Introduction
Curve is a young British company that gained success quickly due to its innovative idea. It is a banking platform aiming to merge different card and bank accounts into one card and store it in one application. The company was founded by Shachar Bialick in 2015 and became popular due to the convenience of its utilization and time-saving technology for the customers (Curve overview, 2022). Curve is considered to be one of the safest online banks with a considerable list of perks for its clients, decent competitors, innovative technologies, and cutting-edge approaches.
Curve’s Competitors
The company currently operates in the red ocean because it has competitors who fight for clients, encouraging them to use the bank by implementing beneficial offers. Monzo bank is one of the main competitors of Curve. It is an online banking system that has multiple benefits in utilizing it. Monzo allows its clients to make free withdrawals abroad, takes no transaction fees, sorts salary when the customer receives it, allows international transfers, and, what is essential, allows joining bank accounts (Burrows, 2022b). Although Curve’s net income in 2021 is unknown, Monzo’s is about £129.7 million (Top Curve competitors and alternatives, 2022). Thus, the online banking system is a decent competitor to Curve.
Another bank’s competitor is the Indian company Juspay, which is different from others with its convenience and success in the market. It is an operating system designed as a platform for online payments (Top Curve competitors and alternatives, 2022). The service distinguishes itself with its availability, working with many banks in the backend, and intelligent strategies implemented to make its usage as convenient as possible (Juspay payout advantages, 2021). Furthermore, its employee rating is 4.5, which is higher than Curve’s and all its competitors (Top Curve competitors and alternatives, 2022). Monese is one of the first online banks in the UK and Curve’s competitor. It allows its clients to withdraw money abroad, keep them in different currencies, and link Avios and PayPal accounts (Burrows, 2022a). Thus, all the companies above are worthy competitors that create the red ocean environment.
Curve’s Creative Destruction
Curve’s innovation has led to creative destruction in the sphere of offline banking. Creative destruction means replacing the old way of providing service with the new one, more progressive (Kopp, 2021). Curve, like many other online bank systems, such as Monzo, Juspay, Monese, and others, has influenced the global banking sphere. The demand for online banks is increasing due to the convenience of utilizing them. People seek the easiest ways to meet their needs, and the ability to make multiple money operations from home helps them. Gradually, many offline banks lose their money and become bankrupt, or the wisest ones are changing their policies and switching to online work too. The Internet by itself is a destructive innovation, and any system that starts its work there adopts the dismantling. Consequently, Curve’s linking multiple banks in its single card contributed to the creative destruction of offline banks.
Curve’s Convergence Innovation
Convergence innovation means linking different technologies and integrating them together in order to receive new outcomes. Curve is an excellent example of such an approach because its implementation was the key feature of the bank. The company merges multiple bank cards and accounts into one card in one application. This trait distinguishes the company from others in the bark industry. The company links all the client’s cards and stores them in one place, which led to the convenient utilization of the service and a new approach to online banking. Furthermore, the application allows customers to switch between cards easily.
Curve’s Design Thinking Technology
Design thinking technology is one of the most powerful and rational in the business industry. It includes five steps: emphasize, define, ideate, prototype, and test (Stevens, 2020). Prototyping is a critical step in the approach because it allows testing innovations at a low cost. For instance, in 2020, Curve was testing “Klarna Rival,” an opportunity for credit on purchases on a small group of clients (O’Hear, 2020). Due to testing new technologies, the company was able to save a considerable amount of money and, meanwhile, understand whether the innovation will benefit the company and its clients or not. Firstly, the company emphasized and defined the problem: it did not have a function of buying in credit and decided to change it. It ideated implementing credits to its service and made prototypes to test them on clients. During that period, it offered “debtor-creditor-supplier loans at 0% interest” (O’Hear, 2020, para. 5). Thus, Curve has adopted a design thinking approach to test its new services properly without extra losses.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Curve is an online banking system that links many bank cards and accounts in one application and one card. It operates in a red ocean due to the considerable number of decent competitors. Implementing its technology of merging cards, which helped the customers make money operations at home, led to the creative destruction of offline banks. Furthermore, Curve is an excellent example of convergence innovation: the linking of different technologies to create a new service. The company uses a design thinking approach to integrate new services into its work, saving it money and resources.
References
Burrows, L. (2022a). Monese review: is it the best bank for money? Money to the masses. Web.
Burrows, L. (2022b). Monzo review: should you make the switch? Money to the masses. Web.
Curve overview. (2022). PitchBook. Web.
Juspay payout advantages. (2021). Juspay developer. Web.
Kopp, C. (2021). Creative destruction. Investopedia. Web.
O’Hear, S. (2020). Curve begins quietly testing Curve Credit, its planned Klama competitor. Tech Church. Web.
Stevens, E. (2020). What is design thinking and how do we apply it? Invision. Web.
Top Curve competitors and alternatives. (2022). Craft. Web.