Wallaby Financial’s Smart Loyalty Card

• The US start-up Wallaby has just launched a beta version of a card designed to aggregate various means of payment on a single medium and route each transaction to the right card based on available loyalty offers.

• This aggregating medium is endowed with “intelligent” card recognition features set to automatically pick the most relevant loyalty programme (cash-back, rewards, miles, else) depending on the purchase.

• Users willing to take part in this programme and receive a Wallaby card first have to register at www.walla.by and provide their current card data. The Wallaby card costs 50 dollars per year.

• A mobile app may also be downloaded to enable checking on specific options at any time: spending limits applied to particular cards on the medium for instance.

Source: TechCrunch

• Wallaby Financial relied on a self-conducted study on a sample of 300 people (June 2012) for this launch. It appeared that most US customers have four credit cards on average and 73% say they would enjoy benefiting from easier reward programme management if a dedicated solution were to be proposed.

• The beta version of the Wallaby card was launched on 25 June to be tested for free by its first subscribers over the first six months. An additional offer should later enable 5,000 customers to have access to the card for free during one year.

• Unlike current offers only focusing on mobile devices (Google Wallet or Apple’s Passbook for example), Wallaby relies on a card-based solution suited to the existing acceptance systems and adds smart features compliant with US consumers’ needs.

• This example further sheds light on players’ increasing interest in “smart” wallets helping their customers choose the right means of payment, at the right time, and feel free to customise their medium according to their own specific uses.