It surprises me the "be profitable by 2015" plan. Square has a front row seat at money, I would've probably bet that they were profitable from day one.
Can you shed some light on to why they are still not profitable?
Square is basically trying to buy marketshare right now.
Everyone regardless of size pays the same base prices to Visa and Mastercard [1] and makes up profit in markups. A large processing network can charge lower markups because they process many more transactions, where smaller processors needs to make more on each. Smaller processing networks also make money on fees (chargeback fees for example), but Square does not.
The only way to profitability would be to try and shift transactions off the processing networks (like with Square Wallet), or to 1000x transaction volume.
Comments
Nice info you got there.
It surprises me the "be profitable by 2015" plan. Square has a front row seat at money, I would've probably bet that they were profitable from day one.
Can you shed some light on to why they are still not profitable?
Square is basically trying to buy marketshare right now.
Everyone regardless of size pays the same base prices to Visa and Mastercard [1] and makes up profit in markups. A large processing network can charge lower markups because they process many more transactions, where smaller processors needs to make more on each. Smaller processing networks also make money on fees (chargeback fees for example), but Square does not.
The only way to profitability would be to try and shift transactions off the processing networks (like with Square Wallet), or to 1000x transaction volume.
1. http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-...