Britain’s biggest high street lender is closing in on a deal to buy Curve, a provider of digital wallet technology that its new owner hopes will give it an edge in the race to build smarter online payments systems.
Sky News has learnt that Lloyds Banking Group could announce the acquisition of Curve for about £120m as soon as this week.
City sources said this weekend that the terms of a transaction had been agreed, although a formal announcement could yet slip to later in the month.
Lloyds has been in talks with Curve about a takeover for some time, with Sky News revealing that discussions were taking place in July.
The financial services giant, which owns the Halifax brand and operates the biggest bank branch network in the UK, believes Curve’s digital wallet platform will be a valuable asset amid growing regulatory pressure on Apple to open its payment services to rivals.
Lloyds closes in on £120m takeover of fintech Curve | Money News | Sky News
Nothing new in that article.
If/when the sale actually happens we may get some information regarding possible end date for Curve users.
How do you mean?
From what I have read, if Lloyds buy Curve the expectation is that Curve as we know it will end.
Lloyds want the technology but not to keep Curve running.
Well as long as they keep the “all-cards-in-one” feature (it’s reason for being in the first place) I’ll be happy.
Have to say I’m not sure quite what other major features have been introduced over time so don’t have a picture of Curve in full.
Definitely a watch that space situation. 
Hmm, I hope Lloyds uses the fact Curve has branches in Europe to expand at least a little… if they have all this wallet infrastructure and some existing agreements with European banks (even if it’s just to licence Curve infrastructure/app to them) maybe Lloyds can go back to being more than a local player.
Any idea what sort of business they conduct in their branches?
(I’m reading there aren’t any customer-facing branches).
I think you’re probably right in that there aren’t customer facing branches, but what there probably is, is a licence in place to offer eMoney services and sales for Curve’s wallet that they’re trying to make a competitor
If Lloyds wanted such a thing they’d have just got them. Curve didn’t pull off some massive coup by getting these European licenses.
Getting licences for a wallet product that they don’t have built would be a little odd, don’t you think?
If they wanted to expand in Europe, as you suggest this acquisition enables, then they’d just get the requisite licenses.
Again, they might not want to start from scratch building a wallet.
It’s a proven money loser and has zero synergies for them. If they wanted to do something in these markets, they’d just do it.
Lloyds, one of the biggest banks in the UK and iirc the biggest lender in the UK with probably the best business in the UK (imo), have no synergies with a mobile wallet, when markets are starting to require Apple to open up?
I can think of one very easily - they could stop paying Apple money and move over to their own digital wallet.
Alternatively maybe they have some Zelle-like plans, some plans to make some QR payments that aren’t related to card fees which rolling out machines that can support it to merchants using their acquiring business.
There are plenty of avenues you can monetise, Curve just wasn’t in the place to do it being independent of a massive player, as they just had to eat fees and try to make them up with memberships. Like, the more you use Curve the more money they lose
Why does any of this require European licenses?
Um, I said earlier why European licences could be useful. I can’t help you understand it too. Curve obviously has synergies domestically and internationally.
We can agree there are synergies for their tech in the UK.
I don’t see how those synergies can be at all relevant in markets elsewhere, where Lloyds do not have a presence. The emoney licenses themselves are not useful unless they’re offering a wallet product. If they did need such a license for a venture, they’d just get them.
Curve’s customer base skews very much towards the UK AIUI.
Curve have also made the platform, to be fair. Could Lloyds throw engineers at it? Yes. Why would they do that though when they can buy an established brand and rebrand it
What has this to do with operations outside the UK?
I suspect Lloyds thinks the underlying technology that Curve has will help to accelerate its push towards being a completely branchless entity.
Perhaps the ‘many cards in one’ idea will help to harmonise cards of the various different brands and products it has across Lloyds, Halifax, BoS etc.
One other thought, they seem to be going after the wealthy customers of late, who are more likely to be borderless than most of us. Maybe that is what they want Curve for. Then again, the payment networks are already global so that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe we’ll find out in May when they next have an AGM.