On Late Monday afternoon Curve announced that some of its services were back after having shut them down because of their affiliation with Wirecard.
On Friday morning June 26, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) ordered Wirecard to freeze all assets and regulated activities in its UK subsidiary. The move came after a week of turmoil in which the beleaguered German FinTech company acknowledged that €1.9bn ($2.1bn) in its finances never existed, saw its former CEO being arrested suspected of having inflated the company’s assets, and finally filed for insolvency on Thursday June 25.
However, the implosion of Wirecard and the UK regulator’s subsequent freeze of its assets meant that many businesses reliant on its services also have to shut down their services. Over the past few days, FinTech firms like Curve, ANNA Money, Holvi and Pockit have all been forced to close down parts of their services.
However, it seems that after a hectic weekend, Curve is now back up and running.
“We’re back! Wow, what a weekend! We know how much you were missing us, so we moved Heaven and Earth to make it happen,” Curve wrote in a statement on its community.
As of Monday June 29, customers are once again able to pay with their Curve Card, use Curve Fronted and see their balance and Curve Cash points. It is still waiting to set up its Curve Send and Refunds features.
“We are now working on enabling Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay as well as Garmin and Fitbit,” the company continued. “Plus, we know how much you love the ‘Go back in time’ feature, so we will also have that up and running again in no-time.”
Curve also assured customers who have “issued by Wirecard” written on their cards that their cards are once again valid. The FinTech startup added that new customers may still get cards that have the message written on them “and that’s OK.”
“We are 100% Wirecard-free after the migration work we did this weekend,” Curve continued. “Wirecard used to be our card issuer, but we brought that in-house and are doing that ourselves now, as a Principal Member of Mastercard. To bring the card issuing in-house, we had legal requirements to also become an e-money issuer (we sent you a letter about this earlier this year). Therefore, we had to open settlement and safeguarding accounts (to keep your money safe) and Investec was able to accommodate our requirements over the weekend.
“We still use GPS for our Curve card processing and we also thank them for pulling through for us this weekend for the migration to bring issuing in-house.”
Because Wirecard served as Curve’s merchant acquirer to process the transactions of users’ bank cards, the FinTech has been forced to found a new supplier, sign a contract and integrate them. Curve decided to go with Checkout.com, which recently became one of Europe’s most valuable privately owned FinTech companies after it raised a $150m Series B round and bagged a $5.5bn valuation.
“Thank you, Checkout.com – one of Europe’s finest FinTechs and, as luck would have it, the agile, flexible, hard-working heroes we needed to get us back up and running,” Curve wrote. “Thank you Checkout.com – we are amazed by you already! You jumped in and worked as hard as we did to get this over the line.”
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