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…