London-based fintech startups Curve and Xero have announced their partnership in pursuit of their goal to provide a “frictionless” banking experience.
Curve’s ability to combine all your cards into one and manage them from an app will be enhanced by Xero’s automated expenses functionality.
Users will be able to use whichever card is linked up with the Curve app, even being able to change payments made on the wrong card to another card using their “Go Back in Time” feature. Then, rather than spending a day each month submitting their expenses, they can take a picture of their receipt and Xero’s technology will submit the claim without the user having to fill out endless HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) information.
“Everyone hates doing their expenses. It’s a tedious, manual job that takes up too much time. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Now, Curve will do the job for you, regardless of the bank you use,” Arthur Leung, Product Lead at Curve, said in the announcement.
“There is a host of money services and products that are completely fragmented, they’re disconnected from each other. Now if you look at the kind of customer experiences today from different verticals, you will find that the experience we’re expecting today is that of convergence,” Curve CEO Schachar Bialick told CNBC in an interview.
The only real competitor to this type of functionality might be Soldo, which offers multi-user banking functionality for companies trying to manage business-wide expenses through one account.
Curve’s user base will undergo a dramatic increase adding Xero’s one million subscribers to its existing 75,000 sign-ups. With Xero’s marketing strategy clearly functioning well Curve will be able to piggy-back on their success and introduce new consumer functionality through already sought-after business functionality in order to increase familiarity in the market.
As for Xero, “Our new partnership with Curve makes managing your business spending even easier, freeing up time that can be spent on growing your business instead,” Edward Berks, director of financial web and ecosystem at Xero, said in an announcement Monday.
The ability of the B2B software to have access to genuine consumer functionality could bring a boost to their popularity, adding pressure from employees to employers decision making.
According to CNBC Curve have used data from the IMF and OECD together with their own data to calculate that it could allow businesses to contribute £7.2 billion ($9.6 billion) more to the U.K. economy.
