Why I left the endlessly creative life of a freelancer and joined a Fintech

I worked as a freelancer my entire working life prior to joining Curve. Like many freelancers, especially creative freelancers, this has meant doing a whole bunch of sort-of-related creative-type-things. And I was pretty good at it. I never had to get the dreaded ‘real job’. I never had to join the rat race. I never had to chase a regular pay cheque.

But… I was never good at money.

I could never budget. I always hated looking into my bank statements. I would play a game where I’d guess the number waiting there for me. Sometimes I would be quietly proud of how close my prediction was - even if it was far lower than it should be.

I had two cards in my wallet. A debit card, and a credit card -only because someone once told me having a credit history would help me get a mortgage. SO really just a debit card. And it was a grotty old thing. Overused and under loved, it was the only thing holding the draining monetary value of all the creative work i’d done in my career. Which is a bizarre thought, but one we all carry around with us in one way or another.

Then there were my clients.

I never knew when my clients were going to pay. Could I stretch it out another week before I sent that slightly desperate email? Probably. Then I’d refresh the tab on my bank’s online site as an outgoing expense appeared several days late and think, “No actually. Let’s email immediately AND IN ALL CAPS.” Several of clients were overseas, and every time my invoice was paid there was a chunk bitten off by the bank/s or whoever it was that transferred my monies. I figured it was the cost of ‘doing business’.

And the worst feeling of all — being somewhere foreign and having my card blocked for trying to get money out of a foreign ATM at 2am to pay for accommodation for a tired film crew. Turns out I had forgotten to call my bank and share my travel plans. Computer said no.

So basically this a long and meandering path to say, I was primed for Curve when Shachar first pitched it to me and wanted me to help craft his vision.

‘Let’s make all the problems you have with money go away’ is what I heard.

We were going to build a product that would take the rough edges off this money stuff and here’s how:

We’d put all your cards into one card.

Not huge for me as I basically only had one card, but now my new Curve card would be shiny and new and black, and have contactless, and my overused and under appreciated old card could go into forced retirement in my desk drawer. And if someone stole the Curve, I could just block it from my phone and old faithful in the desk drawer wouldn’t even get caught in the crossfire. And if I ever got more cards, they could happily live inside my desk drawer too; while their Matrix-like surrogates would live inside the CURVE.

We’d add instant notifications.

Every transaction from any card inside Curve would make a ping in your pocket to tell you when your payment went through. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of knowing your payment went through before the store clerk. It’s good to feel smug.

All your payments would be super accessible in the Curve app.

You’d be able to see each and every purchase and sort them however you like. I could literally tag my spend on particular projects and get a real-time understanding of my budget/ lack of budget. This actually forced me to start making budgets… It also taught me how much money i spent on coffee. We would even make it easy to export everything as CSV in time for TAX season and the accountant person.

We’d make it as easy to spend overseas as it was to spend at home.

Every purchase going through the Curve Card is considered an online purchase — like buying something at Amazon. So my underlying bank card would never think I was out of the country, even if i was in Timbuktu. My cards wouldn’t get blocked by my bank every time I travelled! Also, Curve would have great FX rates, there wouldn’t be any unnecessary extras added on.

We’d make spending your money feel better.

So if you spent in certain places you’d get rewarded with points. Which as a mostly debit card holding individual I never really understood. But hey people like free money!

And this was just the start.

We weren’t going to be a bank, but we were going to take away the pain of banking, and that felt good.

I was hooked. I gave up the endlessly creative life of the freelancer to help make other freelancers’ endlessly creative lives easier. And here we are today.

I genuinely think we’re on the way to making something great, and we don’t have to rebuild an industry to do it. We don’t even need to be a bank.

So let your bank look after your money and let Curve do the rest. Do this and we can help make all the problems you have with money go away too.

Now go make something awesome and don’t think about the money stuff!

Get Curve for free today. www.imaginecurve.com