Is the Curve card ready for prime time? (hint: not yet)

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Update: The Curve card has been discontinued in the United States. Any purchases attempted after July 8, 2024 will be declined.


Curve is intended to be the one card to rule them all.  No matter how many credit cards you have, the concept is that you can carry only the Curve card, and behind the scenes it will pass along each charge to whatever credit card you prefer.  You can even set up rules so that restaurant charges automatically go to one card, grocery charges to another, travel charges to another, etc.  That way, you can automatically maximize rewards without thinking about it.  Curve has been around in the U.K. for years, but a U.S. version is just now being beta tested.

a close-up of a credit card and a barricade

As I write this, the U.S. version of Curve is available only via a waitlist, but they’ve recently started sending email invites to many on the list.  As a result, I expect that many readers are wondering if they should sign up.  My quick answer: not yet.  Sign up now only if you’re willing to deal with significant bugs while Curve works to straighten out its product (pun intended).  Personally, I’ve been very happy with the card, but others on the Frequent Miler team have encountered enough serious issues to make me unable to recommend the card at this time.

Curve Overview

When you sign up for Curve, you immediately get a virtual Curve account number which can be used until you receive and activate the physical card that will be mailed to you.  Using the Curve app on your iPhone or Android phone, you can then add your credit cards to your Curve Wallet and specify which card should be the default for all purchases.  You can also immediately add Curve to your mobile wallet (e.g. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay) in order to start using Curve for in-person purchases.  When you make a purchase, the Curve app immediately pops up a notice on your phone showing the amount spent and the card that the purchase was charged to.

Here is a summary of Curve’s features:

  • Annual Fee: None
  • Foreign Transaction Fee: None (no fee even when applying purchases to cards that usually would have foreign transaction fees!)
  • Welcome Bonus: Earn 1% back on all purchases for the first 6 months. This is in addition to rewards earned with your underlying credit cards.
  • Temporary virtual card:  When you first sign up for Curve, you get a virtual card number right away.  Once you activate the physical card, though, the virtual card stops working.
  • Curve Cash: The cash back earned from the welcome bonus described above gets deposited into your Curve Cash account.  By default, all purchases draw from Curve Cash whenever your cash balance can cover a charge.  Fortunately you can turn off this feature so as to avoid losing out on credit card rewards.  Unfortunately, you can’t cash out your Curve Cash any other way than by spending it, and so it is necessary to forgo credit card rewards in order to use your Curve Cash.  My plan is to wait until the welcome bonus is over before using the Curve Cash at all.  Then I’ll try to use it only on purchases where I wouldn’t earn a category bonus with one of my credit cards.
  • Curve Credit: Curve describes this as “Anti-Embarrassment Protection.” The idea is that if your underlying credit card declines a purchase, the purchase will then go to your Curve Credit instead.  There are a few problems with this: 1) You won’t earn rewards on charges to Curve Credit; 2) Curve Credit is (for me at least) limited to $500 so there’s no way around embarrassment for larger purchases; 3) Go Back in Time doesn’t work for Curve Credit transactions; 4) Curve doesn’t yet alert the cardholder when the Curve Credit statement is due to be paid; 5) It is tricky to figure out how to pay off your Curve Credit balance.
  • Supported credit cards:
    • Mastercard: Yes
    • Discover: Yes
    • Visa: Not yet, but expected someday
    • Amex: Nope, and we don’t expect that to change
  • Default Card: You must have one card in your Curve Wallet selected as your default card.  This is the card that most purchases go to.  The only reason a purchase should go to a different card is if you have Smart Rules set up (see below); or if your default card denies a transaction; or if you use the Go Back in Time feature (see below) to change which card the transaction went to.
  • Smart Rules: Setup rules to tell Curve which credit card to use for different types of purchases.
    • Category Rules: Groceries, Food & Drink, Shopping, Travel (flights, hotels), Transport (train, taxi, rideshares), Entertainment (festivals, events), Bills (electricity bills, water bills), Cash (cash withdrawals), Health (health & beauty), Business Services (Computer, Consulting, Car Rental), General
    • Amount Rules:
      • Use this card if total amount is greater than or equal to ____
      • Use this card if total amount is less than or equal to ____
  • Go Back in Time: Curve lets you select almost any purchase within the past 30 days and change which credit card is charged.  One exception is that they don’t seem to allow this feature for purchases that went to Curve Credit.  I also suspect that they don’t allow going back in time on purchases that go to Curve Cash.
  • 5/24 Impact?  My Curve card hasn’t appeared on my credit report and so it hasn’t had any adverse impact on my 5/24 situation.  While that was true for me, I was also an extremely early adopter.  I don’t know if this will hold as Curve rolls out more broadly.  We’ll report details once we know the answer to this for certain.

My positive experiences

While I’ve encountered a couple of minor issues with Curve, it has mostly been great!  In a previous post I listed the cards that I intended to set up in Curve.  Since then I set up my Curve wallet almost exactly as I described in that post:

  • Chase Freedom Flex (5x rotating categories; 3x drugstore): I have three Freedom Visa cards that I product changed to Freedom Flex Mastercards.  This gives me 3x at drugstores & restaurants; and 5x in quarterly rotating categories.  It’s for the latter that I wanted to use Curve. My thought was that I could change the Smart Rules each quarter to use a Freedom Flex card whenever it would earn 5x.  In reality, the Smart Rules haven’t been smart enough to enable the current 5x categories (Amazon.com and select streaming services).  That said, it’s easy enough to have Curve charge initially to my default card and then I can Go Back in Time to switch the charge to a Freedom Flex card.  I did set up the Health Smart Rule to point to a Freedom Flex card with the thought that it would charge drugstore purchases to that card and I’d earn 3x. I don’t yet have proof that this works for drugstore purchases, but a purchase of eyeglasses got charged to the card (because it met the Health Smart Rule) and didn’t earn 3x.  Luckily it was easy to change that charge after the fact to go to my Double Cash where it earned 2x.
  • Discover It (5% rotating categories): This is the same story as above with Freedom Flex cards.  I want to use this card only for its 5% categories, but so far I haven’t been able to use Smart Rules to get that done.  This quarter, the Discover It offered 5% for Gas Stations and Target.  Neither are available as Smart Rules.  Next quarter Discover will offer 5% for Restaurants and PayPal.  I could set up a Smart Rule for Restaurants, but I already have Restaurants charging to my Citi Prestige card where I earn 5X points that are more valuable to me than Discover cash back.
  • Citi Prestige (5x dining): I set up the “Food & Drink” Smart Rule to point to this card.  That’s worked great!  In looking back at my point earnings, there have been a few times where I only earned 1x because Citi has a narrower interpretation of dining than Curve does.  And with Curve, I have the ability to Go Back in Time to change those 1x purchases to another card.
  • Citi Custom Cash (5x grocery, 5x gas): Curve has been great for this!  I have two Custom Cash cards thanks to product changing an old ThankYou Preferred card and an old AT&T card.  The Custom Cash card offers 5x in the category you spend the most each billing cycle, on up to $500 spend. I have Curve Smart Rules set up to send all grocery purchases to one of these cards.  Then, when I exceeded $500 towards grocery in a billing cycle, I switched the card that the Smart Rule pointed to (also, I moved purchases from one card to the other so that I didn’t exceed $500 in purchases in a billing cycle).  In one billing cycle I also had $450 spend in another qualified category besides grocery and so I moved that charge from my Double Cash to my otherwise unused Custom Cash card and I successfully earned 5x on that $450 charge.
  • Citi Rewards+ (5x+ small purchases): This card automatically rounds up rewards to the nearest 10 ThankYou points.  So, $2 purchases earn 10 points (5 points per dollar) and 10 cent purchases also earn 10 points (100 points per dollar).  It would be cool to set up Curve to use this card anytime a purchase is $2 or less but I haven’t bothered to do this yet.  I can’t imagine that I’ll have enough small purchases for this to move the needle.
  • Citi Double Cash (2x everywhere): The Citi Double Cash card earns 2x for all spend. This is a terrific catch-all card for occasions where there is no Mastercard or Discover card that offers 3x or more.  This is my default Curve card.

Here are my favorite aspects of the card now that I’ve used it for a while:

  • Maximize rewards: I’ve loved the fact that I can use the Curve card everywhere for all purchases and feel confident that I’m maximizing my rewards earnings.  Plus, for six months I’m earning extra cash back on top of my credit card rewards!
  • Go Back in Time:  Whenever I realize that I could do better by having a charge go to a different card, I have 30 days to make the switch.  I’ve tested this multiple times and each time the category type of the charge was preserved (for example, I moved a grocery charge from one card to another and the second card still recognized the purchase as a grocery purchase so I was able to earn my category bonus).  For the record, I’ve tested this in two ways: once I made the change while the purchase was still pending and another time I made the change after the purchase was fully posted.  In both cases Curve preserved the category coding (MCC code) of the purchase.
  • Smaller wallet: My physical wallet is much slimmer than before now that I use the Curve card for most purchases.  I still also carry my Wyndham Business Visa card to earn 8x at gas stations, my Chase Sapphire Reserve to earn 3x for travel (plus get excellent travel protections), and my debit card for ATM withdrawals.
  • No foreign transaction fees: This is awesome. I just spent a vacation in Europe and continued to use the Curve card everywhere.  Even though my Double Cash card would charge me a foreign transaction fee if I used it directly, I was not charged any fee when using it indirectly through Curve!  Plus the exchange rates appear to be good.  For example, for one 25 Euro charge, Curve charged me $26.57.  According to Google, the exchange rate that day was 1.06 and so best case would be to be charged $26.50 (1.06 x 25).  I paid only 7 cents more than that.
  • Cool looking card: Vendors and waiters often seem excited about the card.  One said “It has a cool notch cut out of it!”  Yep, that’s the “curve.”  OK, so this doesn’t really matter much to me, but it’s kind of nice.

Our negative experiences

On the Frequent Miler team, four of us (Me, Nick, Stephen, and Tim) have the Curve card.  Each of us have had negative experiences that, taken together, prove that Curve isn’t yet ready for prime time.  Here are the details:

Greg (Me)

I had the fewest problems overall.  If I had only my own experiences to go on, I’d probably recommend Curve to others.  Still, there have been a few issues:

  • Declined charges. One day, Curve declined all of my in-person purchases except for the final one which was charged to Curve Credit rather than to my preferred card.  That issue hadn’t happened before and hasn’t happened since… to me.  Note that I never received any indication from the underlying card issuer (Citibank in the cases of the declined charges) that anything was amiss so I’m pretty sure that it was Curve rather than the underlying issuer that was denying the charges.
  • Difficulty figuring out how to pay off my Curve Credit balance.  Luckily Stephen had already figured this out so he was able to help me.  Here’s how to do it: Add a debit card to your Curve wallet; then swipe to your Curve Credit and press the “>” symbol next to the words “Curve Credit”, then select your debit card as a payment method.
  • Accidentally picking the wrong default card.  The process of picking which card is your default card is to simply click on the card in the Curve app.  When swiping left and right to see where charges went, or when trying to change settings of a particular card, it is very easy to accidentally change the default card.

Nick

Nick doesn’t actually have a Curve card, but his wife does.  Nick wrote about his plans for the card here: Mastercards on my mind for Player 2’s Curve card (on Nick’s mind).

Now that his wife has used the card for a while, Nick was able to report on the issues:

  • Charges go to the wrong card: “Charges have randomly appeared on cards that aren’t the selected one.”
  • Charges go to Curve Credit: “A couple (of charges) went to Curve Credit, which I’d never have even thought to check if I didn’t happen to toggle through it while trying to figure it where charges went.”
  • No notification of Curve Credit charges due: “I’ve received no notification as to whether payment is due, how much, how to pay, etc.  I see that it says to pay by June 21st to avoid interest charges, but I don’t know if I’ve already incurred interest as I’d totally forgotten about the fact that anything got charged to it.
  • Declined charges: “We’ve been using it a bunch lately, but we’ve also run into random nonsensical declines (like a ~$100 Charge at Target that didn’t work via tap to pay or inserting the chip, but a ~$1K health insurance payment a couple hours later was no problem. My wife has actually had maybe 50/50 luck on declines vs approved charges, which has made it hard to get her to consistently use it.”

Stephen

Stephen has had many more issues:

  • Sign up problems: “It took more than a dozen emails to be able to open my account because it kept trying to get me to sign up for the waitlist even though I was one of the first 100 people and was trying to use the same email address to open the account.”
  • Charges go to Curve Credit: “Charges posted to my Curve Credit balance rather than the card I’d specified should be used in the app. It wouldn’t allow those transactions to be moved to any of my cards.”
  • No notification of Curve Credit charges due: “Curve doesn’t seem to notify you when your Curve Credit balance is due. I didn’t get an email or any app notifications, so I was grateful they don’t seem to report to credit bureaus (yet?).”
  • Difficulty figuring out how to pay off my Curve Credit balance: “It’s non-intuitive to pay your Curve Credit balance. There’s a ‘Pay’ button, but you can’t go any further because it doesn’t prompt you to add a payment method. To pay the balance, you have to add a debit card as a payment method in the app, then you can pay Curve Credit with that debit card.”
  • Curve Credit balance weirdness: “They didn’t seem to take the correct payment for my Curve Credit balance the other month. I’m not sure what the actual balance was, but it charged my PayPal Business Debit Mastercard $463.81 but then Curve refunded $0.26 later that same day. The list of transactions on my Curve Credit came to $450.01, so I’m not 100% sure where the extra ~$13 came from; perhaps that was interest charges because I hadn’t realized payment had been due, then I couldn’t work out how to pay it.  I’m now showing a balance of $1.99 owed on my Curve credit despite no new transactions being on there. Perhaps those are further interest charges, but there’s no entry on there for that amount and they don’t provide actual statements [Update: they do provide statements but they’re hard to find: In the app, click on the current balance under Curve Credit and then statements are on the next screen] It’s saying payment is owed by June 21 to avoid interest charges, but again – no notifications or emails were sent about this. I just happened to notice this charge because of this email I’m sending. I’d not charged anything to Curve, so I would’ve been unaware as to this issue.”
  • Gift card purchases not allowed: “They seem to be on the lookout for gift card spending, although perhaps that’s only for the first 100 people who are earning 10%. I got an email warning me about using Curve to buy gift cards from Fluz and Bitmo.”
  • App issues: “The app can be a bit janky. I’ve had a few days where it simply won’t open on my phone.”
  • Unintuitive Default Card: “It wasn’t intuitive (for me anyway) how to select which card should be charged. There was some kind of setting for Curve Credit as to which card to use as the backup or something like that (I forget exactly what I did), so I selected that but it charged my Curve Credit for the first transaction. You have to tap on the card itself that you want to be used for all transactions using the Curve card.”

Tim

And then there’s Tim. Tim is a unique case with respect to Curve and so it may be unfair to report his experience.  Unlike the rest of us, Tim didn’t clear the waiting list a few months ago.  Instead, when the rest of us cleared the waiting list, Tim simply tried signing up and it worked!  There was a brief period of time where they opened the gates officially to only a few people, but apparently they didn’t guard those gates very well.  So, Tim has a sort-of rogue account.  And it’s been super wacky.  Here’s some craziness that Tim has encountered:

  • Charges go to unsupported card: After trying and failing to add a few Visa credit cards (the failure was expected: Curve doesn’t support Visa credit cards yet but the app made it look like they were supported), some charges he made through Curve appeared on his Sapphire Reserve card!  And since the card doesn’t appear in his Curve App, he has no way to Go Back in Time to change where those charges go.
  • Charges made outside of Curve show in app: Tim reports that some charges that he has made directly on cards that are loaded to his Curve Wallet show up as if they were made through Curve.  Weirdness.
  • Massively delayed charges:  One charge that Tim made through Curve on March 25th just showed up on his underlying credit card on June 1.  Tim was sure it was a fraudulent charge until he found that old charge.

Still Beta

The email being sent out to people who clear the waiting list says (bolding mine) “We’ve officially beta launched in the US and are letting in a select number of people off the waitlist each week. It’s your turn! You’re invited to apply for the Curve credit card.”  And this is at the bottom of the email:

UNDER CONSTRUCTION DURING BETA

  • While we currently accept Visa debit cards, we are working on a solution to support Visa credit cards. Please refrain from adding any Visa credit cards for the moment.
  • If you are using an Android phone, the in-app button to ‘Add to Google Wallet’ will temporarily produce an error message. However, you will be able to load your card manually into Google Pay.
  • If the billing address for a linked card is different than your home address provided to Curve, then you will notice that you cannot select a new state for your new address. Don’t worry — we will figure out the state by your zip code.

Any Issues or Feedback?

Please contact us directly at support-us@curve.com. We will also be sending out surveys to capture your feedback to make Curve perfect before we launch to the general public

I’m glad that they clearly indicate that this card is still being beta tested, but I don’t feel great about how they’re handling the beta.  They have yet to send me a single survey to capture my feedback.  Also, unlike most other beta tests that I’ve participated in, I’ve never received any updates about bugs fixed, features tweaked, etc.

The Frequent Miler team’s negative experiences with Curve to-date show that Curve still has a way to go before the card is ready for prime time.  I hope that the Curve team has been working diligently to fix bugs and improve the user experience, but I have no way of knowing that that’s the case.

Wrap Up

I feel very lucky because I’ve had very few problems with Curve and have taken full advantage of the card’s extraordinary features.  I continue to use it daily for all of my spend.  If it wasn’t for all of the issues that the rest of the team has had, I would recommend Curve for anyone juggling a bunch of Mastercard and Discover cards.  But now, until I see evidence that they’ve addressed these problems, I simply can’t recommend the card.

Despite the fact that I can’t currently recommend Curve, I’m rooting for them.  The card’s features are awesome when they work correctly.  Sure there are more features I’d like added (Visa support, Amex support, Visa/MC gift card support, split charges across cards, …), but none of those features matter unless/until Curve becomes rock solid dependable.

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51 Comments
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Yuri

I’m using Curve for a few months now, and there were no issues.
Really great card, it helps you to determine categories automatically based on rules, and if it doesn’t work, you can “go back in time”. Also, no FTF on all cards, this makes many cards usable abroad. Too bad it only supports Mastercard for now.

ktop

Greg, did the Curve card ever end up showing your credit reports?

I’ve been using the EU version for a couple years, but due to recent changes to that version (new fees for using non-EU cards), I’m considering the US version — but want to avoid adding to my 5/24 count.

JLH

At locations that only take debit cards, can you do an initial curve charge with a loaded debit card and then go back in time and switch it to credit? Or does back in time only work for credit to credit changes?

JLH

Does anyone have experience with the option to get crypto currency instead of Curve cash? If so, could you provide your thoughts on this and also how easy is it to utilize?

Roddy

Isn’t the European version of Curve a debit card while the US version a credit card? Would really find it useful if it was a debit card in the US so we could get CC points on debit only merchant transactions such as Verizon (only takes the Verizon CC), some utilities, etc.

[…] Is the Curve Card Ready for Prime Time Yet? The Curve Card sounds great in theory, but it still has some kinks to work out. See this post on Frequent Miler. […]

Alex

Lots of MCC’s get auto-declined. Just tried $22 restaurant purchase (through the restaurant’s app); declined. Didn’t even go to Curve Credit (which, I’m glad it didn’t, so I could use a different card). I’m ready to throw the towel in on this.

Morris

I signed up yesterday, none of the issues others have been experiencing and already made a charge. I did have to do some weird identity verification of taking a selfie and sending my passport pic, and they never wrote back to say I was verified. I just tried logging into the app a few hours later for kicks and it worked, saying I was approved, after which I got the official welcome email.

Really looking forward to this for the extra 1% and using FX fee cards abroad! Hope they pull through and are here to stay.

Also good for using the automated card/category feature to help capture charges on the right card for merchants for which you don’t know how they code in advance.

Last edited 2 years ago by Morris
Ting

How do charges show up on your credit card? Does it always post as “Curve” just with the right MCC regardless of using Go Back in Time?

whocares

Is everything done in an app? How about on just a website?

Nick Reyes

No website, just the app.

whocares

thanks for that. non-starter for me. don’t use a SickPhone.

Got the Curve Invite email in the last few days. Guess I can delete it.

seldom even use my dumbphone. Off 99.9% of the time, $3 plan.

Greg has some passing familiarity with my views on wireless tech after we met randomly at Lowes Tucson earlier this year.

edit: just checked, it looks like it works for my tablet if Google Play is accurate. Which other then as an alarm clock, seldom gets used / wireless turned on. Though I did bring it on a recent trip and used it for a couple hours total, mostly at a crowded Amex SFO lounge.

Google Play shows 1 million downloads…so it seems like they should be farther along in fixing bugs.

Morris

Completely unrelated, but could you share your views or philosophy behind wireless tech and cell phones, and why you don’t like them?

whocares

Some things to do:

1) read a book called INVISIBLE RAINBOW by Arthur Firstenberg.
[I wrote one of the very first reviews – years ago, before the book was popular. 1,855 reviews now, it had < 10 when I wrote mine. Titled –> A re-evaluation of the technology that has defined our modern world, from a health perspective.]

2) Watch documentaries like FULL SIGNAL, MOBILIZE. There are MANY more.

3) Go to ehtrust – Environmental Health Trust. Look under GET EDUCATED – FILM ON CELL PHONES & EMF.

Lots more…or you can correlate your own health / societal problems with exposure over time. But you have to un-brainwash yourself.

And if you do all the above, there is still a LOT MORE that I’ve uncovered. Most of it unwritten anywhere on the Internet. But we won’t begin to learn about that until AFTER the FALL / COLLAPSE later this decade. But that’s another story, not for an FM comment.

Amazing things happen – when you MICROWAVE the EARTH and its occupants!

enjoy!

anonymous

No surprise there…

Exodus Privacy rating for the Curve app shows it has a lot of trackers. [https:]//reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/

Scott

Received the email that I’m now eligible to sign up, went to the web site, put in my phone number, clicked the button, and … nothing. So add website design problems to the list.

Andy

I’ve been using a Brother P-Touch label maker with 1/4″ tape for years. Can just write labels like gas, groceries, everything else, etc. and stick them to your cards. Works especially well for P2.

I understand Curve can keep your wallet thinner, but I typically only keep 3-4 physical cards anyway, and my labels can stick to Amex and Visa.

Nick Reyes

Yeah, this works for a lot of people. I still can’t get my wife to always follow the labels / put all 3 or 4 cards back in her wallet and I can’t go back in time and change later. I’m not arguing that your system is the wrong one but rather that I do see the advantage of Curve whenever they get it all worked out.

LarryInNYC

Does anyone have any idea how they manage the “go back in time” feature while preserving the merchant coding, or the no foreign transaction fees? I assume that Curve is acting as a US-based merchant and has set up “businesses” with the various merchant codes on them. But wouldn’t they then get charged the “vig” from the ultimate processor — 1% or more (I think it goes up to 2.5%) for the premium cards in the premium categories? How can they not be losing money?

LarryInNYC

In fact, it strikes me that the only way for them to make money is from late fees and interest on charges that get sent to their Curve Credit account. Which might explain some of the issues (erroneous Curve Credit charges and inability to determine when that bill is actually due) that the FM team have encountered.

anonymous

Sale of customers’ consolidated purchase data, maybe? Best to check the privacy policy and opt-outs at signup time.

Nick Reyes

I rarely concern myself with how companies in the fintech sector are making money. I assume most of them are blowing through venture capital and I’m happy to take them up on their redistribution of the wealth.

This is a potentially fantastic product though from a consumer standpoint and I think often when you can create a product that is so highly desirable, you can probably find a way to monetize it. I imagine they are just blowing through venture capital right now, but long term, my guess is that the incredible data collection of knowing your entire wallet and where you spend all of your money is what they anticipate is worthwhile. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they pitch this as a way for credit card companies to market to people who need their product (i.e. this person spends a lot in groceries, so they need card X).

All that said, they’ve existed in Europe for years and made it work, so whatever their secret sauce is they seem to be producing enough of it. I’m rooting for them to succeed because I see what a fantastic product it could be for consumers if they iron out the many wrinkles and also figure out how to earn a profit for themselves.

Bob

Europe has little to no interchange fees due to regulatory cap which means the economics are different. Curve isn’t paying much when they charge european cards on their merchant account. Contrast that with US based PPK.

Last edited 2 years ago by Bob
LarryInNYC

Usually, my “how does this work” questions are just curiosity. I’m happy to take advantage of VC startup capital if they’re offering me a good deal.

But in this case my concern is that their business model may specifically call for diverting your charges to the Curve credit line with them, and then making it difficult for you to avoid paying them for the privilege. It sounds like at least some of the FM team (who are about the most knowledgeable users of this kind of product that there are — and certainly better at detecting and avoiding fees than I would be) can’t even say if they’ve been charged interest or late fees!

Nick Reyes

Yeah, it’s pretty crazy how hard it is to make sense of the statements and stuff.

As for diverting charges to the Curve credit line, I don’t think it was malicious at all. I had like a $43 charge for BBQ chicken sent to Curve credit — I would be very surprised if their profit model relies on moving my $43 BBQ chicken charge to Curve credit. I think it just isn’t functioning at a prime time level.

Erik

As a former Curve User, there is only one Word to describe the Curve Card customer experience – “Avoid”.

A very shaky Fin-Tech product backed up by a last in class Customer Service team.

Curve should not be able to launch in the US or anywhere else unless their current management is terminated and a commercially acceptable product is provided to its customers.

Kent

This. I’m surprised there aren’t any comments in the article on experiences contacting Curve’s customer service. No phone number to call, no live chat (the app’s “chat” support is just messaging), and it’s not unusual for replies to take 24 hours. If your problem is anything outside of ordinary, it may take days of back-and-forth messaging to get it resolved, if at all.

Nick Reyes

No comments about experiences contacting customer service? See the section about Stephen’s problems, which starts out with this in the first section of his problems: ““It took more than a dozen emails to be able to open my account”.

I agree that it’s annoying that customer service is only via email. Honestly, I haven’t even bothered trying to contact customer service as I didn’t have high expectations. I rarely ever expect good customer service these days.

Kent

Sorry, Nick, I did read the article and was initially going to say “more” thinking there was mention of it somewhere, but doing a Ctrl-F on “customer support” and “customer service” found nothing.

There is messaging in the app in addition to email, at least for the UK/EU card: go to Account, Help Center, “Chat” at the bottom right. But again it’s just messaging, not real-time chat.

Frank

Doesn’t help with trying to create the account in the first place.

anonymous

I’ll take shooting a quick message to customer service over sparring with a clueless chat-bot for hours any day of the week. Lol!

Frank

Well, my number came up and I applied. Invasive requirements, but I went ahead. 3 times my selfie was rejected. So, now help from anyone. I’m not a fan of Twitter, their method for communications.

So, it looks like a bust for me.

Grady

I wish Amex should create their own version of this. For example if I have the Platinum and Gold (and pay the fees for both), it would be great if I could just carry the Platinum card in my wallet, but still get the 4x for restaurants and groceries.

Reno Joe

I spoke with an Amex C-suite person and suggested an all-in-one Palladium Card that would offer the highest earn rate in each category among the entire family of cards. The annual fee would be the sum of annual fees for the Platinum, Gold, Green, and Everyday Preferred. It’s about making life simple. The bug is in their ears.

Lrdx

Haha, not going to happen. The name of the game for Amex is breakage.

LarryInNYC

Sure. But they could accomplish the same thing by just having all their cards, or all their premium cards, anyway, feature the best bonuses that any of their cards have. They won’t do that because it’s too expensive for them.

Reno Joe’s suggestion in this thread is similar, except that Amex would benefit from a higher fee for that card. I’d actually pay $1000 for that card instead of having both Platinum and the Gold; assuming it had the Platinum’s lounge access benefits.

Grady

I agree – I’d pay more for the simplicity and I’d direct more business to Amex because of it.

However, if it’s a new product that combines all 4, it’s probably going to cost more than $1000. The combined fee of those 4 cards separately is $1190.

LarryInNYC

At this fee level, I feel that $1,000 ~= $1,190.