What is Curve?

Curve is on a mission to become a financial super app that connects all your money in one place. There’s an explosion in choice in retail financial services. With falling barriers to entry around an inefficient industry with legacy operating models and limitations, disruptive players such as Curve are leveraging technology to deliver better financial products and customer experiences. Consumers are at the intersection of choices between old banks, challenger banks, credit cards, buy-now-paylater, cashback, crypto, and are seeking a primary point of access. This is similar to other everyday needs such as Spotify and Netflix in entertainment, Amazon in retail and Airbnb and Booking.com in travel.

The consumer demands a personalised experience and Curve exists to connect old school finances with new innovative propositions, with minimal behavioural change or infrastructure improvements. Customers can stay with their trusted banks and accounts while Curve provides a personal finance control centre. Curve OS Limited was incorporated in 2015 and we launched our product to the public in 2018. We closed 2020 with nearly 2 million customers in 31 European countries (growing at 166% per annum between 2018 to 2020), and a formidable team of over 200 Curvers.

Founder’s Review

Looking back at 2020, my standout takeaway is how fiercely capable we were, and continue to be as a company. We remained customer-centric, agile, resilient, and united in the face of the enormous challenges brought by the pandemic, the demise of Wirecard Bank which we relied on for our Issuing and Acquiring services, and Brexit.
The evidence shows we overcame these events and thrived, growing our customer base, brand visibility, and team in the UK, EEA, and beyond. We are over the moon about the opportunities presented to us and remain focused on our growth plans.

Learning from 2020

2020 was a year of record growth for Curve despite the obstacle course of challenges on our way. With the astounding support of our stakeholders – customers, shareholders, partners, and our own families - we learnt that we can remain both remarkably focused and ultimately successful. WirecardGate (AKA the demise of Wirecard) On 26 June 2020, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (‘FCA’) suspended the operations of Wirecard Card Solutions (‘WCS’) which was Curve’s Electronic Money (‘eMoney’) issuer and acquirer, leaving our customers unable to use our product. This was an inflection point, a do-or-die situation, where acting at lightning speed and resolve to solve the problem was the only choice.

Within 60 hours, Checkout.com, Mastercard and Investec stepped in and our teams collectively worked around the clock to deliver monumental work, fully reactivating our customers’ accounts utilising the passportable eMoney licence issued to Curve by the FCA in March 2020. In this short timeframe, we designed and implemented new systems, carried out cross-functional integration, negotiated contracts with partners, underwent required duediligence and completed customer onboarding. This would not have been possible without customer obsession our commitment to bring about the best outcome for our customers who place their trust in Curve. The experience was one of the most remarkable feats of teamwork I have taken part in, and has proven to the world Curve’s execution capabilities.

Brexit
Up next was the final march towards Brexit. The demise of Wirecard Bank in Germany derailed our watertightpreparation to date. We had to find an alternative to Wirecard, and with a sense of urgency. In true Curve-style, our priority was to deliver a flawless experience to our customers, whose best interests are always at the forefront for us. We secured our eMoney licence in Lithuania, becoming an Electronic Money Institution (‘EMI’) in October 2020, with European Economic Area (‘EEA’) passporting rights secured in November
2020. On 31 December 2020, at 11PM GMT, all our EEA cardholders migrated seamlessly to our new EEA Electronic Money licence, without any interruption. Customers had no idea about the hard work that went on behind the scenes, and that’s how it should be. The transition involved the establishment of our entity in Lithuania - now a prominent European fintech capital. We are pleased with our presence in Lithuania and our local relationships, and look forward to taking advantage of the opportunities our new gateway to EEA provides.

COVID-19
The pandemic prompted a wild transformation in consumer behaviour and defined new ways of working and living, not just in the UK but globally. As a business, we had to adjust to the uncertainties by adapting our plan and adopting a conservative spending posture. For instance, we suspended our paid marketing activities from March to November 2020 and still continued to see our customer base grow at a healthy pace. Additionally, we implemented initiatives in response to the shift of consumer spending to the online channel, such as our campaign offering cashback to customers spending on Amazon in December 2020. Alongside these adjustments, we stayed heads down, focused on our product development, new launches and longer-term growth plans.

Celebrating our achievements
Curve remained resilient in the face of the adversity seen in 2020. Our overall performance was certainly below what we had initially expected. But all said and done, we thrived and delivered unprecedented customer and topline growth, accomplished key milestones, and demonstrated strong execution.

Growth momentum
From January to December 2020, our customer base more than doubled to nearly 2 million, with marginal marketing spend. As a result, our Gross Transaction Volume (‘GTV’)4 increased by 57% year-on-year5, outperforming card networks on volume and value6, and our revenue by 86%5 year-on-year. We also introduced initiatives to increase our exposure to the online channel, resulting in online transactions expansion by 70%, faster than offline transactions which increased by 49%. Strong partnerships we sealed a number of partnerships, which have been instrumental in developing our proposition and scaling our business:

Firstly, we expanded our collaboration with Mastercard becoming a Principal Member of the payments processing network. This allowed us to streamline processes that took longer via third parties and reduced costs.

We next partnered with Apple and Google to enable Apple Pay and Google Pay; We joined forces with Samsung to release the Samsung Pay+ card powered by Curve, giving Samsung customers in the UK access to our platform and product; and we also selected plaid to connect our customers to their bank balances and Thought Machine to power
our new credit offering.

Looking ahead: Our focus in 2021

We are doubling-down on our growth plans in 2021, with a focus on maintaining our growth momentum. Our potential remains untapped, in the UK and to a larger extent in EEA. We have scoped our countries of focus and have identified and rolled out a number of initiatives in EEA to increase our brand awareness and customer base. Although many of our markets went into lockdowns at the start of the year, our customer base grew by 38% in the first half of 2021, and our GTV increased by 56% compared to the same period last year.• Launching Curve in the US. In the US, we have been constructing a product that best addresses the American consumer’s pains and preferences, and which did not exist before in the market, defining a new product category, as we have in the UK and EEA. We plan to launch in beta, and after a period of validating the product-market fit with our core proposition, we will roll out a broader one to the public. Scaling Curve Credit8. We have unveiled our first in-house Credit product, Curve Flex, an essential part of our proposition. As Buy-Now-Pay-Later has become increasingly popular, and similar credit and loan products now available have established a supportive customer awareness, we are seeing encouraging signs of uptake and engagement and are expecting Curve Credit’s growth to accelerate. Executing on our product roadmap while building strategic and tactical partnerships. We have a pipeline of products and experiences we plan to bring to our platform over the next twelve months, such as our Crypto proposition.