coin 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.
I 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.
Sorry, 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.
Regarding domain hacks: times are changing and it's becoming more mainstream, evidently even for financial services; perhaps only the cooler ones though.
I 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.
I 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'.
PayPal 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.
I 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
For 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.
Interestingly enough, I've just got a new card from one of the major banks and it has the chip. Looks like US banks starting to warm up to this chip idea.
But 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.
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.
I'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).
I 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.
If 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.
They'd have to talk to the processor to allow them to identify as "gas station" or "grocery store" and so on depending on where it came from. I'm sure there's a way to do this - there are many third-party processing systems that do pretty much exactly the same - process transactions from different vendors and put labels on them depending on who actually sent it.
Absolutely not. A second charge would result in Wallaby paying extra interchange fees on everything which would kill them. They also wouldn't be able to authorize properly.
A "network switch", yes, but not using that particular method. They must be a real-time MITM proxy.
My guess is deals with the issuing banks / companies.
Here's my thought process: the parties running rewards programs are doing it because they want people maximizing their spend a) on the card, because spending -> interest and b) on the items / shops / etc that they are incentivizing, because they have backend deals (such as being the airline that is incentivized, or receiving affiliate fees from retailers with low costs).
It doesn't even seem too ridiculous to me that they would be able to work out 0 fee / passthrough rates with the bigger players based on those incentives, though it would probably be a first!
they'd likely be a card processor-- the one who receives the auth request from the swipe terminal and responds with whether or not the charge is approved. they then relay the original request to one of your cards.
Their 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.
Good 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.
The 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%?
Pretty 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.
This 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.)
True. But it would work with all of your personal cards, which is the main proliferation problem.
You could use them together. Get a Wallaby as your "one" smart personal card, and if you feel like springing $100 to go from 2 cards down to 1, you've got Coin.
Personally I'd be a tad worried about handing my Coin to a server to charge a big business meal. What if they accidentally tap the button and switch to my personal card when they're holding it?
Could 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).
Even 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.
How 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.
Magnetic 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).
Well 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!
the 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).
Interesting... 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?
I 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.
183 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadHell, I think I'll build one this weekend, just to be included. :)
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!
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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.
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).
It's a network switch for cards, basically.
If all charges are from Wallaby, how will it know it's a car rental or groceries?
A "network switch", yes, but not using that particular method. They must be a real-time MITM proxy.
Here's my thought process: the parties running rewards programs are doing it because they want people maximizing their spend a) on the card, because spending -> interest and b) on the items / shops / etc that they are incentivizing, because they have backend deals (such as being the airline that is incentivized, or receiving affiliate fees from retailers with low costs).
It doesn't even seem too ridiculous to me that they would be able to work out 0 fee / passthrough rates with the bigger players based on those incentives, though it would probably be a first!
[1] https://walla.by/security
Would love to see tptacek's reaction to that line.
http://imgur.com/C2A1vYQ
http://vimeo.com/44223249
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%?
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.
Either way I'm all for any innovation that thins out the number of cards in my wallet (with the goal being zero.)
2) put your wallaby card into your coin.
3) carry wallaby and one business card
Today just got too meta. Now my brain hurts.
You could use them together. Get a Wallaby as your "one" smart personal card, and if you feel like springing $100 to go from 2 cards down to 1, you've got Coin.
Personally I'd be a tad worried about handing my Coin to a server to charge a big business meal. What if they accidentally tap the button and switch to my personal card when they're holding it?
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop
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!
[1] Loop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6737688