Square Wants to Focus on the Entire Commerce Experience, Not Just Card Payment Services on Mobile Devices for the Buyer and the Seller

Square to Push Beyond Just Payments: CEO Jack Dorsey

Square wallet: Paying is easy when you download Square Wallet to your phone. No more fumbling for cash or cards. 

March 2, 2013

CNBC - Payments were just the beginning for Square. The young company has big plans to cash in on the entire commerce experience.

"We think there is something with higher margins there instead of always being a payments company," Square CEO and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said Friday evening at the New York University Entrepreneurial Festival.

While the four-year-old company has grown faster than most start-ups and has a relatively solid business model, the company is still very much a work in progress, Dorsey said. Square wants to focus not just on payments, but on the entire commerce experience for the buyer and the seller.

"The good portion of working in payments is you naturally have a business model, so you really don't have to think so much about it, but it's not really who we are, it's something that we have to do," he said. "And where we are going isn't really about payments as a revenue model, but more about the data and the experience, and we don't know exactly what that looks like yet. We have some ideas ... but we're not sure where it's going to land."

Commerce is a continuum between the buyer and the seller, and there are many facets of the entire commerce experience where Square sees opportunity, Dorsey said.

On the buyers' side, a decision is being made to make a purchase. For sellers, the focus is on attracting customers, analytics, customer relationship management, and a slew of other factors in the commerce experience. Dorsey wants Square to be a part of all of it.

"Buyers may end up engaging in a transaction, but that transaction is just one tiny unit of the overall continuum," Dorsey said. "We think there is something much broader in the experience that has very, very little to do with payments."