About Curve
Literally one card to rule them all, Curve is a hassle-free financial super app that connects all users payment cards in one. Curve aggregates multiple cards through its accompanying mobile app, allowing users to seamlessly make payments and withdrawals from a single location and to switch cards after each transaction is complete.
The challenge
As a financial service provider that unites users’ card payments into one app, Curve needs instant processing to maintain its exceptional user experiences. Working with a sole acquirer meant an inflexible pricing strategy and limited scope for expansion. Furthermore, Curve faced challenges with reconciliation, settlement times, and limited cashflow management so it sought out an additional acquirer with a forward-thinking mindset and support strategy that matched its own.
As an experience-driven organization with sharp focus on our users, we are delighted to work with Nuvei who has supported us and delivered value at every stage of the partnership. The team understood our unique challenges of working with a single acquirer, found ways to lower our costs, improve transaction speed, and provide scope to expand our payment methods in future.
The solution
By uniting Curve and Nuvei’s innovative, results-focused teams, the two companies implemented a payments optimization strategy designed to improve acceptance rates, speed up settlement times, lower false declines, increase liquidity, and reduce Curve’s overall costs. As part of their partnership, Nuvei and Curve then mapped out a geographical expansion plan that includes additional payment methods to facilitate further growth.
The results
With its original acquirer, Curve’s best month for processing cost was August 2023 at 0.47%. In March 2024, with 90% of its volume with Nuvei, Curve achieved a processing cost of 0.45%. A typical month at Curve will have approximately £300 million in processing volume, so that 0.02% reduction reflects approximately £60,000 per month, or £720,000 per annum, thanks to moving the lion’s share of its processing to Nuvei.
Between March 2023 and March 2024, Curve saw an approval rate improvement of 0.5%. In a typical month, Curve processes approximately 11 million transactions, so the 0.5% improvement reflects approximately 55,000 transactions per month that were authorized rather than declined.
Customer experience is essential to Curve and it is paramount to us at Nuvei, too. That's why human-led expertise and support is in our DNA. We've been delighted to help drive Curve's approval rates up and processing costs down, and it's down to the quality of our partnership as much as our technology. We continually strive to be a true payments partner, to accelerate Curve's revenue.
We’ve been able to accelerate our revenue organically and have approximately £1.5 million more in processing volume, at an average transaction value of £27, every month. Above all, we are now able to serve our customers better, experience fewer declines, and offer greater customer satisfaction.
How can other financial service providers accelerate revenue?
Consider the power of partnerships
Your payments partner should be exactly that. On-demand humanled support and local expertise should be freely available 24/7, whether you’re operating in one market or many.
Seek strength in numbers
Find resilience and redundancy in multiple acquiring partners. Streamline the management of these multiple providers with an integrated payment orchestration solution.
Can you easily add and remove payment methods?
Consider scalability for the future. Can your payments partner easily diversify your mix of APMs in different regions if or when you expand?
Check the cost of your false declines
European merchants could lose around $25B this year just to false declines, but only around $12B to fraud. So, consider your fraud rules.
