So maybe it’s been easy to escape, but next week the new Snap­per cards come into cir­cu­la­tion.

Snapper USB card - this one plugs into your PCAny­one who travels on a Wel­ling­ton Bus can­not have failed to notice the newly installed orange and black fish logo-ed teardrops at the front and side doors. These are the read­ers for the cards. Just wave the card over the read­er, and value is deb­ited from them to fund your bus trip. You can recharge them over the ‘net (but only if you have a Win­dows PC and a mas­ochist­ic will­ing­ness to sub­ject your­self to Inter­net Explorer) and at any of the sup­port­ing cafés and former 10-trip tick­et sellers.

It all sounds pretty good really: no more being stuck for the right change; nev­er a click short on your 10-trip; and nev­er even hav­ing to think about how much extra is stop past your usu­al. And then there’s the pos­sib­il­ity (as some of us, tri­al­ling Snap­per, are doing now) of put­ting the first cof­fee of the morn­ing on it as well.

And it’s cool. We like the logo; the dif­fer­ent form factors; and just the sheer techno-geekery at play.

Oth­ers have been pos­it­ive, too; Poneke has had a reas­on­able time with their card. So here at Wel­ling­tonista we’re all really look­ing for­ward to it.

We do have a few ques­tions though, (after the jump):

  • Will retail­ers really go for the 1% trans­ac­tion fee that Snap­per charge for every trans­ac­tion put through it? Even when Snap­per are busy col­lect­ing interest on the float taken from cus­tom­ers? The Retail­ers Asso­ci­ation are not so sure. If retail­ers don’t, does this mean that Snap­per is still sus­tain­able on the buses alone, giv­en the com­ments by the Snap­per CEO that New Zeal­and’s low use of pub­lic trans­port meant that “our strategy has been to view this at the very begin­ning as a broad­er small value pay­ments scheme”?
  • How private is it? How long do Snap­per keep the records of all your trans­ac­tions and bus trips for (oth­er than the “indef­in­ite peri­od” men­tioned in the Pri­vacy Policy)? Who else may have access to these? (This ain’t cash, remem­ber.)
  • How secure is it? Can we be sure that the cards, and the value asso­ci­ated with them, can­’t be cloned? Are they sim­il­ar, or do they use the same chip­set, as the Lon­don Oyster cards, reportedly cracked in the last few months?

Ques­tions, ques­tions. So, does the fish have legs? We hope so…