How Does Curve Make Money? The Real Maths Behind the Lloyds Deal

 

Curve's pitch was elegant: one card that stands in for all the others in your wallet. What it never advertised was that the maths underneath that convenience never quite balanced and that imbalance is exactly what led to the recently completed Curve Lloyds acquisition, after months of shareholder disagreement.

So how does Curve make money, if the core idea tap once, route the payment wherever you like wasn't enough on its own? The short answer is that Curve built several revenue lines specifically to plug a structural gap in how its core payment mechanism works.

The transaction that only pays half its own way

Every Curve payment happens in two stages, and Curve only gets paid properly on the first one. When a customer taps their Curve card, Curve collects interchange income on what's known as the "Leg 1" transaction this is the standard fee card networks pay to card issuers, regulated in the UK and EU at roughly 0.20% for debit and 0.30% for credit transactions, though the exact rate can shift depending on card type and geography.

Leg 2 is the expensive part. Curve then has to route that same payment on to the customer's actual underlying card to settle it, and that leg costs Curve the full acquiring and gateway fees with no equivalent income to offset it. If the transaction fails and a retry doesn't go through, Curve can be left absorbing the entire value of the payment as a loss. That's the structural core of Curve interchange fees: they cover one side of the transaction convincingly, but they were never built to cover both.

It's worth separating that transaction-level mechanic from how the company performs overall. Curve UK Limited's most recent filed accounts show turnover of roughly £39.35 million, down from about £44.95 million the year prior, with annual losses narrowing to around £3.4 million. In an earlier set of accounts (FY2023), the revenue split looked like this: £14.6 million from interchange income, £7.2 million from subscriptions, and £4.9 million from platform partnerships. A full category breakdown for the more recent year wasn't available at the time of writing. So the honest answer to how does Curve make money isn't "every transaction loses money" it's that the interchange model alone was never going to close the gap, which is exactly why the other revenue lines exist.

Subscriptions and platform deals were built to close the gap

Curve now runs four membership tiers, and the paid ones are carrying real financial weight. The free tier, Curve Pay, charges a 2.99% FX fee once a customer's international spending passes £250 a month. Above that sit three paid plans priced at £5.99, £9.99 and £17.99 a month that trade a subscription fee for higher fee-free spending limits, free overseas ATM withdrawals, and cashback perks at partner retailers, according to pricing published by Finder UK and Curve itself.

There's also Curve Flex, which Curve describes as a credit and instalment product rather than formal buy-now-pay-later, even though it behaves similarly in practice. Customers can retroactively convert a past purchase into an instalment plan over 3, 6, 12 or 24 months at a typical APR of 19.99%, or move the balance onto a credit card instead for a flat 1.5% transfer fee. It's a genuinely distinctive mechanic: rather than lending against a new purchase, Curve is refinancing one that's already happened.

The last piece is platform income retailers pay Curve to appear as cashback partners inside the app, and device makers including Samsung and Huawei have licensed Curve's underlying technology as the mobile payments layer inside some of their hardware. Put the four pieces together interchange, subscriptions, Curve Flex, and platform deals and the real answer to how does Curve make money is that no single line was ever meant to carry the business. It was the sum of all four.

Why the Lloyds acquisition happened, and why it wasn't smooth

Lloyds Banking Group has completed its acquisition of Curve, in a deal first reported by Sky News at a value of roughly £120 million. Companies House filings confirm founder-CEO Shachar Bialick has stepped down as a director, with Helen Bierton and Kim Eun-Soo Verhaaf now listed among the company's officers. That £120 million figure lands at roughly half of the at least £250 million Curve is reported to have raised since it was founded in 2015, and far below the £50–60 billion valuation the company's own leadership floated during the height of the fintech investment boom.

The Curve Lloyds acquisition didn't sail through quietly. IDC Ventures, holding a 12% stake, publicly opposed the sale over governance concerns and said it was reserving its legal rights. A separate shareholder attempt to remove chair Lord Fink and Bialick was voted down before the deal was ultimately confirmed. Bialick himself had already acknowledged, before departing, that the sale price fell short of expectations and warned that without the deal, Curve risked running out of money. In a circular to shareholders, the company put it directly: the transaction's value fell short of what shareholders had hoped for, even as it represented the only viable path forward. Lloyds, for its part, has said the acquisition isn't expected to materially affect its group capital position or full-year guidance.

Is Curve safe to use now that Lloyds owns it?

Is Curve safe? Yes and that answer doesn't actually change because of who owns the company. Curve operates as a regulated e-money institution, not a bank, which is a meaningful distinction now that the Lloyds acquisition has completed. Curve UK Limited holds FCA authorisation under firm reference number 900926, while Curve Europe UAB is separately licensed by the Bank of Lithuania to serve customers across the EEA.

Eligible purchases carry up to £100,000 of protection under Curve's own Customer Protection policy a contractual, chargeback-style safeguard rather than FSCS deposit protection, since Curve doesn't hold customer deposits the way a bank does. Curve also never exposes a customer's underlying card details to the merchant they're paying. Anyone specifically asking "is Curve safe" because of the Lloyds headlines should treat this as an ownership and governance change, not a regulatory one the underlying protections carry on exactly as they were.

What the deal means going forward

Lloyds intends to fold Curve Pay, along with its card-switching and rewards technology, into its own digital banking products giving Lloyds' roughly 28 million UK customers access to tools Curve originally built for a base of around six million. The commercial logic is straightforward: rather than build card aggregation and instalment-lending capability from the ground up, Britain's largest high street bank is acquiring nearly a decade of fintech engineering for well under what it cost Curve to build though that discount also reflects the cash pressure Curve was under heading into the sale.

For Curve, it's an unglamorous but coherent ending to a business whose central product one card, routed anywhere never fully closed its own interchange gap on its own. It's a useful case study for any founder: a genuinely clever product and durable unit economics are two separate achievements, and only one of them determines whether a company survives on its own terms.

FAQ

1. How does Curve make money if Leg 2 of every transaction costs more than Leg 1 earns?
Curve earns interchange income on the "Leg 1" transaction but absorbs the full acquiring and gateway costs on "Leg 2." It closes that gap through subscription fees, Curve Flex instalment charges, FX markups on international spending, and platform partnerships with retailers and device makers like Samsung.

2. Is Curve safe to use now the Lloyds acquisition has completed?
Yes. Curve remains FCA-regulated under firm reference number 900926, and eligible purchases still carry up to £100,000 of protection under its own Customer Protection policy separate from FSCS deposit protection. The acquisition changed Curve's ownership, not its regulatory standing.

3. What exactly are Curve interchange fees?
They're the card-network fees Curve earns on the first ("Leg 1") half of every transaction regulated at roughly 0.20% for debit and 0.30% for credit transactions in the UK and EU, though rates vary by card type and geography. They only ever covered one side of the payment, which is the core reason Curve built subscriptions and other revenue lines alongside them.

Sources: Curve UK Limited accounts via Companies House and Endole, Finder UK, Curve.com, and reporting on the Lloyds Banking Group acquisition from Sky News, Finextra, Investegate, and Retail Banker International. Figures reflect the most recent available data at the time of writing (August 2026). This piece was adapted by the Entrepreneur Plus UK editorial team.