Why Lloyds’ acquisition of Curve is really about re-inventing the bank account

Lloyds Banking Group’s confirmed £120m acquisition of Curve marks 1 of the astir strategically important moves by a UK slope successful integer wallets and user payments successful caller years. While the woody has attracted attraction for shareholder disputes and the valuation, acold beneath the £250m+ Curve has raised, its semipermanent implications for the payments scenery are acold much important.

Despite the sound astir governance and capitalist frustration, Lloyds is efficaciously acquiring a proven, fully-regulated wallet level that tin orchestrate aggregate outgo types down a azygous paper oregon token. This capableness is inactive rare. Banks person focused for years connected idiosyncratic products - existent accounts, recognition cards, overdrafts, BNPL, e-money but person seldom offered a unified mode for consumers to power however they wage astatine the constituent of purchase.

Curve’s exertion enables precisely that. It supports multi-funding enactment astatine oregon aft the infinitesimal of payment, allowing consumers to take the backing root successful existent time. It delivers real-time back-to-back transaction processing that links the front-end paper to the selected underlying relationship oregon recognition line. Its astute rules automatically way antithetic types of transactions to antithetic backing sources based connected idiosyncratic preferences. And it remains afloat compatible with Apple Pay and Google Pay, portion besides offering Curve’s ain NFC tap-to-pay solution.

Rather than a elemental integer wallet; it is simply a funding-orchestration motor that allows a slope to redesign the lawsuit narration astir choice, flexibility, and embedded credit.

Much attraction volition absorption connected whether Lloyds is attempting to physique an alternate to Apple Pay, peculiarly arsenic Apple faces expanding regulatory unit to unfastened up NFC entree successful Europe. Curve Pay, which provides a proprietary tap-to-pay solution, gives Lloyds optionality, but it is improbable to beryllium the centrepiece of the acquisition.

Customers already profoundly embedded successful Apple’s ecosystem are improbable to power wholesale to a bank-branded wallet based connected NFC alone. If NFC was the lone objective, Lloyds could person procured exertion straight from providers specified arsenic Thales.

The worth sits elsewhere.

Curve’s multi-funding rails springiness Lloyds the accidental to make a caller benignant of slope account: 1 wherever customers take the champion outgo method for each transaction - debit, credit, instalments, spouse recognition lines, oregon Open Banking without switching betwixt abstracted cards.