4 ms·

Why wouldn't Square want to work to make their payment platform accessible through multiple channels (NFC, their dongle, mobile-to-mobile, etc.)? Just as they

Why wouldn't Square want to work to make their payment platform accessible through multiple channels (NFC, their dongle, mobile-to-mobile, etc.)? Just as they should develop for many of the big software platforms, they will probably need to have product offerings that allow payments in multiple ways.

enra 15y ago
You can already just pay with the app, which I think really is the best way since it doesn't require any special hardware for the customer. Of course only problem is the penetration of Square registers.
- rdl 15y ago
  I don't have any insider knowledge of Square specific to this, but it's not that hard to make a shim for a PoS to do all sorts of stuff. I contracted for a company in 2003 which did NFC/RFID readers with a little magnetic shim for existing magstripe card readers. You can also integrate at a deeper level directly into the PoS -- there is some customization needed, but a lot of it is generic.
erikpukinskis 15y ago
I'm sure they want to, but I'm also pretty sure they won't. At least not soon. The thing that has struck me most consistently about Square is the brilliance of their restraint. Surely their endgame is to displace plastic cards. But they realize that what matters at this stage in the game is buy-in from consumers and merchants. So where Dwolla and FaceCash go straight for the Brass Ring of a modern payment infrastructure, Square instead chose to provide a service that, while antiquated, is MASSIVELY useful in a broad range of retail scenarios. Once they have the marketshare, which they get by leaning on the crutch of credit cards to enable the usability and usefulness of their product, they can just swap in a more modern payment backend, and voila... They win. But the key is restraint, and focus on the current needs of merchants, and NFC is not.

4 ms·

Why wouldn't Square want to work to make their payment platform accessible through multiple channels (NFC, their dongle, mobile-to-mobile, etc.)? Just as they

by joejohnson 15y ago

enra 15y ago
You can already just pay with the app, which I think really is the best way since it doesn't require any special hardware for the customer. Of course only problem is the penetration of Square registers.
- rdl 15y ago
  I don't have any insider knowledge of Square specific to this, but it's not that hard to make a shim for a PoS to do all sorts of stuff. I contracted for a company in 2003 which did NFC/RFID readers with a little magnetic shim for existing magstripe card readers. You can also integrate at a deeper level directly into the PoS -- there is some customization needed, but a lot of it is generic.
erikpukinskis 15y ago
I'm sure they want to, but I'm also pretty sure they won't. At least not soon. The thing that has struck me most consistently about Square is the brilliance of their restraint. Surely their endgame is to displace plastic cards. But they realize that what matters at this stage in the game is buy-in from consumers and merchants. So where Dwolla and FaceCash go straight for the Brass Ring of a modern payment infrastructure, Square instead chose to provide a service that, while antiquated, is MASSIVELY useful in a broad range of retail scenarios. Once they have the marketshare, which they get by leaning on the crutch of credit cards to enable the usability and usefulness of their product, they can just swap in a more modern payment backend, and voila... They win. But the key is restraint, and focus on the current needs of merchants, and NFC is not.