Skip to content

Comment on Square COO Keith Rabois Departs Companyparent

Comments

If my math is correct: 2.75% of $10B/yr = $275M/yr. Although they may not be charging 2.75% across whole $10B. I don't think Starbucks would pay 2.75%.

Don't forget that the credit card companies get most of that.

They have to give most of that to the credit card companies. I am not sure how much of the 2.75% they get to keep but I would guess less then half, maybe even only a quarter?

It actually is more like $200mm gross (due to discounts, and that's run-rate, not 2012 I think), and then goes to Chase Paymenttech and to the card associations, interchange, issuers via chase -- as well as all their other costs. So I think netting $50mm off the transactions is generous.

They have at least 500 employees -- figure $100k/ea loaded cost, only possible since I think a lot of those employees are not engineers. That's all of it right there.

They really need to be in the 50b/yr range to be doing well. OTOH, they will probably get there in a year or two, and I don't see their costs going up much.

I remember reading somewhere the average swipe fee is 1.6% for cards. Don't know how accurate that is but I'm assuming it's not far off.

You're pretty close to the mark - at least for a company doing that much payment volume. Maybe closer to 1.8% or so. There's dozens of variables (debit vs credit, issuing bank, network, international, chargeback rates, etc...) so it's hard to say with any reasonable degree of certainty.

There's a higher fee for "Card not present" transactions.

Square is card present though.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.