Inactive Curve Card
As a new Curve customer, you might experience declines if you haven’t activated your Curve Card yet. This may also happen when you’re an existing Curve customer, requested a new Curve Card and forgot to activate it in the app. Please follow the card activation guide to make payments as usual.
Incorrect Curve Card details
You could also get declined if you enter wrong card details while making a purchase online. These might be:
- A CVC (security code at the back of your card).
- An expiry date.
- Your billing address.
Please check that you’ve updated your details online to reflect your new card. If the card’s details you enter seem to be okay and you’re still getting declined, please contact us at support@curve.com with the details of the declined transaction and we’ll check what might’ve gone wrong.
Underlying payment card issues
Curve Fronted declines
Experienced a decline when trying to use your credit card via Curve? The reason might be our “Curve Fronted” feature.
Long story short, it allows you to pay for transactions using your credit card when paying taxes or when making financial services transactions where you normally cannot pay with a credit card. You can turn this feature on and off in your app – learn more about Curve Fronted here.
No payment cards added to Curve
If you don’t have at least one payment card to your Curve Wallet, you won’t be able to transact using your Curve Card. Please follow the instructions here to add a payment card to your account.
Insufficient funds
Your payment might often be declined when you don’t have enough money on the selected underlying payment card. Please check your balance or choose another card with sufficient funds for the attempted purchase.
This often happens when you have your Curve Cash Card selected as the active payment card and you don’t have enough funds to cover the entire transaction.
Reached Spending Limits
Sometimes a transaction can be declined even though you have enough money on your bank account and you’re within Curve spending limits. Exceeding your payment card’s spending limit is a common reason for a decline too.
Banks blocking transactions with Curve
Sometimes bank’s fraud engines are blocking transactions with Curve because it’s a unique and relatively new product on the market. If you were declined and you have enough money to cover your transaction please contact your bank to find out the exact reason. They can whitelist Curve and your transactions should go through.
Blacklisted Merchants
Merchant Category Code (MCC) is a four-digit number that is used by financial institutions for payment categorisation purposes. It’s worth noting that the same payment might be categorised differently with various payment cards providers.
Curve doesn’t allow most of the transactions categorised as:
- Gambling – check our T&Cs for more information (see section “What can I not use my Curve account and Curve Card for?”).
- Direct marketing – this type of transaction with Curve is considered high-risk.
Payment Timeout
Sometimes the transaction may take too long to complete, and that’s why it gets declined. It means that someone in the payment chain didn't reply in time; it could've been us, your bank or the payment processor. Trying such a transaction again usually solves the problem and the payment should go through.