Curve built a card that lets you carry one piece of plastic instead of five. It never quite told you the maths didn't work and that tension is what's just been resolved through the Curve Lloyds acquisition, now completed after months of shareholder wrangling.
For anyone asking how does Curve make money, the answer starts with a gap the company has spent a decade trying to close.
Subscriptions Plug The Interchange Gap
Curve makes money from interchange fees, monthly subscriptions, Curve Flex instalment fees, FX markups, and merchant partnerships revenue lines that exist largely because Curve's core payment-routing mechanism is structurally difficult to make profitable on its own.
Curve earns interchange revenue on what's called the "Leg 1" transaction, but loses money on "Leg 2," the second half of every payment it routes. That mechanism is central to how does Curve make money, and it's also the deeper context behind the Curve Lloyds acquisition that has now gone through.
For founders watching from the sidelines, it's a useful lesson in what happens when a clever product sits on top of demanding unit economics for a decade.
The two-leg transaction problem (Curve interchange fees explained)
Curve interchange fees work in Curve's favour on only half of every transaction it processes. When you tap your Curve card, Curve earns interchange income on Leg 1 Paymentsculture's analysis estimates this is subject to the regulated interchange levels of 0.20% on debit and 0.30% on credit card transactions in the UK and EU, though actual rates can vary by geography and card type. That's the fee card networks pay issuers, and it's genuine revenue.
Leg 2 is where it gets harder. To settle the payment, Curve routes the transaction on to your underlying linked card and that leg costs Curve the full acquiring fees plus gateway costs. If it fails and retries don't succeed, Paymentsculture reports Curve can absorb a loss equal to the entire transaction amount. That mismatch is where Curve interchange fees do the heavy lifting but they were never designed to cover Leg 2's costs alone.
Paymentsculture's analysis argues this makes Curve's payment-routing mechanism structurally loss-making on a transaction-by-transaction basis, regardless of how much overall spending grows. Worth separating from company-level performance, though: Curve UK Limited's turnover fell to roughly £39.35m in its most recent filed accounts, down from around £44.95m the year before, with losses narrowing to about £3.4m. That's the clearest single answer to how does Curve make money not that every transaction loses money outright, but that the routing mechanism was never going to close the gap alone.
In Curve's FY2023 accounts the breakdown Paymentsculture's analysis is built on interchange income came to £14.6m, subscription income £7.2m, and platform income £4.9m. FY2024 accounts have since been filed showing the turnover decline above, though a full revenue-by-category breakdown for that year wasn't available at the time of writing.
Platform income is worth a mention: retailers pay Curve to be featured as cashback partners in the app, and firms including Samsung and Huawei have used Curve's technology as the mobile payments layer inside some devices.
Subscription tiers and platform revenue
Curve now runs four subscription tiers, and the paid ones are doing real work to keep the business alive. Curve Pay is free but carries a 2.99% FX fee on international spending above a £250 monthly allowance. The three paid tiers above it trade a monthly fee for higher fee-free spending limits, ATM withdrawals, and cashback.
(Source: Finder UK, Curve.com, current as of 2026 pricing)
Then there's Curve Flex. Curve describes it as a credit and instalment feature rather than formal buy-now-pay-later, though it functions similarly to BNPL products in practice: customers "swipe" a past purchase and convert it into an instalment plan- 3, 6, 12 or 24 months at a typical APR of 19.99%.
Move the balance onto a credit card instead of an installment plan, and Curve charges a 1.5% transfer fee on the amount moved. It's a genuinely clever mechanism: Curve isn't lending against a new purchase, it's retroactively refinancing one you've already made.
Add it up and the picture is clear. How does Curve make money, in practice? Not from the card swipe itself from everything wrapped around it.
The Lloyds acquisition talks
Lloyds Banking Group signed a share sale and purchase agreement to acquire Curve for around £120 million, first reported by Sky News, and the deal has since completed Companies House records show founder-CEO Shachar Bialick is no longer listed as a director, with Helen Bierton and Kim Eun-Soo Verhaaf now among the company's officers. The figure is roughly half the at least £250 million Curve is reported to have raised since founding in 2015 and far below the £50–60 billion valuation Curve's management once floated at the height of the fintech boom.
The Curve Lloyds acquisition didn't go smoothly on the way there. IDC Ventures, which holds a 12% stake, publicly opposed the sale and said it was "reserving all legal rights" over governance concerns. A shareholder push to remove chair Lord Fink and Bialick was voted down before the sale was confirmed.
Bialick had been candid about the outcome before his departure. He'd acknowledged the sale price was disappointing, and warned that without the Lloyds deal, Curve would likely run out of money. In a circular to shareholders, Curve put it plainly: "We recognise that the value of this transaction falls short of the ambitions we all held for Curve, and we share the disappointment some of you may have in this outcome." Lloyds has said the transaction wasn't expected to materially impact the group's capital position or full-year guidance.
Is Curve Safe? What the sale means for customer money
Curve is safe to use because it's a regulated e-money institution not a bank and that distinction matters more than ever now the Curve Lloyds acquisition has completed. Curve UK Limited is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under firm reference number 900926, while Curve Europe UAB is licensed by the Bank of Lithuania for EEA customers.
Eligible purchases can receive up to £100,000 of protection under Curve's own Customer Protection policy, subject to its terms and exclusions a contractual chargeback-style mechanism, not FSCS deposit protection, since Curve doesn't hold customer deposits the way a bank does. Curve also doesn't expose your underlying card details to merchants. Anyone asking is Curve safe should sit with that distinction before assuming Curve behaves like a current account.
Now the acquisition has completed, Curve continues operating under its existing FCA and Bank of Lithuania authorisations while Lloyds integrates Curve Pay into its own digital offering. If you're asking is Curve safe specifically because of the Lloyds headlines, the honest answer is that the sale is an ownership and governance event; the underlying regulatory protections haven't changed as a result.
What this means for Curve's future
Lloyds plans to integrate Curve Pay, and Curve's card-switching and rewards technology, into its current digital offering, giving its 28 million UK customers access to tools Curve built for over six million. That's the logic behind the deal: rather than build card aggregation and instalment lending from scratch, Britain's largest high street bank is acquiring a decade of fintech engineering for well below what Curve raised to build it a gap that reads as a discount, though the final price also reflects Curve's own cash pressure heading into the sale.
For Curve, it's an unglamorous but plausible ending to a business whose payment-routing mechanism never quite closed its own interchange gap, a reminder that clever product design and durable unit economics are two different achievements, and only one guarantees survival.
FAQs
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 faces the full acquiring and gateway costs on "Leg 2," and covers that gap with subscription fees, Curve Flex instalment charges, FX markups, and platform partnerships with retailers and device makers like Samsung, according to Paymentsculture's analysis of Curve's accounts.
2. Is Curve safe to use now the Lloyds acquisition has completed?
Curve remains regulated by the FCA under firm reference number 900926, and eligible purchases still carry up to £100,000 of protection under Curve's own Customer Protection policy, which is distinct from FSCS deposit protection. The acquisition changed Curve's ownership, not its regulatory status.
3. What are Curve interchange fees exactly?
Paymentsculture's analysis estimates Curve's Leg 1 interchange revenue is subject to the regulated 0.20% debit and 0.30% credit interchange levels applicable in the UK and EU though the exact rate Curve receives can vary by transaction type and geography, and this only covers half of what each payment costs to process.
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Editorial Note: The EP+ Editorial Desk covers UK startups, founder stories, and venture capital. All editorial content is independently produced and human-reviewed before publication.
Sources: Data drawn from Paymentsculture's analysis of Curve's annual report, Companies House filing records for Curve UK Limited, company data via Endole, Finder UK, Curve.com, and news 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.
