Last week I was on the NYC Subway and a young kid walks through car to car selling $1 candy bars, and he actually said that he can accept credit or debit cards!
I probably wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it myself. Nobody asked to pay via credit while he was in my car so I didn’t get to see how he was going to process it. I assume a small square-like thing to attach to his cellphone, but who knows. Also who knows if he would have had a strong enough signal in the underground to process a payment.
But if that’s not a sign of where we are headed, I don’t know what is
Mekong - I believe SQ can process or “store” payments offline, so transacation can be finalized once they have internet. I believe a SQ merchant asked this on a conference call a few quarters ago.
“The analyst’s Cash App versus Venmo payments app tracker points to a “continued healthy pace” of downloads in March with 2.2M additional downloads, up from 2.0M in February, and 6.3M downloads in Q1, up from 6.0M in Q4. Since inception, total Cash App downloads have reached 49.7M versus 44.6M for Venmo”
Hi everyone! I’m just starting to learn about investing, so this board has been a great find! I consider myself an old('82) millennial. Anyway, I just wanted to chime in about digital payments - but unsure if this is relevant information or not - Venmo is owned by Paypal and Venmo is used by about 99% of the people I know for peer to peer fund transfer. It used to be all about Paypal, but since Venmo has come into play, it’s all I hear - “Do you Venmo? I"ll Venmo you.” Just this morning my carpooler Venmo’d me money for gas because she forgot her own credit card (She’s 26yo). My tenants(mid 20’s) pay rent via Venmo - and I can see their payment activities on Venmo and they basically use it like cash between their friends. I live in San Francisco, BTW, so maybe that’s why everyone I know uses it? I don’t know. There is no fee for peer to peer transfers, so I don’t know if this affects their bottom line or if they have plans to monetize it somehow. But maybe this is something to think about when considering Square’s competitors.
Thanks Snowfu. Venmo is a well known competitor to SQ, and if you had left out the second half of your message, I could have profiled you as a youngish well educated person living in a coastal region.
SQ has all the middle bit. The ‘under or unbanked’
Do you need a bank account with Venmo?
Both are doing very very well and so far there has been plenty of room for both.
I like how SQ has been going for the unbanked’, because it’s only an amount of time before banks start getting better with their apps and easy to use transfer of cash
SQ has gone after the market that banks have always ignored. Now there may be a reason they’ve been ignored, and if sq takes on credit risk…that’s an added risk.
I don’t know where this starts and finishes (just MC or also Visa; just UK or worldwide repercussions) but this could have implications for PayPal and Square opportunities as well as potentially Shopify, Afterpay, AMEX etc.
Square can’t get its banking license soon enough if Visa and MC are looking vulnerable.