with issuers, or permission from Visa/MC to sit on the processing network somewhere and do some kind of MITM).
- eksith 13y agoI think how it works is that the charge initially goes to Wallaby so the merchant is paid. They then charge the amount taken from Wallaby from one of the listed cards according to where the charge originated from and which deals your listed cards have. It's a network switch for cards, basically.
- RandallBrown 13y agoI wonder how that works for getting you the rewards and stuff that you should be getting. If all charges are from Wallaby, how will it know it's a car rental or groceries?
- dangrossman 13y agoIf you use your Wallaby card at a gas station, then Wallaby separately charges your card that offers cash back on gas, you won't get any cash back as Wallaby's MCC is not that of a gas station. They'd also have to pay transaction fees every time they charged one of your cards, and those fees would necessarily be higher than any fees they could collect through usage of the Wallaby card. That can't be what they're doing.
- ghughes 13y agoTheir security page [1] needs some work: apparently they "use SHA 256-bit encryption across all of our solutions" and "your personal account information is never compromised". SHA-256 is a hash algorithm, and it's not very clever of them to state that users' PII is never going to be compromised. Someone with an ounce of computer security knowledge needs to rewrite this page, quickly. [1] https://walla.by/security https://walla.by/security
- meowface 13y ago>"use SHA 256-bit encryption across all of our solutions" Would love to see tptacek's reaction to that line.
- derstang 13y agoGood points. We have upgraded our encryption scheme since writing this page. I think trying to explain security to lay people and make them confident is a difficult challenge. We'll get this updated and re-written.
- dvetrano 13y agoIt looks like this product has been around for a year already: http://imgur.com/C2A1vYQ http://imgur.com/C2A1vYQ http://vimeo.com/44223249 http://vimeo.com/44223249
- adamzerner 13y agoThe value they offer seems to be: get you the most rewards by using the right credit cards. I'd like to see some numbers. Are there beta users? If so, how much are they saving? If not, how much does Wallaby predict they'll save their customers? .1%? .5%? 2%?
- josephagoss 13y agoPaypass/Paywave? If they can't duplicate chip+pin and wireless payments they will never hit the Australian market.
- jduck 13y agoIt's a pyramid scheme! Soon we'll have a meta-meta...meta-n card.
- mgambrell 13y agoI would assume most people use cards based what they're associated with (i.e. Business, Personal, etc) not based on rewards
- abalone 13y agoPretty interesting. Here's my guess at how this works: Wallaby is both a card issuer and (working with) a processor. The merchant's processor routes the charge to them like a normal card. Then Wallaby selects the appropriate card number and proxys the charge via their own processor to that card's issuer. I.e. the same round-trip transaction, they're just a man-in-the-middle swapping out card numbers. The issuers never see a difference. Couple issues they'd have to have worked out for this: 1. Getting approval from the card network to proxy a transaction like this. Given the founder's background with Green Dot I can see them having the pull to drive that. 2. Dealing with chargebacks. The merchant will have a record of the Wallaby card number because that's what's swiped through the POS. But the customer will see it on their actual card's bill (let's say Chase). If they file a dispute, and Chase contacts the merchant, there's a card number mismatch. I wonder what their solution is for this. Perhaps they instruct cardmembers to initiate disputes with them and they proxy those as well. Overall I have to say I like this a little better than Coin, if only because it's simpler. You don't have to make any decisions each time you pay, you just configure it through the cloud, which can actually make smarter decisions for you. And it's not $100.
- disc 13y agoThis looks like it work great for optimizing/consolidating personal cards, but one advantage Coin offers is the flexibility of charging normal purchases to a business account. I'm not sure how Wallaby could discriminate if my restaurant meal or office supplies are a business expense or just personal use. Either way I'm all for any innovation that thins out the number of cards in my wallet (with the goal being zero.)
- thatthatis 13y ago1) get two wallaby cards, one for business one for personal. 2) put your wallaby card into your coin. 3) carry wallaby and one business card Today just got too meta. Now my brain hurts.
- bloometal 13y agoWait. Why not both wallaby cards in the coin?
- nostromo 13y agoCould I put all my credit cards in a Wallaby Card, and then put my Wallaby (and debit and reward cards) on a Coin Card? If so, I'd have just one card (Coin's pain point), but I'd also get Wallaby's "smart routing" for miles (Wallaby's pain point).
- dangrossman 13y agoEven better, get the Loop case for your phone and carry zero cards. It emulates the signal the reader would get from a magswipe wirelessly, so you just hold your phone near the reader. It's supposed to work with credit/debit/loyalty cards like Coin and is shipping soon, not next year. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop
- darkmighty 13y agoNot a huge issue but this device likely makes it pretty easy to intercept your mag card data.
- dangrossman 13y agoHow so? It's extremely short range, the only thing that can read it is the terminal you were about to give your card to anyway. It's not broadcasting while in your pocket, so nobody's going to read your card by bumping into you.
- IgorPartola 13y agoMagnetic field falls off at the rate proportional to one over distance cubed. A huge NMR magnet that will suck you in by you wrist watch at one meter is a harmless hunk of metal at four meters (approximately).
- vxNsr 13y agoWell technically the part that allows you to pay is shipping next year... Also this doesn't solve the problem that is being discussed in the coin thread of imprinting and buyer verification for the merchant. Still, This is the technology that cell phones should be including on a hardware level, not the stupid NFC thing that doesn't work for most US POS. I don't have an iphone or else I'd be contacting them right now asking if I could get in on the action even though I'm about a week late! What they should do is connect your cellphone account to this and that would allow the carrier verify your identity (if you're on a contract).... I'm sure there's more here that we could do, maybe have an option to silkscreen the your id of choice on to the back of the case... People this needs to be made to work NOW!! I use the ninja wallet and even that is too big and bulky for me, if I could get rid of the whole thing and just carry it in my phone the world would be a better place!
- beachminter 13y agothe wallaby card sounds pretty awesome. i just checked out their mobile app and tested a few places out and the rewards were accurate on my Chase Freedom (which has rotating categories each quarter).
- lsh123 13y agoInteresting... Suppose it is a Visa card on the frontend and then on the backend I have Amex linked. Will the merchant be hit with Amex fees? Will it be accepted if merchant doesn't accept Amex?
- Geee 13y agoI can't understand why you people use more than a single card for payments? That solves all the problems that these Coin and Wallaby cards are trying to address. Rewards are bullshit anyway, I buy stuff from honest companies without any kind of reward systems.
- clarky07 13y agoInteresting that every payment card solution but the one that I actually find interesting is on the frontpage right now [1] [1] Loop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6737688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6737688
- pmorici 13y agoWith the rise of Bitcoin aren't all these all-in-one credit cards just a Blu-ray player in an iTunes/Netflix world?
- ubercore 13y agoBitcoin has a long way to go in terms of proving security (not algorithm security, but practical "in use" security) and convenience before it it's a Blu-ray/Netflix dichotomy. These last few weeks, with millions of dollars lost in bitcoin hacks reinforces that perspective, I think.
- faramarz 13y agoWhat if i'm doing an online purchase? How do I charge the Wallaby Card when my only options are Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Really interesting concept. Canada, just get it to Canada!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- runn1ng 13y agoI am an European, so maybe it's different in US, but is too many cards problem that people actually have? Judging by the top 2 stories on HN right now, it probably is. I have a card. It is hooked up to my bank account. It works.
- bloometal 13y agoYou mean '3 out of top 4'? There's a "Protean echo" too.
- sharkweek 13y agoI have... a debit card, a credit card, a backup credit card and my corporate card I would love a positively fail safe solution to get this down to one card, but to be honest, neither of these top stories offer that. Because at the end of the day, the most common reason for failure in my standard use case is user error on my part.
- nawitus 13y agoEuropean cards are typically a combined credit and debit card, so that's one less card alraedy.
- vidyesh 13y agoOh so your bank issues a debit and credit card merged together? How does that work? This sounds fascinating. I am from India, I have multiple cards but most because there is a surge of credit card offers in India, most banks are providing free credit cards and offers to get people signed up. So many of those cards are just used to utilise those offers to get discounts and a certain select websites for discounts. But I practically use my debit card, a credit card hooked to online payment services ( paypal et all ) and a backup credit card when I cross the limit of my other credit card. That's all. One other card I use is just when dining out in which I get some % discount/cash back offers thats all.
- jnsaff2 13y ago
- bhaile 13y agoLaunched in Summer of 2012. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161916 I had signed up and was in the second batch of users. First 1,000 users got it for free for life. Next batch got it one year for free. I never got the card though. Something related to demand was too high and then nothing.
- cantrevealname 13y agoSlightly off topic, but it's sad to see so much brainpower and energy go into "innovation" in the financial sector. We (society) have created a complicated game involving credit cards and we have to continue playing the game otherwise we lose. Merchants charge higher prices because they need to pay a 2% merchant fee, then the credit card "rewards" us with 0.5% back. Madness. If the blizzard of credit card features--cash back, reward schemes, loyalty plans, interest options, perks, airline points--all disappeared, it would be a huge net benefit to society. I realize it won't get fixed. It's sort of like simplifying income tax legislation. Almost everyone would benefit even if the amount of tax collected remained the same, but there's no mechanism to even start doing it. Same thing here with the credit cards.
- a2kadet 13y agoI'm pretty sure loyalty programs are good for the smart consumer. I would speculate credit cards were all competing with one another while charging a 2% fee. They all wanted to go lower but couldn't and needed something to compete. Enter loyalty programs, designed to attract your attention but be too confusing to actually use. TL,DR - I would guess cutting loyalty programs wouldn't lower credit card fees.
- dangrossman 13y agoThe interchange rate charged by the card network (Visa, MasterCard, etc) is determined by the type of card presented. Rewards cards are charged a higher fee because they're reward cards (the rate is literally called "CPS Rewards"), and that extra money ends up back with the card-issuing bank who's paying the rewards. If you head into your local convenience store and pay with a cash-back card, that store will lose a larger percentage of your transaction than if you had handed the very same cashier a basic non-rewards card. http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-reimbursement-fees-april2013.pdf http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-...
- abalone 13y agoThat's a good way of putting it.. "we have to continue playing the game otherwise we lose." But we didn't create it. Visa and the banks did. Visa was able to win over so many banks by offering the highest interchange fee. Remember, card network customers are banks, not you, so they're actually competing to raise the fee that merchants pay (interchange) that gets passed back to the bank that issued the card. In a masterful example of leveraging network effects, Visa was able to come up with the highest fee that still had wide acceptance by merchants. This pissed merchants the hell off. Theoretically it may have increased prices by 2% in general, but it's hard to say. That's part of the "genius" too, it's designed to be a small enough fee to be a rounding error that merchants just eat. It did have one advantage for consumers: it made Visa accepted absolutely everywhere by further driving its network effects. (And Mastercard too which followed the same model.) As compared to networks like AmEx or Diner's Club, for example. What happened then is the banks started competing with one another with reward programs. This basically took the margin out of the interchange and returned it to the consumers. But only if they "play the game" and know how to play it well. So what we're left with is a silly game consumers have to play to get their 2% back, which merchants really hate. This has been "fixed" through legislation in other countries. Australia for example. But guess what? They did a study and found that merchants did not lower prices. They just kept prices the same and enjoyed an extra 2% margin.
- saadshamim 13y agoThe main problem with cards, isn't necessarily the number, rather the speed. Nfc is the fastest implementation so far and both my credit and debit card have it, and I will gladly carry around an extra few millimetres in my pocket to speed up the transaction process.
- logician76 13y agoAt Costco, you can only pay with American Express and at their gas station and store register, the card also doubles as a membership card, so since they don't explain how their card works I doubt that it would work for Costco.
- mikegagnon 13y agoThe problem with the world isn't too many physical credit cards. It's too many lines of credit.
- CmonDev 13y agoA Belarusian start-up? Nice!
- thomasjames 13y agoI was thinking the same thing. I wonder if there are any consequences to having Belarus have domain over your--well--domain. It is a modern country with a well educated populace, but its government is Europe's last dictatorship. I imagine there aren't consequences, but you have to wonder if the founders considered any of the legal issues with spinning the globe to find a country with a matching top-level domain.
- OafTobark 13y agoI signed up for one way back and never heard from them. Not going to bother now.
- SumantChhunchha 13y agoWallaBy + Loop will make a good combo - put all your cards in one WallaBy card and put one WallaBy card in to Loop. So your phone will have only one card and your point of control will be WallaBy. Hiding all other cards details - block one card and you are safe. Coin card is not going in the right direction i feel. Time to loose the card stuff now...
- SumantChhunchha 13y agoWallaBy + Loop will make a good combo - put all your cards in one WallaBy card and put one WallaBy card in to Loop. So your phone will have only one card and your point of control will be WallaBy. Hiding all other cards details - block one card and you are safe. Coin card is not going in the right direction i feel. Time to loose the card stuff now...
- mkramlich 13y agoThis is getting to remind me of XKCD on standards. The wonderful thing about having too many standards is that somebody comes along to create a new standard intended to unify and replace all the other ones. Then you have N+1 standards to choose from. That said, I do think adding an extra level of indirection to any customer/merchant transaction event is a Good Thing. Allow the customer to pay in any manner he chooses that otherwise satisfies the merchant. While doing so in a way where the customer can be confident his payment identity/authorization is not hijacked and repurposed, or reapplied, or TRACKED, without his permission or knowledge. We still seem to be in this era where POS payments are catching up with what software engineers knew at least decades ago would be a smarter solution.
- talhof8 13y agoAm I the only one confused about this coincidence?
- joetech 13y agoGreat concept, but I don't know how comfortable I am giving them access to all my accounts when all they do for me is choose which card to charge. And how do the purchases show on my card statements? Are they all from Wallaby now?
- ryanjm33 13y agoSounds like one of the top stories from yesterday: [Coin a step in the wrong direction](http://www.techendo.co/posts/coin-a-step-in-the-wrong-direction http://www.techendo.co/posts/coin-a-step-in-the-wrong-direct...)
- rexreed 13y agoI wish I could see some customer validation videos where they went on the street and asked random consumers and merchants if they would find this product (and Coin and others like it), useful as well as hear their concerns. Since I doubt that sort of customer validation work was done in that way (random users vs. specific focus groups, if at all), my impression is that it would be a video full of people saying "eh, maybe, but what about..." or "no, I don't have that problem" or "yeah, it's interesting, but I don't use my card(s) that much or in that way"... or "yeah, but I won't pay extra for that" or maybe "sure, I like it as a consumer" or "sure I'll accept that as a merchant".