Square Makes It Easier for Big Businesses to Sign Up for Mobile Payments
Square is eliminating one more hurdle that may have been a turnoff for bigger businesses looking at adopting its service, which allows people to collect payments using a mobile phone and card reader.
In a phone interview, Square’s Keith Rabois explained that the company would no longer hold back a business’s funds for up to a month if they processed more than $1,000 as a new customer.
Originally, he said when new businesses signed up they would have to provide additional verification in order to receive all of their sales by the next business day. Anything over $1,000 could be held for up to a month. That could easily happen for a plumber, or a small jewelry business that processed potentially large transactions.
The measure was originally in place to reduce fraud, but Rabois said, “Now that we’ve been commercially available for a year, we can now spot statistical anomalies.”
The San Francisco-based company, which is backed heavily by Visa and other investors, has been on a major growth spurt during its first year in business.
Rabois said it’s all about making the service really simple to use for individuals, small and even large businesses.
The company is now processing more than $2 billion a year on an annualized basis, and has fully authorized 800,000 merchants to use its payments network to date.
To put that in context, Rabois said Visa and MasterCard have authorized 8.2 million merchants. “In a year, we’ve been able to offer payments services to the equivalent of 10 percent of Visa and MasterCard’s network.”
What’s more, he said 70 percent of its users have never accepted credit cards before, so they are expanding the number of merchants accepting payments.