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Curve, the London fintech that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending, has added support for Amex cards.

In effect the feature is being re-instated, having existing fleetingly when Curve was in testing back in 2016 before being unceremoniously blocked by American Express. The two companies appear to have finally settled their differences, which is undoubtedly good news for Curve customers who also have a U.K. Amex card.

Technically in Beta, the new Amex feature lets Curve customers add their Amex cards to Curve and spend with Amex anywhere the Curve Mastercard is accepted. This, says the fintech startup, solves the annoyance Amex card members face with some retailers not accepting Amex cards due to the card’s higher fees.

Presumably, Curve is happy to swallow these fees to better serve its customers, although we don’t know the specific commercial terms of any commercial agreement, if indeed there is one.

In further good news, Curve says that Amex card members will continue to earn American Express Membership Rewards points when they spend with their Curve card linked to Amex and will simultaneously earn Curve Rewards points, too. Curve itself offers rewards at 50 major brands, including Amazon, Uber, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Ocado, Selfridges, BP and more.

This should mean that Curve customers who switch the Curve app to charge their Amex card under the hood will receive twice the rewards. Once from Curve and once from Amex per qualifying transaction.

Curve says it has been trialling Amex compatibility with its platform in closed Beta since November. During Beta testing, at least 500 Curve users spent more than £1 million on their Amex cards by paying with Curve, apparently.

Adds Curve founder and CEO, Shachar Bialick, in a telling statement: “Ensuring Amex compatibility with Curve was one of our priorities and most asked for features by our customers. However, bringing Amex back to Curve was not an easy feat. There were challenges around brand and commercials, some of which still exists”.

In a brief call, Bialick paid tribute to his team for getting Amex support across the line and to the “progressive regulatory and competitive landscape” in Europe and the U.K., which he says is fostering competition in the payments and financial space and enabled Curve to bring Amex into its platform. “We hope Amex will continue to support the interest of their customers,” adds the Curve founder.

In other words, this is likely evidence of a startup pushing up against the boundaries of Open Banking and PSD2 to innovate on behalf of customers and finding that the regulation holds water. Hopefully we’ll see more innovation to come in the months and years ahead as other fintech startups do the same.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2SdBRcy

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Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that now boasts 1.5 million current account customers, has partnered with fintech startup Flux to bring itemised receipts and loyalty points to its banking app.

Due to be officially unveiled at a joint event in London on Wednesday, the new functionality means that if you’re a customer of Monzo — and once you’ve opted in — Flux will deliver digital receipts, rewards and loyalty to the Monzo app in real-time, whenever you spend at a Flux partner merchant. Currently this includes EAT, Costa Coffee, itsu, pod, and pure, while I understand a number of other major merchants are in the pipeline and could be announced quite soon.

In the long-term, Flux wants to become the proprietary technology platform for the interchange of item-level digital receipt data, but has always faced a chicken and egg problem: It needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks. As I wrote when the company raised its Series A in December, cracking this problem has clearly started to gather momentum.

Noteworthy is that Monzo had actually been trialing Flux in a very small closed beta since 2017, but progress had stalled while the challenger bank built out its current account offering and figured out its “marketplace banking” strategy. Related to this is the question of how deep third-party integration should go and how wide the Monzo marketplace should cast its net in terms of the number of competing third-party products vying for attention.

To that end, the Flux integration feels pretty wholehearted. This includes a call-to-action within the Monzo app to link your account to Flux when you spend in a Flux partner merchant. On-boarding users to Flux in context — ie right after the point of purchase — and therefore unlocking itemised digital receipts immediately and retroactively, will very likely make opting into the feature a no-brainer.

Flux’s integration with the Barclays Launchpad app works in a similar fashion. However, within challenger bank Starling, the other Flux bank partner, no such call-to-action exists. Instead, it can only be enabled within the Starling Marketplace, which at two taps deep feels slightly buried for now.

Meanwhile, although the current focus is building receipt infrastructure, the Flux vision is much broader. By bridging the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up in your bank statement or mobile banking app, the startup can not only power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics, it could also offer new types of enriched experiences for consumers.

This could in the future include letting you easily track your eating out habits, right down to item-level rather than just merchant category, as part of your general health goals. Or providing much deeper spending analytics to help you improve financial wellbeing. In other words, there’s a great deal more latent value in item-level receipt data to be unlocked yet.

Cue Matty Cusden-Ross, CEO and Founder at Flux: “Flux’s mission is to liberate the worlds’ receipt data in order to enrich trillions of experiences globally. Today we’re excited to be expanding our partnership with Monzo to bring automated receipts and rewards to even more people. Monzo share our vision of the future and as Flux continues to scale across bigger and bigger merchants we can’t wait to make Flux available everywhere”.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G56wCr