Curve card ‘pauses’ Amex functionality

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• Vinz says:

  24 May24 May 13:08

  Quick question. If I wait until 31st to cancel but in the mean time Curve goes bust, do you think I could dispute the £35 transaction on the Amex I used to pay the fee with? I paid my Curve mid April so I should be within the 60 days for disputing charges? Am I wrong?

  • harry says:

    24 May24 May 14:51

    not if there’s no way for Amex to get the £35 back from Curve – Amex themselves are not going to compensate you

    • Mr Dee says:

      24 May24 May 18:09

      Might be worth considering the amex refund protection here:
      Refund and purchase protection with your Card

      Eligible items you buy on your Card in the UK have Refund Protection. Items are covered up to 90 days and we’ll replace or refund up to a maximum of £300. Even if the retailer won’t.

      • harry says:

        24 May24 May 18:16

        services

        EXCLUSIONS
        You will not be covered for:
        1) Any item with a purchase price less than £25.
        2) Items that are not in a new and saleable condition, free from all defects,
        and in full working order.
        3) Jewellery, precious stones, rare and precious coins or stamps; one of a
        kind items including antiques, art work and furs; cash or its equivalents
        (including travellers cheques); tickets; services; books; animals and
        plants; consumable and perishable goods; healthcare items; rebuilt and
        refurbished items; closing down sale items; vehicles and their parts; land
        and buildings; items permanently affixed to home, office or vehicles.

        • Mr Dee says:

          24 May24 May 20:05

          Yes but the card is physical which is what the fee is for and so is the wallet, so worth a try!

        • harry says:

          24 May24 May 20:06

          Snowball’s

• VJP says:

  24 May24 May 13:12

  I believe they have more sustainable business model now.

  Charge to Retailers 2%
  Charged by Credit Card Supplier 0.3%

  1.7% spread

  With AMEX the spread was much smaller.

  • Mr Dee says:

    24 May24 May 18:11

    Yes but little benefit to the customer of using the Curve card unless they introduce a good value loyalty program quickly

• luckyjim says:

  24 May24 May 13:12

  I think we can all kiss goodbye to our £35/£50. Request a refund by all means but don’t get your hopes up.

  I was happy to take a gamble but I do think it was irresponsible of Raffles to promote this scheme knowing that it was always likely to fail. Indeed, promoting it to an audience who are inclined to exploit such schemes all but ensured its demise. I guess the lure of all those referral bonuses was just too great.

  • headformiles says:

    24 May24 May 13:25

    Well said but the original promises made by curve made it attractive to begin with, it was worth sharing.

  • Jeff says:

    24 May24 May 13:28

    I don’t think there was any “irresponsibility” here; that is very unfair. I am pleased that Raffles brought it to my attention and I hope the various comments won’t discourage him from doing so in the future. We are also only talking about £35 which won’t even buy you three decent pizzas.

    I hope you will get your refund. I am hanging on just in case and bringing forward quite a few transactions as I suspect are many people, so maybe the fees from those will give them some income to make the refunds.

    I have saved more than the £35 fee today alone with the 1% forex fee, buying various domestic train and flight tickets in China, as well as all the extra Avios over the last few weeks, so it was money well spent for me at least.

  • Ross Parker says:

    24 May24 May 13:34

    Unfair. Plus, we’re all adults. Take some responsibility. After all, *you* took the gamble, right?

  • Mike says:

    24 May24 May 13:35

    It was always made clear that this is a start up company, that this is a ‘beta’ program and with that comes some risks (really small in this case). I’m glad Raffles posted about it, it has been useful to me for the last month (I may even keep it – ATM withdrawals linked to the HSBC premier card are still a perk).

    • Yuff says:

      24 May24 May 13:47

      The card has easily paid for itself in the 3-4 weeks I’ve been using it and it’s still working ATM;)

      • Rob says:

        24 May24 May 15:00

        What you forget is that, when I first wrote about this, there was NO referral scheme. The first I knew about it was when readers started to post their own codes in the thread.

        Those of us on the Beta did not get a refer a friend code.

        When I knew codes were available I asked Curve to generate one and then added it into the article. However, the email version (75% of the readership) had gone by that point as had a large % of the ‘on the day’ readership.

        • Peter K says:

          24 May24 May 15:38

          That’s exactly what I thought had happened. There was no referral bonus for Rob at the time. I seem to recall a message him on the message boards kicking himself for not knowing about but also being “that’s life” about it well.

        • Luckyjim says:

          24 May24 May 15:43

          But when you published a referral link you did not declare your interest. You mentioned several times that readers would gain £10 from using the link but did not mention your own incentive. Your articles subsequently failed to highlight the risks of a business model which relies on a loophole and the possibility of losing the sign up fee.

          Also, when Curve sought to limit abuse of the cash withdrawal option you encouraged readers to get round this and carry on abusing by referring to the small print in the original Ts and Cs. You again failed to point out the risks eg the risk of readers having their Amex cards taken away for indulging in manufactured spending.

          Bottom line, you need to declare your interest so that readers can judge whether your articles are fair and balanced or have been influenced in any way.

        • harry says:

          24 May24 May 16:11

          By its nature, referral marketing is about encouraging/ rewarding customers to recommend products – so Raffles’ interest was self-evident.

          There was no ‘loophole’ and Curve had its own terms & conditions.

          Nobody has lost the sign-up fee.

          Raffles referred many times to the likelihood of Curve users seeing their cards blocked if they abused the cash withdrawals – and indeed mentioned £200 per month as a sensible guideline, which Curve themselves subsequently settled on.

  • Ossie says:

    24 May24 May 13:49

    Irresponsible? Really? That’s exactly why I read HFP – so that I’m alerted to things I would otherwise miss. Grossly unfair criticism in my view. Keep up the good work HFP.

  • Bryan says:

    24 May24 May 14:03

    Woah I think that is a bit harsh. This site brought it up as a bit of news that may be interesting to the community who read the site. You decided to go ahead with it.

    Me personally I will keep the curve, yes the amex thing is a major blow but it is still a handy card to have and if i lose out on £35 then I lose out on £35

  • KeithS says:

    24 May24 May 14:07

    Irresponsible? Wow!
    Not sure this is the equivalent of the South Sea Bubble. We are only talking of £35/£75 here and if any of us have not recouped that in other ways by using HfP then we must be doing something wrong.
    There will always be the odd glitch when looking for these things.
    If you are not in overall ‘profit’ from the various HfP ‘recommendations’ then I am sure Raffles will refund your HfP membership fees.
    Personally I found the email from Curve disappointing, especially as I went for the £75 version, applied immediately, but only received it last week and haven’t even activated it yet. However, in the grand scheme of things it is of little consequence balanced against all the other ‘wins’.
    I will probably keep it for the 1% overseas spend as I have a hotel to pay for at end June – and put it down to experience.

    • Mycity says:

      24 May24 May 14:17

      Wow that’s harsh on Rafles. As above we’ve all benifeted from Rob in the past, as for the referal bonus, let’s remember Rob didn’t at first post one, it was others who put up their own codes, Rob only put his up after a few of us objected and suggested it should be Rob that benifited

  • DM says:

    24 May24 May 14:15

    A) I’m sure Raffles didn’t ‘know it was going to fail’
    B) Informing you of something isn’t the same as promoting it
    C) We as a group probably do exploit these things a bit too much, but on the flip-side we adopted this quite quickly and likely many of us have then told other people about Curve. Most startups would gladly pay for this sort of scenario.

  • harry says:

    24 May24 May 14:54

    just scare-mongering – reports already out there that refunds are being processed promptly

  • Chris says:

    24 May24 May 15:52

    Thats a bit harsh.
    We´re all adults on here …..we make our own decisions.

  • the_real_a says:

    24 May24 May 16:52

    What utter rubbish. Who knew it was likely to fail? Raffles is in no way responsible for any of us, and I’m grateful it was brought to our attention. If the loss of £35 will ruin your day, you need to go away and find a different hobby.

    I have made the fee back several times over and would have done more if it wasn’t for the small monthly cap on spending.

    In the space of a year this blog appears to be attracting more and more idiots who are unable to asses risk, expect hand held protection at every stage and blame others when it all goes wrong.

  • DV says:

    24 May24 May 18:08

    What a stupid comment.

  • Tom H says:

    24 May24 May 19:01

    Take some responsibility, that is the most rediculous thing I have heard in a long time. I really don’t understand how you can criticise Rob for this.

    It really didn’t take a genius to work out that the buisness model had some holes in it. If you are big enough to read the article and act, you should be grown up enough to chalk it up to experience when it doesn’t go how you would like it.

  • JamesR says:

    24 May24 May 19:52

    The guy is running a business, We’ve all got to eat mate.

    We all took a gamble on £35.
    Who the hell cares. You read the speculation of it failing just like we all did.. but we all took the risk. Ive probably spent more than £35 in lottery tickets since I signed up for curve

    • Rob says:

      24 May24 May 20:09

      I think you misread the email James, because the version I got offered you a refund 🙂

• Christian says:

  24 May24 May 13:13

  It’s a shame for them. Us head-for-point’ers have a habit of piling in and completely overwhelming even the biggest and most robust systems when we all jump in at once. I’m thinking of the Amazon Gift Card offer that we managed to siphon off within a day. A small startup has pretty much no chance against us.

  Yes, Curve was annoying sometimes (getting my card long after the person I recommended and a double charge that’s taking forever to resolve) , but it had promise. It was a good idea even if showing all the signs of being executed by a team who learned as they went along.

  For me, I’m going to stick with it. If it goes, it goes and it’s hardly a lot of money to lose. But if they get it back together it is still the good idea that attracted us all to it in the first place. I expect teething problems, they are small and new after all. I’m going to give them a chance.

• Scott says:

  24 May24 May 13:14

  I have contemplating what to do since the email came out this morning. I have not had any issues using the card and was please with how it worked and the service they have provided. However, the Amex functionality was the ‘killer app’ for the Curve card, for me this meant being able to use the card where Amex isn’t accepted. Withdrawing cash wasn’t such a big concern, I think the last few years of focussing on spending on cards has meant I have conditioned myself not to use cash.

  Having thought about it I have decided to close my account and take the refund. On balance I would rather have the £35 back in my account than take the risk that the company doesn’t survive. Given the number of people that are saying they are cancelling, it makes me wonder if they will make it through the next few weeks, that will depend on how deep the pockets of those backing the venture have and how much confidence they have. If they do survive and can get Amex back on board then I will be happy to sign up again but for now I’m out.

• ahop says:

  24 May24 May 13:15

  So which is it?

  “We also have a new 3 month reward programme: reward-collecting begins on 1st July and ends 31st August”

  OR

  1. Additional promotions
  1.1. You will automatically be entered into a loyalty promotion whereby if you spend
  £1000 on your Curve card between 25th May 2016 and 31st August 2016

  • Mr Dee says:

    24 May24 May 18:16

    Also when will get the credit being the most important question?

• Colin JE says:

  24 May24 May 13:28

  I think I know the answer to this but just in case I’m mistaken, does this mean that the double pack Visa/Amex cards like Virgin MBNA also can’t be used through Curve? The argument that Amex want to give a seamless experience might not be quite true, as customer service goes through the card provider like MBNA, not Amex. I presume that Amex are removing their retailer facility to Curve, so Curve can’t charge ANY Amex card regardless of who the card issuer is?
  Like others, being able to charge my Amex card transactions to a retailer who only took Visa (such as HMRC!) was the only reason for getting Curve. If I can’t even use my Virgin Amex black card (2 miles per £1) then I mightas well cancel. And sadly I haven’t even received my Curve card yet, so I can’t even make hay before 31st May.

  • harry says:

    24 May24 May 14:57

    Good point – there’s no indication that cards giving (say) 1 Avios per £1 on Visa or M/C won’t still work

    we await reports

    • Rob says:

      24 May24 May 15:02

      Should be OK because the Visa bit is processed by Visa and the Amex bit by Amex.

  • Colin JE says:

    24 May24 May 18:32

    Card order cancelled. No payment has been taken apparently. Sounds like I got out just in time.

• Aeronaut says:

  24 May24 May 13:41

  I have to say Curve looked like an inevitable calamity from the very beginning.

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