Curve bringing Samsung Pay to all banks through novel workaround

Samsung’s mobile wallet Samsung Pay has, until now, struggled with moderate support from the UK’s high street banks, with only HSBC, The Coop, Nationwide and Santander signed up… until now.

Curve, the all-in-one bank card, fresh off its edgy rebrand, announced this morning that it was adding support for its card to be added to Samsung Pay.

What this means is that, indirectly, all the Visa and Mastercards supported by Curve can now be used through Samsung Pay.

“It’s fantastic that Samsung customers will be able to take advantage of all the features of Curve, and we are happy to invite customers of more banks to the Samsung platform,” said Diego Rivas, Curve’s Head of Product

It’s a curious implementation of Curve’s technology, putting banks with no direct relationship with Samsung in the position of supporting Samsung Pay, reminiscent of Curve’sforays with American Express over the years.

Samsung Pay users who take advantage of Curve’s offering to add, say their ‘officially’ unsupported Halifax or Barclays card to Samsung Pay, will also take advantage of Curve’s existing feature-set—1% instant Curve Cash at certain retailers, Go-Back-In-Time to switch card payments, and cheap FX rates.

Curve also said this morning that the launch was a key part of its roadmap as it gears up to scale “throughout Europe and into the US in 2020”.

In July Curve closed a $55m Series B funding round at a $250m valuation, and in September Curve broke its crowdfunding target by raising £6m in an oversubscribed Crowdcube campaign.