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

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.

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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