Curve-tråden

Nei, DnB har ikke sagt noe om det spesifikt. Men dem syntes jo det var litt rart at alt var blitt refundert rett over månedsskiftet. Ikke sikert at dem vet hvordan det var mulig. Og jeg har ikke noe behov for å forklare. Sa bare at ja, alt er refundert. Ble ingen flere spørsmål da

 

Curve shareholder info del 1

Spoiler

Dear shareholders

2021 was another epic year for Curve.

I could not be prouder of how much we accomplished this year, especially quietly launching our Alpha product in the US, and releasing Curve Flex - Curve’s very own lending experience. The ambitions we have been quietly toiling away these past two years for have finally been realised and are ready for scaling.

Beyond flashy features and new market expansions, we have almost doubled our customer base to more than 3 Million customers, and dramatically improved our processes and controls. The way we operate today would be unrecognisable to a Curver 12 months ago. In a good way. If we are going to win the race, we need to be able to move quickly as well as deftly. But no rest for the wicked - we still have a lot of work ahead of us; from addressing organisational debt we accumulated in the past 18 months as we scaled our teams completely remotely and learnt new ways of working, to scaling up our customer base in UK, Europe and the US, to further improving our product offering as we expand to new audiences.

Our progress in 2021 and some key achievements
Customer Base and KPIs

We grew by 1.5 million customers in 2021 to a total of 3.3m! And with a phenomenally low cost of customer acquisition.
Nearly £2 Billion was spent on the Curve platform during 2021 for a total of £4 Billion; Growth of 100% from 2020 spend volume (£1B).
We distributed more than £1.8m of cashback in 2021. Our customers know Curve is the most rewarding way to spend and are taking advantage of that - to our benefit!
Curve reached a stable headcount of 446. Our growth in the first half of the year was matched by a focus on stabilising teams and building systems in H2. This work will continue in 2022.
Partnerships

Curve’s growth emphasis on partnerships continued to bear fruit in 2021. We launched two new major distribution partnerships this year thanks to our new VP of Business Development, Nancy Yaffa and her small but mighty team.

Partnership with Swatch

Firstly, using Curve’s unique positioning in the payments ecosystem, we helped Swatch enter the mobile payments game without the headache of needing to contract with each and every bank they hoped to support. By simplifying using the Curve Card as the card loaded onto their watches, Swatch was able to accept any Mastercard, Visa, or Discover/Diners card in one step. SwatchPay-enabled watches have been selling steadily and every activated watch creates one more Curve customer.


Partnership with Huawei

Until September 28th, when Curve Pay launched, Huawei customers were unable to take advantage of the mobile payments revolution. Now, by simply downloading Curve, Huawei phone users can have the same seamless experiences that Google and Apple customers have enjoyed for years. The partnership with Huawei provides huge growth potential for Curve with more than 70M Huawei customers across Europe alone.

Most importantly, Curve Pay is now available to Curve customers on Google Android mobile OS, bringing one of the most important behaviours that people do with their money (Spend it!) completely inside the Curve app and making it possible for Curve customers to do even more without leaving Curve. This is a vital functionality that continues to set Curve apart from neo-banks and brings us closer to consolidating all financial experiences into our superapp.


Curve is always on the hunt for companies facing challenges with the payments ecosystem that we can leverage our unique technology to bridge, building partnerships with established brands and creating delight for future customers. Keep your eyes on the press for announcements of more high-profile partnerships in 2022.

Curve Boost

Cashback has always been a major driver for both acquisition and retention. Curve differentiates itself from other payment forms in the UK and EU by offering a rewarding cashback scheme (up to 1%) in markets where this is not standard practice. It has been remarkably helpful in attracting and retaining a large portion of the population - Rewards and Points enthusiasts.

To double-down on this, we added an additional way to earn Curve Cash through merchant funded rewards. Curve now offers a rotating selection of one-off opportunities to earn up to 20% cashback from top brands like Amazon Fresh, Five Guys, Selfridges and thousands more. The best part is that the selection is smart. It responds to your spend patterns to make sure you are seeing the best rewards for you - not just a clutter of random offers you won’t use.

Integrating With More Networks

In August, Curve made it even easier to consolidate your wallet by adding support for Discover/Diners cards. This was an essential development that helps grow the Curve TAM and makes it possible for even more customers to totally ditch their wallets and use Curve for all their spend. While the market share of Discover is limited in the UK and EU, it is an essential scheme to support in the US.

Successful Series C

While it feels like years ago, in February 2021 Curve completed its $95m fundraise. We have begun using these funds to complete development on Credit and the US as well as building-out essential teams like Product, Compliance, Customer Experience, and Business Development.

Curve Credit (AKA Curve Flex)

Curve Credit is live! After two years of careful planning and development, Curve has finally received FCA authorisation and launched the ability to go-back-in-time and pay later, up to a year after the original purchase was made.

Curve Flex allows customers to split past transactions from up to a year ago into installment loans for a small interest fee (representative ±13% APR). Customers are able to design and amend their loan by selecting the purchase, choosing how many instalments, and even paying back early if they so choose. We believe that Curve Flex is truly differentiated in this crowded market and offers greater flexibility in how people manage their cash flow, reducing their borrowing costs.

Curve customers are progressively being rolled onto the platform. We have already lent 6-figures and are well on our way to scaling the product. Curve has ambitious plans for lending volumes so watch the news for new announcements.


Working USA Product

Back in 2015, I presented to the Board the entry plan for the US. It spanned 5 years, and required us to first launch in the UK, then in Europe, and then using the regulatory precedents and the relationships we’ve built with the Networks, to passport Curve’s product to the US. Now, 5+ years later, I can tell you that our plan has worked.

In H2, we devoted additional engineering resources to our US Product Team in order to make sure we had a fully functional product by the end of the year. It paid off. Curve USA has a working product. While we are limiting access to insiders in an Alpha release for further testing, the heavy lifting of expanding to the US is in place and we anticipate a Q1 launch to our ever-growing waitlist.

I want to emphasise the incredible effort by Amanda Orson who leads our US expansion, and the whole US team (now 24 people in the US) to get us to this stage. I cannot wait to onboard all of you (who are Americans) onto the Curve Credit Card in the US.

 

Curve shareholder info del 2

Spoiler

Key New Hires

Eric Molitor, CTO. Former VP of Engineering at Improbable, a UK technology start-up that creates and enables virtual worlds. Prior to Improbable, Eric spent over a decade at Amazon, leading its engineering departments and product and brand integrations. Eric brings with him a host of experience and his goal is to bring Curve’s tech stack and teams to become a leader in our field.


Nancy Yaffa, VP Business Development. Formerly Director of Commercial Card Sales at Bank of America after spending 10 years at Amex and founding her own hospitality business in NY. Nancy already brought significant value to Curve in the few months since she joined us. There’s no challenge she’s unwilling to accept, and have built a small yet powerful team to deliver on Curve’s Partnership strategy.


Alison Verlander, VP Risk and Compliance. Alison was formerly the Director of First Line Risk at Nationwide and the Chief Compliance Officer at TSB. Alison brings further maturity to the business; creating scalable Risk systems, and ensuring that we operate according to regulations, and within the Risk profile that the Board had assigned to the business.


Sarah Cox, VP People. Sarah’s skills go beyond HR and Coaching, where she has focused on in the past five years. She is also an experienced General Manager and leader with over 20 years at American Express. Sarah's wealth of experience and knowledge in leadership and people’s excellence will elevate our management and leadership standards and systems.
Conclusion

We are ending 2021 in an incredibly strong position. We have a broad and developed product which caters to our core customers’ jobs to be done and the foundations for further development in 2022 which will tie the existing Curve offering together and clearly position ourselves as the superapp for Europe, the UK, and US.

And.. to whoever missed it, please follow our blog!


OUR PLANS FOR 2022

2022 feels like THE year for Curve. We have done most of the heavy lifting, and we will see our plans that we have spent almost two years speaking about come to fruition and create a step-change for our customers and business. We have further simplified our company OKRs to only two goals to drive an extreme focus. Firstly, we will continue our growth-pace in the UK and EEA while increasing our pace with our new market in the US. Secondly, we will increase our revenues through new products such as Curve Credit activities, and Premium.

Curve Rules

We cannot be our customers’ ‘personal CFO’ if we cannot act on their spending choices for them. We’re bringing a new experience to Curve which enables customers to create rules that automatically apply transactions to underlying funding cards. We believe that this will go one step further in simplifying and unifying spending, while reducing your borrowing costs. Not only will all your transactions be in a single place, you will no longer even need to think about allocating them.

Plus, if the Rules makes a mistake or you want to make an exception, just use Curve’s patented Go Back in Time technology to change the card.


We’re entering the Crypto game with Crypto Cashback

Curve customers already know Curve is the best way to spend their fiat currency but crypto is rapidly becoming an important part of their financial lives. Customers will soon be able to opt to receive their cashback in a crypto coin of their choice (or even a portfolio). Customers who are crypto savvy will appreciate the ability to increase their holdings passively while crypto novices will be attracted to the ability to gain exposure to this asset class without the education and hassle of creating wallets and converting currency. And like any rewards, our customers would be able to spend their Cryptos with Curve anywhere Mastercard is accepted.


Premium Revamp

Curve is completely changing the premium proposition to drive uptake and boost company revenues. Beginning with a new card design (sneak peek below), we are completely changing the structure and value-proposition of what it means to be a Curve premium customer to fit better with the post-COVID world.


Onboarding

Our onboarding team has been working on improving our new customer experience throughout 2021. They achieved their conversion goals for 2021 and will continue to take our new customer experience across the Awareness-Acquisition-Activation funnel to new heights in 2022.

Churn Reduction

Curve does a great job of bringing customers to the platform (+1.5m this year alone) and an increasingly better job of converting them and also retaining them with +50% M12 retention. However, considering we haven’t done much work on our retention to date, we have a huge opportunity to improve it even further. As such we intend to continue and invest in the customer experience, accelerating time to value, and improving LTV even better.

Further Credit Enhancements

After launching Curve Flex at the end of 2021, the Curve Credit team continues to develop and scale the experience, and bring new experiences to the market.

We will improve our credit scoring to incorporate the unique spend-based data that Curve captures. This scoring mechanism will allow us to move beyond simply relying on the credit reference agencies’ scores, or Open Banking data, and create scores which more accurately reflect the risk-levels of our customers, ultimately reducing default rates and expanding the pool of credit-worthy customers while reducing the burrowing costs to our customers.

We will bring balance transfers and refinancing of existing loans to help reduce overall borrowing costs. We will integrate with open banking to enable Flex for transactions made outside of the Curve ecosystem, allowing brand new customers to take advantage of Curve Flex before they’ve made a large purchase on their Curve Card (e.g Go Back In Time and split your rent). We also intend to offer rewards and incentives to drive responsible usage.

USA Public Launch

It's going to happen soon. It’s going to be big. Wait for it.

I can’t help but feel lucky to have our crowdfunding shareholders with us on this mission. From making introductions and giving advice in the active Crowdfunding community channel, your help was instrumental in accomplishing everything we did this past year.

2022 is going to be a big one for Curve!

Shachar

 

Ser det ikke står noe om ny utvidelser i kapital osv.

Skal jeg være trygg på at det kommuniserer godt i egen eposter, eller bør jeg følge noen tråd et sted eller noe for å være sikker på å være med videre?

 

Hvordan var dette med det blå gratis kortet igjen? Kun 5K som blir gebyrfritt mandag-fredag?

 

Ja, om du mener transaksjoner i annen valuta.
Om du ikke skal handle i annen valuta, eller om du overlater vekslingen til underliggende kort, så betaler du ingen gebyrer til Curve.

 

Fått det nye SAS Mastercard designet nå og skal legge til det kortet i curve.. men det går ikke. Noen tips?

 

Gikk fint for meg for noen uker siden. Og har vært i bruk. Slett app og reinnstaler?

 

Har du husket å slette det gamle før du forsøker å legge inn det nye?

Mener å huske det gamle "sperrer" for å legge inn nytt når kortnummeret er uendret.

 

Jepp, det som var problemet. Takk!

 

...og når du først er i siget, sender du det det nye designet til Curve så de får det på plass i appen? Selv har jeg fremdeles det gamle et års tid til, så jeg får ikke gjort det.

 

SAS Premium Mastercard designet ligger i hvertfall inne. Faktisk med to forskjellige varianter, under de gamle designene i „change image“.

 

Her var det et par varianter som aldri har eksistert

 

Finner fremdeles bare de gamle designene i appen min. Vet ikke om det skyldes forskjell mellom mellom iOS og Android (som jeg bruker), om appen trenger oppdatering, whatever...

EDIT:
Gjorde en liten test nå. Logget på iOS på en iPad, og der var også de nye designene. Tilbake til Android, og de var fremdeles ikke der.
Nye design for Nordic Choice MC og DNB Private Banking manglet imidlertid fremdeles begge steder (sistnevnte har jeg selv sendt inn bilde av for en god stund siden).

 

Jeg bruker Android og får disse valgene:


Og bruker denne versjonen:

 

Jeg har samme versjon på Android og fant disse ved å scrolle ned:

 

Hadde plutselig fått mye høyere spend limit her

 

Finner nøyaktig de samme tallene her, og jeg har gratiskortet (blått).

 

Skjønner sånn ca hva Curve gjør, men foruten det praktiske, er det noen hacks her som gir muligheter for økt EB-poeng?

Ok, for steder som bare tar VISA, så kan man rute kosten over på amex/MC, men noe mer?

 

1. Du trenger (i teorien) kun et kort. Så styrer du i Curve appen hvilken kort som skal belastes. Gi kona e.l Curve på tlf så samler du alle transaksjoner på et kort
2. Hvis du har brukt «feil» kort et sted, kan du flytte betalingen til et annet kort opptil 30 dager i etterkant. Det er fint ved doble poenghelger feks
3. Støtter ikke Amex