The founder of UK fintech Curve proudly tells Tech.eu that its 200-strong workforce comprises 45 nationalities, likening it to a “melting pot”.
It seems apt then that Curve’s headquarters are in a pretty mews in London’s Paddington district, one of the capital’s most cosmopolitan and polyglot areas, in a building that could be mistaken for an international business school or an art gallery.
Waiting in reception, on a boiling hot day, Tech.eu can hear a cacophony of languages as parched employees walk past reaching for the water fountain.
One of these overseas nationals is the Curve founder himself, Shachar Bialick, a softly-spoken Israeli who founded Curve in 2015 after moving to the UK.
Bialick says: “Usually immigrants come from a very uncomfortable position, which means they have more pain and suffering. It means by definition they have more resilience.”
What is Curve?
Curve is a UK fintech that is slightly under the radar: it’s not a flashy headliner like Revolut or Monzo nor a chirpy challenger often in the news, like Zilch.
In fact, Bialick, 42, a serial startup founder, is arguably more well-known than Curve, frequently popping up on panels and podcasts, usually with a headline about his time in the Israeli special forces.
Curve is a digital wallet which allows users to consolidate all their bank and loyalty cards through one app and make payments that way.
Digital wallets are big business these days: two in five online purchases in the UK were made using a digital wallet in 2024 and almost half of Brits (45 per cent) leave the house with only their phone as a payment method; meanwhile, in Brazil, instant digital payment Pix has supplanted credit cards in popularity.
Curve has around six million customers, half from the UK, half from the rest of Europe, who spent over £30bn on the platform in 2022. It makes money from card transactions, subscription fees and also on rewards fees and lending.
But Curve is a bit of a David, compared to the Goliath that is Apple Pay, which has over 750m users globally and is used by 63 per cent of the UK population who use mobile payments. Then there are other mobile wallets such as Google Pay, PayPal, Revolut and MasterCard Click to Pay.
Taking fight to Apple
But Apple’s vice-like grip on the European market could be under threat after a landmark European Commission ruling, which has allowed alternative digital wallets on the iPhone.
Now, Curve, with its Curve Pay digital wallet, can be the default wallet setting on iPhones.
Bialick says: “That enables us now to compete directly head to head with the likes of Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.
“Unlike Apple Pay, Curve is able to give you the same wallet experience, tap and go, but it gives you much more value. For example, Curve is the only wallet that saves you money on FX on travel.”
Other advantages of Curve Pay, which is also available on Android devices, over Apple Pay, include rewards and splitting payments while saving banks millions in transaction fees paid to Apple, he claims..
Bialick says over 35 per cent of Curve’s customers have signed up for Curve Pay as its default iPhone setting.
Funding to date
Curve has raised around £200m to date, a figure Bialick calls frugal, contrasting it with the larger funds raised by Revolut, and pointing to its unflashy offices as an indicator of its frugality.
Investors in Curve include Speedinvest, Seedcamp, Santander InnoVentures, Outward VC, IDC Ventures as well as fintech luminaries including Ricky Knox, Tandem Bank co-founder, and Taavet Hinrikus, Wise co-founder.
This year, it secured £37m in fresh funding, led by Israeli Hanaco Ventures, which invested in Curve for the first time and has a focus on Israeli startups.
Curve was last valued at £133m, when it raised in 2023, but Bialick rebuffed questions about its current valuation.
Curve’s financials
In its latest financials for the year ending 2023, Curve reported revenues of £26.7m, on losses of nearly £36m.
Bialick says he hopes Curve will begin turning a profit in the next six months, which seems a stretch, saying profitability will satisfy its backers.
Curve took some arrows in the media after its auditor PWC warned about a “material uncertainty” about Curve's future, in the accounts.
On the warning, Bialick said, post the Wirecard controversy, auditors are a lot more risk-averse and want to see a startup’s clear cash flow view over the next 18 months.
Lloyds in Curve acquisition talks
In the past few days (after this interview took place), Sky News reported that Lloyds Banking Group, Britain’s biggest high street bank, is in talks to buy Curve, for a price said to be up to £120m, with a deal potentially announced as early as September.
Lloyds is said to have identified Curve as a strategically attractive bid target as it pushes deeper into payment infrastructure under CEO Charlie Nunn.
Lloyds is also said to believe that Curve would be a financially sound asset to own because of the fees Apple charges consumers to use its Apple Pay service.
Move to UK
Bialick arrived in the UK in 2013, after spending a year at the Singapore arm of the famous French business school, Insead, an experience he describes as giving him “humbleness”, flattening his ego as he was surrounded by higher achievers than him.
In the UK, he joined payments startup Checkout.com when it was a tiddler, with just 12 employees, as head of product.
The idea of Curve had been bubbling away in Bialick’s head since 2006, he says, but he wanted to know more about the world of payments, to ensure Curve could be viable.
On Checkout.com, he said: “It was a remarkable experience in terms of learning about payments, learning about what it is to be an employee.”
In fact, he says he is still friendly with Checkout.com founder, Guillaume Pousaz, (although, he says, he didn’t know Pousaz had recently switched his residency from the UK to Monaco).
It was Pousaz, he says, who helped Curve out of the Wirecard scandal, with Checkout.com replacing Wirecard as its card acquirer, and Pousaz, he says warmly, not taking advantage of Curve’s perilous position.
Israeli startups founded and exited
Bialick was born in Tel Aviv, Israel's second-largest city and was brought up in the settlement city of Ariel, in the occupied West Bank.
He lived in Israel up until the age of 30, founding and exiting four startups solving “ad hoc issues”, none of them achieving “Spotify levels of success”.
He says: “What it does give you is ten years of deep experience mentoring people, raising funds, working with shareholders, understanding how markets operate.”
Before that, at the age of 18, he had carried out compulsory service in the Israeli military, which “rejigged his mindset”, instilling in him the mantra that “everything is possible”.
He tells of a brutal military exercise, walking for 40km, in 40cm of water, in heavy rain, with 40 kilos on his back.
“When you have finished that, it gives you the confidence that actually I can do what I thought I couldn’t do,” he says.
One solution, posited by Bialick, for more UK startup success stories is to bring back compulsory military service (like in Israel), shaking up the UK class system by bringing together a smorgasbord of social and ethnic communities.
He points to a slew of successful startups, with Israeli military-experienced founders, including US insurtech Lemonade and global software outfit Similarweb.
Management style
Plastered on the walls of Curve’s offices are a dizzying array of leadership principles, like “focus on the mission” and “obligation to dissent”.
Bialick likens his role to a gym instructor, “coaching and training” his “professional sports team”, driving them forward. At one point, he likens himself to a “Ferrari”.
“Our job is to coach people to what great looks like,” he says.
One of his big rallying cries is “speed of decision making”, so he often asks employees to deliver projects earlier than they said they could.
He admits the high-performance, Darwinian culture is not for everyone but says the culture is well set, joyfully recalling overhearing a conversation when a Curve employee effectively ousted an underperforming employee from the company.
Domestic life and UK government
This high-performance culture appears to extend to his personal life.
Bialick, who is married with two children, spends the little free time he has “formalising physics theories for fun” or “iterating on new AI tech”.
For the most part, Bialick is a fan of the UK, saying institutions like the NHS are “remarkable” but not appreciated by the Brits.
However, he has concerns about the ramifications of tax reforms, which have targeted wealthy non-domiciled residents.
He adds: “My biggest concern right now is that the UK has done remarkably well building an ecosystem. But will they continue to build it and continue to support it?”
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