Most people who know me are somewhat aware that I travel quite a lot. I love visiting new places, and I really enjoy being on the move. One thing that often bugs me, however, is how awkward using money in different countries can be.
Getting local cash at a decent rate can be a pain. Using an ATM abroad incurs fees from your bank, and you don’t necessarily get good rates. Going to a currency exchange can be a hassle too. I usually carry some dollar notes on me anyway, because they’re accepted almost everywhere.
Using your debit or credit card abroad incurs yet more fees, with unpredictable and usually poor rates.
This is where my new Curve card comes in. A Curve card essentially acts as a proxy between the world and your existing cards. You can add multiple credit and debit cards to it, and select which one to use for each payment (or even change it afterwards!). Using your Curve card doesn’t incur any currency conversion fees, and you receive a better rate than most high street currency exchanges.
Cleverly, all the transactions on your Curve appear as purchases on the “source” cards, which means you can also take cash out of an ATM using your Curve card, and choose to source the cash from any of your cards, including credit cards (without incurring the cash advance fees that you normally would), debit cards and pre-paid cards.
So what does this mean for travelers? Firstly, using your Curve card saves you money abroad, both when using it to purchase goods and services, or getting cash from an ATM.
Secondly, it’s far more secure. Just take your Curve out with you, and leave your main cards in the safe at the hotel, or simply keep them elsewhere on your person. If your Curve card gets stolen or lost, simply open the app and deactivate it. Even if it somehow got cloned by some unscrupulous bartender or waiter, you’ll receive instant alerts of any payments, so you’d know the instant it was used, which means you could instantly disable the card and request a refund.
Thirdly, you get real-time feedback and notifications, making budgeting far easier. You can tag your purchases, add notes, and scan receipts to add to purchases. This means you can keep track of your spending, check how much you’re spending on travel, food, shopping, etc, and even use it to form the basis of your expenses claim if travelling for business.
In my opinion, Curve is still lacking a few features though. You can’t yet add it to Apple Pay, which would streamline payments even further. You can’t add a single debit or credit card to multiple Curve accounts either. The reason for this is that when travelling as a group or a couple, you could all add some money into a shared pre-paid card (e.g. Monzo), and then add that to your individual Curves. This would solve all those split-payment problems when you’re paying for supplies or travel costs for the whole group. If there’s any “debate” around a certain item being charged to the group card, it’s easy to “go back in time” (as Curve put it), and charge it to a different (i.e. personal) card.
I’m pretty sure the group payment challenge is solvable, either with existing tech, or by someone shortly bringing out fintech joint accounts. Either way, using Curve has definitely made my travelling life a lot easier, and I’m excited to see what they do next.
Shameless promo: sign up for Curve here with code NPWZA and you’ll get £5, and so will I.