The Beginning Of The End For Curve Card? Creation Cancel ALL Cards Used With Curve

As of today individuals who have a card from Creation Financial Services (e.g. the IHG or Marriott Credit Card) AND who have used their card as the underlying card on their Curve card have been receiving closure letters.

The closure letter states that cards will be closed on the 3rd December and is postmarked with yesterday’s date, 30 September 2021. Whilst the letter doesn’t give an awful lot of detail by contacting the call centre it appears…

1. If you spend £10,000 on the IHG Rewards Premium credit card before closure you will still get your annual free night voucher.
2. The annual fee is not being pro-rata refunded. We aren’t sure why not as this would be easily contested with the FOS. If you are affected by this we suggest raising a complaint (intially with Creation) as soon as possible.

What is Curve Card?

If you weren’t already aware Curve Card, is a debit card that allows you to recharge transactions to a linked credit card. This meant you could use your credit card in places that don’t accept credit card payments e.g. HMRC etc. You can read more about Curve Card here – https://www.curve.com/

Why is Creation cancelling ALL cards used with a Curve Card?

We don’t know is the short answer. The long answer is it’s likely to do with the various manufactured spending routes which a lot of Curve/Creation users took advantage of. One such example is depositing money with National Savings & Investments & having it charged to a cashback or points credit card through Curve. They’d then take the money out to pay off their card and repeat.

A few weeks ago a text message was sent to Creation cardholders saying that their cards couldn’t be used with Curve anymore. Regardless if you stopped after receiving this text it appears that EVERYONE that has ever used their creation card with Curve has been closed down. Even if you haven’t used it for any manufactured spending and stuck to innocent reasons for linking the two. e.g. Apple Pay! (you couldn’t direct put your Creation Card on Apple Pay.)

Conclusion

It’s hard to say if this is going to form a wider crackdown on manufactured spending routes from credit card providers BUT we would err on the side of caution at the moment. If you have a credit card you want to keep for the long term we wouldn’t currently use it with Curve. Particularly as this shutdown seems to involve ALL customers that have ever used Curve with their card rather than just the ones taking advantage of manufactured spending routes.

Did you receive a shutdown letter from Creation?