Originally Posted by
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I don't know if they are dishonest, sloppy or just stupid. Their home page says today there are now 'no currency conversion fees' when you travel abroad yet their other documentation says there is a 1% fee. If this change sticks, it'll be a big improvement and makes them competitive against their rivals.
Other parts of the site say there's no fees for using Amex. It's all a bit too fluid when they're asking people to pay up to £75 for a card which no-one (including the company themselves) seems to know what it's going to be offering next month.
This is what they currently (Apr 25th) say (although note it's contradicted elsewhere)
Well its partially true - its a new feature they brought into the app - which i think is pretty good. Somehow they chose to hide many things in their website which i find more or less equal to false advertising as it forces the customer to decide based on partial facts.
It allows you to select the funding currency of the base card. ie, If you have a 0% fx card in your wallet - say Hfx Clarity / Santander Zero - and you are travelling in Iceland - you can select the base currency of funding card to be ISK (instead of GBP) and thereby avoid Curve fx fee (1%).
But again - this is risky as Curve processed the payments based on the funding card selected at the time when they actual process the transaction with the funding card and not when customer makes the payment.
So any contactless transactions are subject to glitches.
The bug certainly is a critical one; I wonder why they didn't block CNP transactions in the first place if they knew the existence of bug from last weekend. Basic understanding in any domain (esp in Banking) is isolate the affected piece and protect the rest. Instead, Curve somehow decided to take everyone for a ride despite the known bug !
My Amex got charged with 3.5K (600GBP marked as final) and rest pending due to the bug - as transactions with a particular retailer got posted twice. I am liaising with Curve at the moment to get it reversed.
Further, Curve boasts to allow any Visa / Master / Amex cards to be added to the wallet provided their currency is in the supported list. But most (if not all) of my Indian Cards fail to get added. I believe its because of 3D secure verification (for all CNP transactions) imposed on any cards issued in India. I had an initial discussion with Curve and they are of initial opinion that their acquirer may not support 3D secure. !!!
This makes me believe that the feature list in their website should be taken with a pinch of salt as they haven't done proper research or hands-on on the cards & payments space across geographies.