Lloyds Banking Group’s confirmed £120m acquisition of Curve marks one of the most strategically significant moves by a UK bank in digital wallets and consumer payments in recent years. While the deal has attracted attention for shareholder disputes and the valuation, far below the £250m+ Curve has raised, its long-term implications for the payments landscape are far more important.
Despite the noise around governance and investor frustration, Lloyds is effectively acquiring a proven, fully-regulated wallet platform that can orchestrate multiple payment types behind a single card or token. This capability is still rare. Banks have focused for years on individual products – current accounts, credit cards, overdrafts, BNPL, e-money but have rarely offered a unified way for consumers to control how they pay at the point of purchase.
Curve’s technology enables precisely that. It supports multi-funding selection at or after the moment of payment, allowing consumers to choose the funding source in real time. It delivers real-time back-to-back transaction processing that links the front-end card to the selected underlying account or credit line. Its smart rules automatically route different types of transactions to different funding sources based on user preferences. And it remains fully compatible with Apple Pay and Google Pay, while also offering Curve’s own NFC tap-to-pay solution.
Rather than a simple digital wallet; it is a funding-orchestration engine that allows a bank to redesign the customer relationship around choice, flexibility, and embedded credit.
Much attention will focus on whether Lloyds is attempting to build an alternative to Apple Pay, particularly as Apple faces increasing regulatory pressure to open up NFC access in Europe. Curve Pay, which provides a proprietary tap-to-pay solution, gives Lloyds optionality, but it is unlikely to be the centrepiece of the acquisition.
Customers already deeply embedded in Apple’s ecosystem are unlikely to switch wholesale to a bank-branded wallet based on NFC alone. If NFC was the only objective, Lloyds could have procured technology directly from providers such as Thales.
The value sits elsewhere.
Curve’s multi-funding rails give Lloyds the opportunity to create a new type of bank account: one where customers choose the best payment method for each transaction – debit, credit, instalments, partner credit lines, or Open Banking without switching between separate cards.
