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Curve Card is now working with American Express for beta testers – this is how it works

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(EDIT:  Curve has changed a lot since this article was published.  Please do not rely on the information here.  Instead, please click here to read our detailed 2020 Curve review, which includes a link for a free £10 credit when you sign up.)

Curve Card is an all-in-one payment wallet and aggregator that is popular amongst Head for Points readers.  I describe Curve in detail here, but in summary:

Curve Card (a debit Mastercard) is free – in fact Curve will pay you £10 for trying it out if you use our link

You can link any other Visa or Mastercard to Curve – so the smart thing to do is to link a miles or points earning card

You can pay DEBIT card bills with Curve which are recharged to your linked Visa or Mastercard.  Importantly, this recharge goes through as a purchase and so earns miles and points on the underlying card.

You can withdraw £200 of cash per month at an ATM for free and it will be recharged to your underlying Visa or Mastercard as a purchase, earning miles and points (unless you have a credit card from Tesco Bank, which treats Curve ATM transactions as cash)

You pay ZERO FX fees when using your Curve Card for overseas spending (Mon-Fri, a 0.5% loading applies at weekends).  This effectively turns ANY Visa or Mastercard into a ‘no FX fees’ credit card.  There is a £500 per month ‘no FX fees’ limit on the free Curve Blue card and a £15,000 annual limit on the £50 Curve Black card.

As you can see, there is lots of interesting stuff here that can both save you money on FX fees and earn you miles and points too.

Curve is about to allow American Express cards to be linked to the card.  This will have a number of advantages:

You can pay with American Express anywhere, even at shops which don’t allow American Express, by using your Curve Mastercard linked to your Amex

You can pay with American Express at places which only accept debit cards, by using your Curve Mastercard linked to your Amex

You can spend abroad on American Express without incurring FX fees, by using your Curve Mastercard linked to your Amex (up to £500 per month on the free Curve version)

Amex payments are currently operating via a Beta programme with a small number of Curve users.

In summary:

Amex functionality is a little different.  You will have an e-wallet enabled in your Curve app.  You need to pre-load this with funds from your linked American Express card.  The T&Cs say that eventually the top-up will be automated, so that you don’t need to manually load funds – as soon as you make a £100 Curve purchase, for example, Curve will automatically top-up your e-wallet and authorise the transaction.  

Amex use is not free.  Holders of the free Blue Curve card will pay 0.65% on all American Express transactions.  Holders of the £50 Black Curve will get £1,000 of American Express payments for free each month, with a fee of 0.65% thereafter.

All UK personal American Express cards are accepted as far as I can tell.  This includes charge (Platinum), BA, SPG etc.  This is a surprise as I understood that only the co-brand cards – which have had their fees capped under EU legislation – were going to participate.

Is it worth paying 0.65% for American Express acceptance?

Oddly, there is not a straight answer here.

If you have Curve Black then, whilst you are spending your £1,000 of free Amex allowance per month, it is clearly a good deal.  Beyond that, or for all Curve Blue customers, it is a bit different.

On the face of it, you might say:

“I am paying 0.65p per £1 recharged to my free BA Amex to earn 1 Avios, and 0.65p is a bargain”, or

“I am paying 0.65p per £1 recharged to my BA Premium Plus Amex to earn 1.5 Avios, and 0.43p per Avios is a great bargain”, or

“I am paying 0.65p per £1 recharged to my SPG Amex to earn 3 Starwood / Marriott points, and 0.22p per Starwood / Marriott points is a great bargain”

However ….

There is also an opportunity cost because you could have used a Visa or Mastercard for free.  You could for example:

Link a Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard to Curve, earn 1.5 Virgin miles per £1 and pay no transaction fee, or

Link a BA Premium Plus American Express to Curve, earn 1.5 Avios per £1 and pay 0.65% transaction fee

Your American Express acceptance cost is therefore 0.65% PLUS whatever rewards you would have got for free linking your highest earning Visa or Mastercard instead.

There are very few ‘super generous’ Visa or Mastercard products available however, so unless you have one of the new Virgin Atlantic cards or the IHG Rewards Club Premium Mastercard then paying for Amex acceptance via Curve is likely to be your best bet.

Of course, if ‘manufacturing’ American Express spend via Curve Card makes it easier to hit the 2-4-1 voucher on your British Airways American Express card, or hit the sign-up bonus on a new Amex, or hit the 10000 points annual bonus for spending £15000 on American Express Preferred Rewards Gold, then the maths changes again. Using Amex via Curve is likely to be an excellent way of ensuring that you hit these targets.

Most Head for Points readers WILL get a lot of benefit from linking their American Express card to Curve.

When can I get it?

I don’t know.  The Beta programme launched last week for those who were invited.  The rest of us will have to wait a while.

It is also worth noting that Curve is planning to replace the existing Black card with two new products, each of which will carry a monthly fee but will come with a far wider range of benefits than you receive now.  I am not sure how existing Black cardholders will be migrated.

There is certainly no harm in getting yourself the free Curve Blue card now.  You can enjoy all of the benefits I outlined at the top of the page whilst waiting for Amex acceptance to roll out. Curve will pay you £10 for trying it out if you use our link.

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Category

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Comments (271)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • TescoTease says:
    26 Nov26 November 08:30

    Anyone got any experience of closing their curve account. I’ve hit my £50k and they won’t change the limit so I have no use for it. I’d rather close the account than sit with it open for another 11 months.

    Thanks in advance

    • the_real_a says:
      26 Nov26 November 08:46

      You might find “losing” your card useful.

    • Ian says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:47

      You have to email them

      • iamfugly says:
        27 Nov27 November 12:00

        On emailing, you should also specifically ask them to ensure they delete your mobile number from you closed account. I recently tried closing and reapplying but was unable to because of this reason. If your account is closed properly you should have no issue with reapplying. The only pain is waiting a month or two to build up the necessary spend history to increase your limit. Also note, that it is better to be using the card regularly on everyday spending rather than on large one offs which I have been doing only to be told my spend history is not sufficient.

    • K says:
      26 Nov26 November 10:31

      I’m confused about the £50k limit. Does it reset on 1st of January, or once reached you have to wait 365 days or uses the last 365 days spend. So if 11 months ago I spent £10k (but reaches my 50k limit in the meantime) then 12 months later I can spend £10k again?

      • Jon says:
        26 Nov26 November 10:43

        Mine doesn’t seem to be resetting / reducing with the 365 rolling clock but when I check back I seem to have spent 65k over the past 12 months. I think this was because I switched from the business to the personal card and it reset to zero but doesn’t reduce on a rolling basis.

        I’m waiting to see what these new cards are with higher limits.

      • lawyerboy says:
        26 Nov26 November 11:01

        Also how do you get the £50k limit? I’m stuck at £10k.

      • Alan says:
        26 Nov26 November 21:50

        Yes, that’s how it’s meant to work.

  • Nigel the pensioner says:
    26 Nov26 November 08:37

    I thought i had got to the point of understanding curve and was patiently waiting for amex (ba and centurian) to be included. I didnt see the fee coming and im so glad I have not wasted £50 by getting curve in advance! I also wonder if amex will charge customers a cash advance fee on top of curve’s charges as amex are cash funding your amex card (charge or credit) to allow curve to pay ……
    Now, curve are introducing a monthly fee!!
    Its clealy now the downward slope of the curve in my opinion. It would have been useful for buying ex eu ba tickets on the ba card, but not now. Not for fees fees and more fees!

    • Sandgrounder says:
      26 Nov26 November 11:14

      You pay £2.2k for a Centurion every year but you are worried about wasting £50? You might need a thorough financial review Nigel! 🙂

  • Pam says:
    26 Nov26 November 08:46

    Curve will only send a card to EEA countries so Channel Islands and Isle of Man residents are not accepted.

    • Joe says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:42

      At this rate of progress they probably won’t roll Amex compatibility out before we leave the EEA!

  • Mark2 says:
    26 Nov26 November 08:56

    Neither my wife nor I received notice that they had/had not been selected, perhaps because she has spent all her limit and I have only got £1800 left on mine.
    I see from the (badly written and not checked) T&C that Amex spend is within normal limits so of limited use unless this changes.

  • nimesh says:
    26 Nov26 November 09:04

    Got the invite but cannot seem to download the app to work, keeps failing on the update as ”Update failed’ , so the Beta for Andriod is not working for me, anyone on Samsung phones got the Beta app working?

    • dcochrane says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:09

      @nimesh did you delete the old Curve app before installing the Beta Amex version?

      • nimesh says:
        26 Nov26 November 10:15

        Aaarh, that did the trick, thanks all working now, lets see how it likes AMEX

    • PJ says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:29

      I understand there are known bugs in the Android Beta app

      • RussellH says:
        26 Nov26 November 10:22

        Surely that is what ‘beta’ implies – fewer bugs than alpha, but not (yet) fit for general release. Charging beta testers seems inappropriate though, particulalrly when what is being tested involves personal financial data!
        Charging should be restricted to the first stable release.

    • Michal says:
      26 Nov26 November 12:07

      Feel sorry for your bugs. I am on iOS and everything works fine. Maybe try to delete app update your android to latest version and follow installation instructions again.

    • Alan says:
      26 Nov26 November 13:41

      Did you uninstall the previous version first?

      • Michal says:
        26 Nov26 November 16:35

        No. I just followed instructions from curve and original app was automatically replaced.

        • Alan says:
          26 Nov26 November 22:27

          @michal – for Android at least the instructions said to uninstall the existing app first, I’m don’t think nimesh did that…

  • Andrew L says:
    26 Nov26 November 09:22

    Instrad of offering new benefits, Curve would be strongly advised to sort out their Customer Service Department first, which has become the worst of any financial institution and has been getting steadily incompetent throughout 2018!

    • PJ says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:46

      They are a fintech startup – they need to scale the product in order to grow and survive whilst they have runway – if they slow down, the burn rate will kill them. Sad fact that CS is not scaling at the same speed. A conversation I had with some of their people hints they are struggling to onboard new CS reps.

      • Lady London says:
        26 Nov26 November 14:09

        Funny, that :-). would YOU want to be a CS rep for Curve, right now?

        And I agree with RussellH’s comments above about they should not be charging for access to the beta version.

      • Andrew L says:
        26 Nov26 November 16:11

        Isn’t Starling a fintech startup? There Customer Service is fantastic. Fintech or not, if your Customer Service isn’t up to scratch then the business stands no chance of succeeding.

        • Alan says:
          26 Nov26 November 22:18

          Interesting – I was pretty unimpressed with them when I was abroad and had to contact them re a duplicate transaction. After that I moved spend across to Monzo.

    • Jay says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:54

      Andrew…. totally agree ……..Curve CS is beyond incompetent. Their ticket system is a total waste of time. I asked a simple question 2 weeks ago and heard nothing back. I care not that they are a fintech and at the rate they are hacking off customers with their poor product offering, non existent CS then they will kill themselves off without a doubt. Curve was a nice idea, but is in no way a financial institution I want to deal with now. As with all these businesses, the proof of how good they are is how they handle things when they go wrong….. answer they don’t and they bury their head in the sand. Shame on you Curve!

  • R A says:
    26 Nov26 November 09:45

    Reading these comments at least gives me some comfort I am not the only unhappy with Curve.

    I paid for the Black card following the suggestion from Rob that there were new benefits just around the corner solely for Black card customers . . . . . . let’s hope that wasn’t a waste of money.

    I also have a Tesco Mastercard and have been hit with the fee for using the ATM.

    There are benefits such as the 1% cash-back in the first 3-months and paying HRMC with a points credit card but it’s not been the slam dunk choice it was reviewed as being.

    • R A says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:57

      Forgot to add . . . . I also had a terrible experience with their customer services. Received an essay back justifying why they cannot do anything about the Tesco Card fee. I know this was always a possibility but some understanding from their side would have at least softened the blow!

      • Petman says:
        26 Nov26 November 13:25

        You people have been told many times that you abuse cash withdrawl limits at your own risk. Soooo many warnings! Tut tut!

  • Ian says:
    26 Nov26 November 09:49

    Curve is now too much hassle for me. The benefits aren’t obvious like they were when it first launched (fees, 0.65% on Amex transactions, having to top up etc.)

    And I can guarantee there will be times where I’m stood in a shop and the process isn’t working like it should.

    Good idea, but too convoluted now to be worth bothering with. Shame.

    • Ian says:
      26 Nov26 November 09:57

      Also, in my experience, using any service with an intermediary is messy. In terms of protections, transaction queries, etc. Worth it if the benefits outweigh the hassle, but as the benefits are so negligible now, there’s no point.

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