Curve Review

This is our detailed Curve Review.

Curve card is an excellent choice for everybody who uses a lot of different cards as Curve replaces them all, so you don't need to carry them with you. It offers you a great solution, as you can connect them to your Curve and have only one. This is perfect for digital nomads and people traveling a lot.

We are digital nomads and permanent travelers, finding optimal banking solutions is very important. So we tested Curve and wrote this detailed review to help you get to know it better and see if this is something that would make your life easier.

Let's get into it!

Type of Curve Cards

You can select between three subscription plans, one free and two paid ones.

Here are the details and benefits of each:

Overview: Curve Card

Curve is a fintech company offering e-money services founded in 2015 in London, UK. The founder is Shachar Bialick. Curve is a card and mobile app that helps you to handle your different bank cards in one place. They are not a bank, but they offer a smart card for your diverse banking needs, which means that it doesn't replace your bank, only your numerous bank cards.

They are promoting single card use and not needing to deal with hidden currency fees when abroad, as they follow fee-free foreign spending.

By connecting your cards under one, you also get a central platform to easily view and track your spending on different payment cards and control your spending better. In addition, it gives you a good overview of your financials in one space.

Curve keeps a record of spending you made on each card, so you don't need to log in to different accounts to see your transactions.

Curve is available for UK and EEA residents, and supports Mastercard, Visa, Diner, and Discover debit, prepaid cards, and credit cards.

Besides simplifying your banking, they offer other perks like cashback features, traveling benefits, going back in time features, etc. We'll check them in detail shortly, along with the available subscription tiers.

Main Features and Benefits: Curve Review

As mentioned, one of the main features of Curve is the possibility to add and connect all your cards into one Curve account to reduce the number of cards you carry with you and simplify your finances. But let's look at what else Curve offers. They have a couple of signature features and are not seen with other cards.

Go back in time

Going back in time is a unique feature of Curve that enables you to switch the payment card to another one up to a month after that payment was made. They promote it as your travel machine, which is a pretty cool feature, but is it really useful?

We would say yes. If you use many different cards and use a different one by mistake than intended, you can quickly reroute the payment to a different one. It's handy for any business expenses, where you by mistake used your personal card, and so on.

The feature is easy to use; all you need to do is select the purchase you want, switch the payment for, and choose the card to move it to.

Going back in time is free to use Curve's trademark, so you will not get it with any other card.

Travel with Curve

A curve card is also a convenient payment solution for digital nomads and frequent travelers. For different reasons, to name a few:

• avoiding high conversion fees when traveling abroad,
• avoiding exchange rates offered by some banks and currency exchanges abroad,
• you get instant spending notifications
• they have 24/7 customer support available for you if anything goes south when you are traveling,
• they offer 1% cashback for booking with easyjet.com and booking.com
• you only need to carry one card, instead of X amount of them.

Anti-Embarrassment mode

Curve also had an anti-embarrassment mode. What does this mean exactly?

With anti-embarrassment mode, you activate your chosen backup card if your payment doesn't go through with the selected card. The process is automatic, so your payment will never get declined.

Curve Flex

Another exciting feature is Curve Flex. This Curve allows you to split any payment you made in the past year into multiple installments. With this, you can instantly release some money while making sure your one-time fee will be covered in a couple of parts.

How does it work?

In your past transactions, you find the payment you made in the past 12 months. Then, you swipe left and split your payment into 3, 6, 9, or 12 monthly installments. When doing so, Curve will release the funds of that payment, and the first Flex repayment will become due in 30 days.

With Curve Black and Metal, you are entitled to 1% cashback, Black on three selected retailers, and Metal on 6 selected retailers. Which is not so significant compared to some other cards, like Crypto.com, or Binance.com.

You can also select from different offers directly on your app and earn up to 20% cashback from purchases with Nike, Amazon, Uber, JustEat, and others.

You can also earn 15 EUR whenever you refer someone, and your friend will earn 5 EUR.

Supported Countries: Curve Card

Curve is currently available to the UK and all 30 countries within the European Economic Area (EEA). They are promising to support the US market, too, starting 2022; let's see if they make it.

At the moment, you can add your Visa, Mastercard, Diners, or Discover debit and credit cards to the Curve app; unfortunately, Amex is not supported yet, even though they are promising to add it for a while now.

Fees and Limits: Curve Review

All the cards you add to Curve adapt their wholesale fixed daily rate provided by Mastercard. So they don't add any additional fees.

Curve won't apply any fees when spending in the currency your payment card is set to in-app. However, when using your Curve abroad, there are some limits until which you can make transactions and withdrawals for free.

When your underlying card is a credit card, you can withdraw up to 200 EUR each month; after that, a fee of 2% applies.

For all domestic withdrawals, where the underlying card is a debit card, you have ten withdrawals per rolling 30-day period for free, and after that, a 0.50 EUR fee applies.

There is an additional fee for foreign transactions during the weekend. If your cards are in USD, EUR, or GBP, a foreign exchange of 0.5% applies to other currencies: 1.5% on a spend of up to £/€ 500 per 30 rolling days.

Here are some additional fees and Curve spending limits that differ based on the tier you decide to go for:

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Security and Customer Support: Curve Card

Security is essential for the company, and Curve is a safe card.

They protect your data with financial services industry-standard encryption and other security measures. Furthermore, they offer their protection up to 100,000 EUR.

Curve account has a multi-factor authentication, a mobile number, a one-time password, and Curve passcode or biometrics.

In case of any fraudulent transaction or in case your card gets compromised, you can lock your card in the Curve app. You can also reach out to their Fraud Team to investigate further. If they confirm that the charge was unauthorized, they will issue a refund and send a new card.

They have a bug bounty program, where they pay up to 12,000 USD for reporting critical system vulnerabilities.

Their customer service can be reached 24/7 via the online form; however, their customers point out slow response time and somewhat incompetent help in some cases.

Reviews: Curve Card

Curve has 5,506 reviews at the moment with an overall score of 4.0, which falls into the category of Great.

People are mostly praising the convenience of the card, as they don't need to carry all the cards and Curve's ease of use. Some also mention the benefit of using some cards usually not supported by some merchants or Apple and Google Pay - adding it to Curve; you can easily overcome this obstacle.

How to open a Curve account?

You can create your Curve account in a couple of simple steps.

1. First, you need to download the app to your iOS or Android device.
2. Sign up with your details.
3. KYC process- due to regulations, you need to verify your identity to start using Curve. You will need to take a photo of your official document and your face. They don't accept Driving Licenses.
4. Once your docs are reviewed, you will get Verification Successful notification.

After verification, you can start adding your cards and using Curve for payments.

Don't forget, Curve is at the moment available for residents of EEA and the UK.

Conclusion: Is Curve Worth it?

The Curve card is straightforward to set up, use, and manage money. In addition, it's an all-in-one card, that connects the multiple cards that you don't want to carry with you. Besides this convenience, what we like with Curve is that it enables you to use some of your cards in places where they would usually not be accepted or compatible with mobile wallets.

We also like their unique features that allow you to go back in time and switch the payment card for the purchases made in that past month (Go Back in Time) and Curve Flex, enabling you to split payments you've made in the past year into installments.

The main drawback that we see is that at the moment, American Express is not accepted and that you are very dependent on the internet connection and full phone battery in case you need to switch your card, which can sometimes be a problem when traveling. You need an internet connection to switch the selected payment card in the mobile app. Also, if Curve fails you, you are stuck without the possibility to pay, as you have all the eggs in one basket.

For frequent travelers and digital nomads who already have a good grasp of their finances and prefer to have multiple cards, Wise or Revolut would be a great solution, too, as they offer great international rates and are one of the to-go solutions. You can read our detailed Wise vs Revolut here.

We like the concept behind Curve and love using it; so if you want to start optimizing your wallet, you can click the button below: