Huawei partners with Curve to operate its m-payments

Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Huawei has just announced its partnership with Curve, the London-based FinTech offering a payment aggregator card. This partnership should allow Huawei smartphone users to make contactless payments with their phone. Huawei gains a partner involved in the democratisation of mobile payment.

FACTS

• Owners of Huawei smartphones running on HMS (application platforms within the Huawei operating system) will now be able to access NFC payment functionality.

• To do so, they will need to download the Curve Pay application from the AppGallery shop.

• A simple registration will then allow access to the payment service. Owners of Huawei smartphones can access Curve's features from their mobile phones, including spend tracking, statistics, 1% cashback on all purchases for the first month, 5% cashback on Huawei purchases and, of course, contactless mobile payment.

• The service offered by Curve and Huawei works with most European bank cards. Many European countries are involved, including the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Spain and the UK.

CHALLENGES

• Filling a big gap: The US presidency of Donald Trump will have left its mark on Huawei. The Chinese manufacturer has been banned from using Google's services. This decision is particularly difficult for a manufacturer that has historically operated under Android. But Huawei was able to bounce back, putting forward its home-grown operating system. And its new partnership with Curve pursues the same objective of complementarity to compensate for the lack of Google Pay.

• A broader alternative: Through its involvement in the democratisation of mobile payment services, Curve is positioning itself as an alternative player capable of carrying an interoperable system. The FinTech relies on its numerous banking partners to offer a broad service and thus challenge the hegemony of manufacturers in the mobile payment market.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• This is not Curve's first partnership with a mobile phone manufacturer. The FinTech already signed a partnership with Samsung in August 2020 to help it launch its Samsung Pay Card on the UK market.

• This card then relied on FinTech Curve's infrastructure to operate in the UK market.