Save 15% on BA Wine Flyer purchases with American Express

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

• Rooster says:

  3 Sep3 September 13:41

  O/T Curve card has been over funded with their crowd sourcing, seriously must be people with a lot of money to waste!

  Their product is not attractive and people only use it where they can’t use another card ie HMRC, any valuation is based on their customer base and transaction data, which if things like HMRC were pulled would probably make it dwindle quickly!

  • Kai says:

    3 Sep3 September 14:47

    £10 for a funky replacement card is not a bad deal.

    • Rooster says:

      3 Sep3 September 18:54

      Worth taking the free version and get paid using robs code though!

      Wonder what their customer acquisition cost is if every referral costs them at least £10…. think all this funding will be paid out this way!

      • Shoestring says:

        3 Sep3 September 19:04

        Consumer recruitment costs are averaged out, some become top tier consumers, some don’t.

        Virgin ISA paid out 8000 miles (£80), Orbis ISA last year £100, Wealthify ISA (or general investment fund 🙂 ) £40 this year.

        They don’t expect everybody to be a cheapskate gaming the system/ hobby investor. They are most certainly right: my wife & myself must be in a small minority.

        £10 per new consumer for Curve is pretty low. Or think about Monese, call 6 million Avios £60,000 and they’re going to have a pretty high per consumer cost, I’d have thought – but could be a nice proportion of HNWIs or the old ABC1s in there

        • Rooster says:

          3 Sep3 September 19:31

          Oh yes they are ‘proper businesses’ that have a product and a path to making a profit, hope Curve lasts for a long time as I will make the most of it while it does, as long as they keep getting their investment money 🙂

  • TGLoyalty says:

    3 Sep3 September 15:21

    No tbf its now my default card abroad and I tend to use it for bill payments etc where I’m not really worried about using my CC directly even if Visa/Mastercard is accepted.

    Being able to swap the underlying card easily is a massive positive

    • Rooster says:

      3 Sep3 September 18:46

      Yes for the consumer its not bad for unto £500 transactions a month for the free version.

    • Polly says:

      3 Sep3 September 22:05

      Yes it’s our go to card abroad, now that we don’t have Lloyds avios card any more. Trying to put all non amex normal spend on it now.

  • AndyGWP says:

    3 Sep3 September 15:59

    I must say I find the “go back in time” functionality useful (though admittedly not ‘necessary’), and it’s also a good backup card to have in the pocket. I know what you mean though.

    • Rooster says:

      3 Sep3 September 18:41

      Yes its fine until IHG blocks your card thinking its fraud for some reason (Several times)

  • Rooster says:

    3 Sep3 September 19:00

    This said I do like Curve as a consumer but as a business can’t say I see them being a good investment.

    • AndyGWP says:

      3 Sep3 September 21:24

      Are there any Crowdfunded businesses that have proven to be (genuine question)?

      I’ve looked into quite a few of these and none seem like an investment – more like a donation (happily hold my hands up that I’m looking at the wrong businesses though)

      • Rob says:

        3 Sep3 September 22:32

        If you’re getting equity then it’s fine if it goes well. The biggest issues have been with Kickstarter, where you are genuinely donating to help get a product off the ground – and if it goes well and is sold for a big profit, you get nothing.

      • Rooster says:

        3 Sep3 September 23:17

        Take white car which had in theory a real business, it went bust this year and to be fair something dodgy must have gone on for them to lose all the money as the cars were all on lease
        https://www.crowdcube.com/companies/white-car/pitches/bPWdJZ

        • Rooster says:

          4 Sep4 September 00:38

          Follow up from investors
          https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/white.car

    • Joseph Heenan says:

      4 Sep4 September 07:59

      Agreed – as a consumer curve is great, and all the investor cash following in means they’re now going to be around for a while.

      As a potential investor, I could not find any even slightly plausible route to profitability described in their deck. There were no financial projections at all. Much is made of the quick growth in users and comparing it to say Monzo – but rather omitting that Curve achieves this by little more than ongoing bribing of users (or however you characterize making a loss on most transactions whilst users benefit from rewards on the underlying cards).

      It feels just like the dot-com bubble all over again.

      • Rooster says:

        4 Sep4 September 11:20

        Yes very much so, their data on use is not accurate as people aren’t use the card everyday when they can use the underlying card instead unless its HMRC or abroad spending even then you have to avoid the pre auth transactions such as hotels/rental cars etc

        • Renaud says:

          4 Sep4 September 18:53

          I took the card for HMRC initially, but converted almost all my non-Amex spending to Curve. Easier to use the same card as you don’t have to remember all the PIN codes for the ones you don’t use often. And with the Go Back in Time function, you don’t have to switch cards in the app immediately before use.

• Shoestring says:

  3 Sep3 September 15:17

  O/T somehow I missed the new 16-17 railcard that came out yesterday. My son *had* mentioned it but I dismissed it saying (ill-informedly) ‘you can’t buy season tickets with railcards’. Then today, buying his Adult season ticket as he’s now 16, the station agent also mentioned it, I said ‘how does that work?’ and he said ‘we don’t really know yet’, so I just carried on buying my son his season ticket for the next 6 weeks, £220 – twice as much as that of an under-16.

  Got home & looked up 16-17 railcard, & sure you can buy season tickets with it, 50% discount ie same cost as an under 16, plus time it right & you can add on 4 months once they’re 18, almost enough in my son’s case to finish the 6th Form.

  Hared it back to the station just to see if I could get a refund – answer yes – then went home again to work out how to get the digital railcard. Not so easy, it’s railcard app first then open account & buy the 16-17 card, upload digital passport photo, give passport details, pay, get code & enter it on the railcard app. Anyway, only took a few minutes with my son’s help. Then back to the station to buy a half price season ticket with the digital 16-17 card as proof of entitlement, mission success.

  He’s got 12 half terms left, so that’s about £1100 saving over the 2 years.

  • The Original David says:

    3 Sep3 September 15:38

    How far do you send your son to go to school?! Or is this First Class?

    • Shoestring says:

      3 Sep3 September 16:01

      yep not so good as going to the local comp but it’s a good school & the other advantages

      with all the messing around waiting, getting to the station etc plus journey time, I guess return it’s 2hrs a day

      at the same age I had to walk 1 mile to catch a coach, travel 4 miles or so etc & I guess that ended up more like 80-90 mins/ day, so he’s not that much worse off plus does actually study on the train a bit

      there’s a handful get on with him, then next station (10 mins away) along absolutely tons of them

      early introduction to the daily commute

  • Mark2 says:

    3 Sep3 September 15:54

    You can save more by buying in minimum five week blocks Monday to Friday avoiding weekends. With a bit of effort you can often avoid holidays, bank holidays too. I used to do this when mine was £800 for five weeks (seven years ago).

    • Shoestring says:

      3 Sep3 September 16:02

      not an option down here – they only have 1 option on the first section (I split tickets), in the 2nd option more choices but not what you mention

      • Mark2 says:

        3 Sep3 September 23:12

        It may have changed, but over one month you could have any length.

• Harry T says:

  3 Sep3 September 19:53

  OT:
  Has anyone used Curve to pay into investment funds with Vanguard or Fidelity, with an underlying Virgin Card? Are there cash advance fees?

  • axel says:

    3 Sep3 September 20:40

    no fees investing in vanguard through hargreaves lansdown with curve 🙂

• Spaghetti Town says:

  3 Sep3 September 20:02

  The Virgin Credit card is now compatible with apple pay.

  • Harry T says:

    3 Sep3 September 20:27

    Yes, just seen this in the app.

• Benilyn says:

  3 Sep3 September 20:28

  OT: 1Y Creation CC IHG Premium is coming to 1Y anniversary. Can I cancel, earn my free night from previous year and sign up again? I need that bonus….

  • TGLoyalty says:

    3 Sep3 September 20:35

    I wouldn’t bank on Creation accepting you again based on reports in past comments sections.

    Can’t get the free card aswell for 10k?

  • the_real_a says:

    3 Sep3 September 21:16

    Yup – i know of several people now who have cancelled, and are of A1 credit scores with both high and modest incomes who get an auto decline when applying for a second time. Its happening too often to be a coincidence.

    • Benylin says:

      3 Sep3 September 22:28

      Ahh annoying…. to pay £99 to continue or just give up …

• Shoestring says:

  3 Sep3 September 20:42

  Damn, just realised I will need to renew my daughter’s passport so that in the event of Brexit & onerous ‘6 months left on passport’ travel condition, she can come with us at Xmas

  • Shoestring says:

    3 Sep3 September 20:51

    https://www.passportwaitingtime.co.uk
    currently running at 12 days for child renewal passport so it can wait until after she comes back from Sevilla (half term with my wife, luckily back well before 31st October)

  • Shoestring says:

    3 Sep3 September 21:31

    I can’t take the possibly small risk of messing up Xmas hols for the matter of £49 fee * (5 months remaining/ 60 months validity) = £4.08

    calculation would be slightly different if I didn’t call it 60 months but 54 (as you can’t use the last 6 months in Europe after Brexit) or put in exact weeks/ days – but you get my drift – for the sake of a fiver I’d be the least popular person around for months if my daughter can’t travel at Xmas – or I might be forced to fast-track it, which doesn’t come cheap

    if Brexit doesn’t look like happening or gets delayed until Xmas or something like that, I’ll still be in a position to delay renewing until January

    anyway, the vote in 30 mins (watching it on Sky News) plus the possible debates tomorrow might actually shed a bit more light on your question!

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.