When Walla.by was first launched their aim was to offer an all in one card called the Walla.by card way back in 2012. If you were on the wait list, you should have received an e-mail from co-founder and CEO Matthew Goldman stating that they will be unable to bring the product to market (thanks to Travel with Grant for forward this e-mail).
Instead they’ve now partnered with another all in one solution, Wocket card & Wallet. Wocket seems to be similar to other all in one solutions, except that it comes with a somewhat bulky physical wallet that needs to be used as well. In addition to this, it’s not EMV compatible and it hasn’t even launched yet.
Wocket does not have an official release date, if you were on the Walla.by wait list then you can get early access on starting June 1st. It seems anybody can actually get this pricing by visiting https://wocketwallet.com/pages/wallaby. The pre-order pricing is $149.99.
Personally I think you’d need to be somewhat crazy to pre-order any of these all in one cards. A lot of them have had issues with delivering on time (or delivering at all) and I’m still not convinced that any of them will be EMV compatible which is an absolute necessity given the October 1st liability shift.
To me this technology is 5-10 years late, payments are quickly moving to mobile and I don’t see how these cards will be able to compete. This is doubly true when you look at the pricing on these cards, ~$150 seems to be excessively high. Walla.by will continue to offer WalletBoost and their other products/services direct to consumers and their card intelligence (e.g what card should you use at a grocery store) will be built into Wocket.
