Much of the banking system is still based on procedures and practices from the 20th century and so, like many other areas of life, is ripe for modernisation through technology. One company trying to bring some innovation in this space is Curve.
Curve is billed as the one card to replace all your cards and feels a little bit like Apple Pay in that you scan your existing cards into their (iOS only) app and then swap between them when making payments.
The Curve is currently in “beta” and only available to those working for small businesses. There is an entrance fee of £35 for the basic card and £75 for the black card which earns double points on Curve Rewards, a programme that doesn’t actually exist yet.
I signed up and a few weeks later a padded envelope popped through the letter box. I have to say that the Curve is beautifully packaged looking like something Apple might have released.
One of the things that initially attracted me and many others to the card was the support for American Express meaning that, as the Curve is a Mastercard, you could charge things to your Amex that wouldn’t normally have been possible. This joy was to be short-lived however as Amex quickly stomped on this and support was withdrawn. To be fair Curve did offer to make up for this by adding £35 to everyones rewards account albeit with caveats (min £1,000 spend on the card).
I decided to stick with it and see whether it truly could replace all my other cards meaning I only needed to carry the Curve. Unfortunately we got off to a bad start when my very first transaction in my local Asda was declined. A quick call to support told me that this was probably just a timing issue and shouldn’t be an issue going forward.
I hoped that this would be a one off but it wasn’t. Over the next couple of weeks the card was rejected a further number of times. These rejections were seemingly random in a mixture of shops and cashpoint machines where my usual cards worked faultlessly. The frequency of the rejections made me not trust the Curve and led to me having to carry it and my ordinary cards which somewhat defeated the object of it. I decided to give the Curve one more go but when it failed a further two times out of three in one 24 hour period I gave up.
What was most disturbing about this was not the failures themselves but the responses from support when I questioned why I was seeing so many problems. Almost without exception the response was “it’s probably a connectivity issue” which is a little strange given that I have never experienced such a thing in the many years I have been using “normal” cards.
Curve is labelled as “beta” and worthy of the tag. I might also be tempted to say it is more alpha than beta in my experience. I have to say that a friend who also has the Curve has far less issues than myself so maybe it’s just me. However, one of the major selling points for me was the ability to leave my other cards at home and only carry the Curve but that’s just not possible as it is not reliable enough to guarantee that it is going to work.
I’ve kept my card in the hope that in the future it will prove more reliable but for now I won’t be carrying it.