Curve Card adds 1.5% fee to credit card repayments and NS&I / Premium Bond purchases

Curve Card made a slightly confusing announcement on Friday, emailing members to tell them that it was imposing a 1.5% fee on anyone who used their card to pay off a credit card.

The reason it was confusing is that paying credit cards using Curve Card is against its terms and conditions.  It represented financial recycling.

Because Curve Card recharges your payment to whatever Visa or Mastercard you link to it, you were effectively paying off a credit card with another credit card to earn points.  This was not allowed.

Curve Card had already blocked some financial institutions from its system.  American Express seemed to come and go – a lot of people found that they could pay off their American Express bills using Curve and earn points on whatever underlying credit card was linked to it.  Personally I never got this to work, but I have a ‘first generation’ Curve Card which is structured slightly differently.

Which merchants will Curve Card now charge you 1.5% to pay?

Curve Card has now categorised two types of payments which will incur a 1.5% fee.  These are known as ‘Curve Fronted’ transactions and are explained on the Curve website site.

The fees are triggered by the coding applied by the merchant.  This may lead to anomalies as some merchants are incorrectly coded, or have a code which represents a different part of their business to the part you are transacting with.

The following payments use Merchant Category Code 9399 and are now charged at 1.5%:

• HMRC (this change was made a few months ago)
• National Savings & Investments, including Premium Bonds
• DVLA Vehicle Tax
• Student Loan Payments

Until yesterday, all of the above – except for HMRC – were payable with Curve Card for free and could be recharged to a credit card which earned points.

The following payments use Merchant Category Code 6012 and are now charged at 1.5%:

• Paying credit card bills, loans or mortgages, where your Curve Card recharges to a credit card
• Purchasing financial services or products from banks, Credit Unions, Deposit Takers
• Purchasing foreign or non-fiat currency such as cryptocurrency, travelers cheques or money orders
• Purchasing store value cards such as prepaid cards

In reality, most of the above were already blocked by Curve Card on an ad-hoc basis and were against its terms and conditions in any event.

Barclaycard is known to block payments with Curve Card and this policy is unlikely to change.  Other credit card companies may move to block Curve Card payments to discourage financial recycling even if Curve itself is happy to allow it.

Can you get around this fee?

Yes. 

If you have Curve Metal (£15 per month), you are exempt from these charges.

This means you can now, openly, pay off your credit card with another (or even the same!) Visa or Mastercard credit card linked to Curve as long as you pay £15 per month for Curve Metal.

Does this makes sense?

It depends.  For a start, some underlying credit cards will – irrespective of whether Curve imposes its 1.5% fee – treat these payments as a cash advance.  This means that you wouldn’t earn points and, worse, would be hit with a 3% cash advance fee.

Barclaycard is also known to block Curve Card payments and others may follow suit (MBNA is fine, Amex is usually fine).  The only way to be sure if a payment will work is to test.

Secondly, you are limited by your Curve Card limits.  Most people start at £50,000 per year, with daily and monthly limits on top.   If you’re lucky you may get moved up to £100,000 per year.  Even if you are a high spender, you will still bump up against the cap on your total Curve Card spending.

In some scenarios it would work.  If you could recharge £50,000 of credit card repayments to your Virgin Atlantic Reward+ Mastercard, which earns 1.5 miles per £1 spent, you’d be picking up 75,000 additional Flying Club miles per year.

In this scenario, the £15 per month cost of Curve Metal would make sense.  However, it would depend on Virgin Money deciding not to treat your Curve Card transactions to financial services businesses as cash withdrawals, or deciding to block Curve Card payments entirely.

Is it still worth getting a Curve Card?

It has some value, yes.

For a start, you can still recharge any purchase which is ‘debit card only’ to an underlying Visa or Mastercard credit card and so earn points.

As long as the purchase doesn’t fall into the categories listed above, you’re fine.

You can also make free ATM withdrawals and have them recharged to your credit card, treated as a miles-earning purchase.  There is a monthly cap which varies depending on which Curve Card you have.

Curve Card will pay you £10 to try it ….

…. so there is no risk.

To sign up to Curve, simply go to this page of their website.  The easiest thing to do is order the free Blue card and then upgrade to Black or Metal once you have got familiar with it, although you can start immediately on Black or Metal if you want.

Curve will pay you £10 for trying it out if you use our link.

Our introductory guide to Curve Card is here if you are a new HfP reader.

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