Lloyds Shows Interest in Buying FinTech Curve

British banking giant Lloyds is in talks to acquire U.K. FinTech Curve.

That’s according to a report Saturday (July 12) by Sky News, citing unnamed sources. Lloyds is looking to pay £120 million ($161.9 million) for the digital wallet provider, the report said, and that an announcement could come by the end of September if negotiations succeed.

Spokespersons for both Curve and Lloyds declined to comment when reached by PYMNTS.

As the Sky report noted, Curve was founded by Shachar Bialick, a former soldier with Israel’s special forces, in 2016. He said three years later the company would go public within another decade and be worth $50 billion to $60 billion.

If the £120 million figure is correct, that would represent a lower valuation than the £133 million Curve raised in its Series C funding round in 2023.

Curve has in recent years been positioned as a competitor to Apple Pay, the report added, having launched as an app that lets consumers combine debit and credit cards into one wallet.

One source close to the proposed deal told Sky that Lloyds considers Curve an attractive target for acquisition as the bank has focused more on payments infrastructure. In addition, Lloyds views Curve as a good investment due to the fees Apple charges for its Apple Pay digital wallet amid greater regulatory oversight into Apple and Google’s payment services in the U.K.

In other digital wallet news, PYMNTS wrote last week about this payment method’s evolution into a key piece of global commerce infrastructure, especially as small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) struggle with recent tariffs.

“In the past, we had wires, EFT and checks,” Lyndsay Langford, Bank of America’s head of Global Payment Solutions for Canada, told PYMNTS in June. “Today, clients demand faster payments, less friction and richer remittance data.”

PYMNTS Intelligence’s “Global Money Movement: Singapore Edition” report found that 64% of merchants surveyed indicated that faster transactions would motivate them to start using digital wallets within the next 12 months.

“Digital wallets aren’t just conduits for moving money,” PYMNTS wrote. “They are becoming multifunctional financial operating systems for SMBs. This embedding of financial services is especially powerful for SMBs that may be underbanked or lack access to formal credit. With digital wallets, transaction history becomes a proxy for creditworthiness, enabling alternative financing models and insurance.”