Square: Designing a Better Mobile Payment
There's a lot of buzz out there about Square these days, not just because it was started by one of the original twttr folk, Jack Dorsey. Like all innovation and social media observers, I see a lot of very interesting applications come through my Google Reader every day but Square was of particular interest to me. Earlier in my career I worked in a card merchant services product management organization and remember being impressed by the wireless card terminals that enabled people to accept credit card transactions remotely. As passe as that seems now, back then, that was pretty cool. This wireless offering was targeted as somewhat of a niche market - transient or mobile merchants like cab drivers, flea market booth sellers, etc. While there were obvious benefits to the solution (chief among them: being able to accept credit cards as payments and lower interchange rates) there was one key problem. The cost of the equipment and the contract required to use the service. I forget the exact cost, but even today, these devices aren't cheap. However, merchants had few alternatives.
- Integration via the headphone jack. Fantastic way to ensure the most smartphone users will be able to adopt.
- Beautiful, digital receipts. I've attached the sample from Square's site. Just fantastic. Lots of information displayed in a clean, readable format. We sort of get inured to the elegance of design sometimes, but really pause and look at that receipt. Now pull out the receipt you got at Starbucks this morning. Compare. Yea, it's pretty impressive.
- Payer photo verification - Nifty and thoughtful fraud prevention tool that shows the image of the card holder at the time of transaction to allow the merchant to compare.
- Contract-free - This is a big one. People don't like contracts. No one wants to get suckered into a commitment with something that may be awful. Square's approach here is spot-on from a user's perspective.
- Baked in loyalty card - I recently posted on the fantastic opportunities that Foursquare will afford small businesses in the loyalty program department. Square is right in the mix here too. From Square's site: "If you frequent a place that accepts Square, we’ll let them know you’re a repeat customer. That 10th cappuccino may be on the house, no paper coffee card required." In addition to being a great standalone option for merchants, I'm sure there could be some great synergies between Foursquare and Square (e.g reduced fees if you use both Square and Foursquare together perhaps?) down the road.
