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Curve is back online after the Wirecard scandal

Curve customers are now able to make payments as usual. This comes after a three-day outage starting last Friday since Curve’s infrastructural provider Wirecard activities were frozen by the FCA.

Wirecard is a German payments company and its shares have fallen by more than 90% after the auditors from Ernst & Young had raised questions over cash balances worth €1.9bn last week.

Read also: Wirecard collapse freezes accounts of Pockit or Curve customers

The company has filed for insolvency with German regulators. After that, the FCA has imposed restrictions on Wirecard UK to cease all regulated activity and freeze all assets and funds.

“Our primary objective is to protect the interests and money of consumers who use Wirecard,” stated the regulator.

Curve, which allows people to use a single card to make payments from any of their bank accounts, told its 1.3 million customers to carry an alternative card because transactions and money transfer would not be possible as a result of the freeze.

At around 15:00 last Friday, Curve announced its services were “temporarily suspended”. Curve used Wirecard to issue its cards and process transactions. This meant Curve’s operation depended on Wirecard’s operational support.

The pause on services also saw Curve suspend its cash back reward program Curve Cash, as well as it’s Go Back In Time’ feature. This allows users to put past purchases onto different cards.

The Curve team has been working over the weekend to come up with plans to handle all e-money services in house.

“It’s given us a bit of a shot in the arm. We’ve been able to move that in house bit quicker than we wanted. Which gives us more control. We’ve got a new processor now as well: we’re working with Checkout.com,” Curve’s spokesman said to AltFi.

“It has also united everyone. By pulling long hours over the weekend there is a really good feeling the company to have done this in such a short period of time. It is totally remarkable and probably unprecedented,” they added.

Jan Cerny
Jan is an innovation enthusiast and Fintech news reporter. He specializes in news distribution, social media, and content analysis.

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