What’s the best credit card to pay with to earn stuff back? A new payment player that launched into beta this week says it will tell consumers the answers.
Wallaby Financial, the name of the startup, offers a cloud-based digital wallet that houses all of a consumer’s credit cards and links that payment data with a physical Wallaby Card. The usage pitch to consumers? Wallaby helps consumers determine the best purchase rewards. The Los Angeles-based startup says it guides consumers into which card they should use for payment to score the best cash back, miles, points or merchant discounts — depending on the user’s preference.
Bank Innovation learned of the new product in a tweet Wallaby sent to @BankInnovation this week.
Wallaby describes its value proposition on its site as follows:
You provide us your personal information (as required by law), the credit cards numbers to the cards you want to keep in the wallet and tell us your favorite type of rewards to earn. That’s it — we do the rest. We’ll mail you a Wallaby Card, and you’re on your way to swiping smarter.
Each time you swipe your Wallaby Card, we look at where you are, what day it is, what cards are in your wallet, what your preferences are and what special deals are available. We then determine the best card for you for this purchase and forward the transaction to that card.
The math works out like this: The Wallaby Card is running a free six-month promo and then will charge users $50 per year.
Wallaby is the sort of innovation that benefits the reward-hungry credit card crowd, but here’s what I’m wondering: How many credit cards does an average consumer use? I’ll speak for myself: one. And I hope to never have more than that.
I know I’m not the norm, though. The company’s data points to the average person using around three credit cards. I would think that a consumer would need many — perhaps more than three active credit cards — to make Wallaby worthwhile. But even so, issuers argue that the notion of consumers jumping from plastic to plastic is fanciful. But perhaps that is simply because the hassle of figuring out which plastic is best to use has been too burdensome for consumers to card hop? With a service like Wallaby, the headache is removed once a consumer completes the initial data entry (a hurdle to adoption perhaps?). Plus, with credit cards ever-increasingly changing their perks and offers recently, the task of cardholders staying abreast of which card provides what on any given day has become more complicated. In other words, consumers have more incentive to simplify how they manage their card offers, and that should scare issuers.