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American Express suspends its relationship with Curve Card, just 36 hours after launch

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Here’s something I didn’t see coming.  After launching with much fanfare on Monday, American Express suspended its relationship with Curve Card on Tuesday night.

This came just 36 hours after Amex functionality was launched to the public.  Amex cards had, however, been activated for a test group of Curve Card users for a few months before this.

(EDIT:  Curve has now published a lengthy blog post explaining how the split with American Express occurred.  I copied it into a separate article here.)

If you look on the Curve website, none of the cards are showing the option to link to American Express.  This means that the company is effectively back to the position it was in before Monday.

American Express sent me a statement last night which said:

“American Express participated in a limited Curve beta test where we enabled a small number of Card Members to load funds onto an e-wallet using their Amex Card in the Curve app. Following this beta test we informed Curve that we would not participate in the further roll out of the Curve e-wallet.”

I spoke with Curve’s CEO early this morning and, whilst for legal reasons I don’t want to repeat what he said, he confirmed the position with American Express.

Curve has sent the following to users:

“We are extremely sorry that the top-up functionality for your Amex wallet is currently disabled.

Like thousands of other UK merchants, Curve has a valid merchant agreement to accept Amex payments into its e-wallet. However, on Tuesday evening, Amex decided to terminate this agreement and block all Amex transactions to Curve with immediate effect.

Amex has given no good or fair reason for their decision and we feel it is entirely disproportionate and discriminatory to Curve and all our (joint) customers. UK payment regulations clearly state that Curve should be allowed to access the Amex payment network on a level-playing field with every other fee-paying and legitimate merchant.

Rest assured that you can still spend the funds that you have already topped up to your existing Amex Wallets. If you have contacted us for support, we apologise for the delay in response and will endeavour to do so as soon as possible. We will update you as soon as we have any further information.

With our customers interests in mind, and our mission to deliver to you a truly innovative product, Curve intends to fight Amex’s decision with its full might. We believe financial freedom is the future and we are prepared to fight for yours.”

If there is any more news during the day I will drop it into this article.

TechCrunch has decent take on the subject here if you want to read more.  It is worth noting that the Amex statement given to TechCrunch – 18 hours after my statement – is a bit different:

“We participated in a limited Curve beta test in which we explored enabling Card Members to load funds onto an e-wallet using their Amex Card in the Curve app. A very small number of Amex Card Members participated in the test. Based on the results, we communicated to Curve that we would not participate in the further roll out of Curve because of concerns related to the overall American Express Card Member experience. Subsequently we terminated our contract with them.”

Curve will pay you £10 for trying it out if you use our link.

PS.  In a separate (or perhaps not entirely separate) note, payment company Billhop – we covered Billhop here – sent the following email to users yesterday:

“Due to guidelines from American Express you will no longer be able to make payments to private accounts with an American Express card regardless if the purpose of the payment is related to a business transaction. This change will come into effect on the 7th of February 2019.

You will still be able to use a MasterCard and/or VISA card for transactions to private accounts relating to business transactions including, but not limited to, payroll, housekeeping, rent, nanny services, etc.

Please note that peer-to-peer remittance is still not allowed regardless of card.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

Note that this only covers payments to sole traders.  You can continue to use Amex via Billhop to pay a company, local authority, HMRC etc.

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Comments (791)

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

  • Alan says:
    30 Jan30 January 05:44

    Shocking doesn’t quite cover it! I really don’t get what’s happened – was it crossed wires somewhere? Amex seem to be saying they only participated in beta and didn’t progress to full launch, Curve are saying Amex reneged on their agreement – which is correct! I can’t believe that they’d launch all these products without confirming in advance Amex were happy with how the trial had gone.

    From an Amex perspective they’re losing more in-depth data re spend, but they’re also then getting a lot of extra spend that wouldn’t otherwise go to them, for places that wouldn’t take Amex. Seemed a reasonable trade-off to me, and it’s not like anything changed with the setup post-beta so I don’t see why it wasn’t all straightened out during the testing period?

    • Kiran says:
      30 Jan30 January 05:58

      I wonder if AmEx would say they are trying to sign up these final merchants that don’t take AmEx cards and see a large Curve roll-out as an issue with that. Very strange that this fall-out has happened in public.

    • John says:
      30 Jan30 January 06:05

      As we don’t actually know the agreement between them I don’t think we are in a position to say if anyone was in the “wrong”. Curve was charging us 0.65% but do we know whether Amex was charging Curve the same, or higher, or lower? As I posted above, one possibility is that Amex could be considering its own Curve-like product

      • Shoestring says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:41

        That’s confidential, of course.

        But assuming Curve was also paying Amex a blended fee of 0.65%.

        Also assume the following: Amex pays when MR points get redeemed, the cost of this to Amex will vary according to points program but HfP often reckons that they pay 1p for Avios points.

        Amex initially thought that 0.65% would be OK because ‘blended’ covers higher & lower fees – and Amex wouldn’t lose overall because the ‘blend; of Curve’s fee would work out OK.

        Then yesterday/ 28th they quickly worked out that the type of consumer sticking money in the Amex wallet was actually going to cost them multiples of -0.35p @points redemption time…ie the ‘blend’ assumption wasn’t going to work out according to plan.

        1p minus 0.65p = misery (0.35p) – no need to take that on the chin so pull it.

        • John says:
          30 Jan30 January 08:08

          Yes, agree, but I think Amex would have been foolish if they expected Curve users to spend their MR on gift cards and statement credit

  • Optimus Prime says:
    30 Jan30 January 05:45

    Guess quite a few people did top up their wallets with £10k to trigger those BAPP 241 vouchers…

  • Dan says:
    30 Jan30 January 05:52

    Beware – amex pulled out of curve last night – currently amex doesn’t work with curve – I just paid £150 for a card yesterday , hope I get my money back

  • Roger says:
    30 Jan30 January 05:58

    Back to my VS Black Card for non-Amex spend!

  • Andrew says:
    30 Jan30 January 05:59

    Curve has always been more trouble than it’s worth! I don’t know why it gets so much airtime.

    • Ted says:
      30 Jan30 January 06:01

      Rob’s conflict of interest..

      • Rob says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:06

        Curve was 3% of our revenue last year, it is a rounding error.

        I think the 500+ comments on the Monday articles show the level of interest out there. Monday was our biggest readership day ever, in 7 years.

        • John doe says:
          30 Jan30 January 06:32

          If Amex told them they were NOT going to participate any further and curve continued to market and sell a financial product on the basis of known faulty information….that sounds like something regulators take a very dim view of,

        • Johnny rotten says:
          30 Jan30 January 06:48

          That’s quite a rounding error, you sure you use to work in “the city” ? !

          Anyhow given that hfp pretty much acted as launch day online marketing support, responding rapidly to dozens of questions in the comments of the two articles that were left pinned at the top for over 24hrs, and has direct access to Curves CEO at 6am in the morning of a major screw-up, it seems you determined this ‘rounding error’ was something that was worth working on.

          • Rob says:
            30 Jan30 January 07:08

            You got it the wrong way round. Curve stuff is massively popular with readers hence the record page views on Monday and hence the coverage.

        • John says:
          30 Jan30 January 07:23

          3% plus the increase in click throughs on other items, and google adverts etc.

          • Rob says:
            30 Jan30 January 07:48

            Nice try, except the last two points only apply if I write about things people genuinely want to read about.

        • Obvious says:
          30 Jan30 January 15:42

          …because it was a fools paradise. If something appears too good to be true, it usually is.

      • RichS says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:10

        It does seem to get far more coverage on here than it deserves.

        • Ian C says:
          30 Jan30 January 06:17

          Curve is a good product, especially if you travel or have large HMRC bills.

          They were trying to innovate and generate income but clearly Amex has f’d them in the a on launch day.

          Could this be a global decision going over the heads of the UK Amex team?

      • Alan says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:12

        LOL given how little Rob has said it accounts for overall on site revenue I’m not sure that’d be the case! It is an interesting product that clearly is of interest to lots of readers judging by the number of comments on the article so seems fair to cover – more interesting than things like Emirates football tickets 😉

      • Chris says:
        30 Jan30 January 10:34

        Absolute crap. HFP is one of the best blogs on the internet and I have gained hundreds of thousands of miles from the information on the site. I always find the articles well written, factual and unbiased.

        If Rob hadn’t run the posts on the launch, it would have attracted the same attention on FT but just in a less organised way. I too am disappointed that Curve has failed for the 2nd time. The miles & points community were all very keen for this to work but I can’t see it coming back from this.

        Those that have loaded their accounts up with £10k and now whining about it need their heads read. These were probably the same people planning on paying their Amex bills with curve to create manufactured spending.

    • John says:
      30 Jan30 January 06:11

      Curve is just the latest in the long list of “more trouble than they’re worth” schemes that motivate a proportion of HFPers.

      Reselling lego and printer inks on ebay, flying a 3-stop itinerary that takes twice as long as a direct flight so you can go to the CX lounge on short-haul, scratching hundreds of gift cards, buying a dumpster’s worth of frozen food, staying up to 1am and paying £1000 of taxes and fees so you don’t have to stay up to 1am on your flight 355 days later….

      • Ian C says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:13

        Hahaha. Brilliant. Depressing that I’ve done some of those.

      • Alan says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:14

        £2k saving on flights leaving ex-OSL and £400 saving on Amazon top-ups seemed perfectly worthwhile to me for a small amount of time expended, personally I’m glad all these sort of options are covered – some are too much hassle for me to bother, others I’m happy to make use of.

      • MT says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:20

        Surely however that is the beauty of HfP it gives us all this information and then we can choose what to do with it and which schemes are ‘more trouble than they are worth’ for ourselves. No one is forcing anyone to adopt these ideas or spend their time on this site reading them. T

        To some however they feel the time spent on these schemes is worth it and I for one have never resold Lego but equally have I fly long haul return 5-10 times a year and havent ‘bought’ a ticket in the last 3 years and every one of those flightsa is in First Class so I for one very much appreciate all the information and then can decide myself what to do with it!

        • John says:
          30 Jan30 January 06:25

          Oh I fully agree, it’s fun to read about people’s exploits even if you wouldn’t do them yourself and everyone can choose what they want to do, it would be boring otherwise

      • Thywillbedone says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:35

        Harsh, but true!

      • Call them out says:
        30 Jan30 January 15:46

        + 1000000000000000 !!!! Brilliant !!!!

  • Patrick says:
    30 Jan30 January 06:11

    curve cowboys strike again

  • Ian C says:
    30 Jan30 January 06:11

    A Fyre Festival of a card launch

    • Alex W says:
      30 Jan30 January 06:31

      Already been done, it was called Magnesis!

      • John says:
        30 Jan30 January 06:38

        *Magnises

        That was not even recharging but simply cloning your card to a metal one – so not useful for anything HFPers might want

        • Alex W says:
          30 Jan30 January 08:12

          Imdeed, the card was about as useful as Fyre Festival was for festival goers

  • Neil Donoghue says:
    30 Jan30 January 06:13

    Who would have thought after all that hype, Amex would pull out! This is turning in to the Fyre festival 2.0. Clearly the system was massively abused and it only took 36 hours. Glad I didn’t upgrade my card or top up my e-wallet and I hope everyone gets their money back.

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