(Gilbert, also CEO of San Francisco-based Better Finance, was interviewed earlier this month for a QA for an Oct. 23 report on the Bay Areas fastest-growing private companies, based on revenue growth over the past three years.)
Asked whether theres a public misperception of what Square does — most people just think of its square-shaped card reader — Gilbert said: It shows how good the card reader is even though the focus will shift to EMV chip cards.
Square is an operating system for small business, he said. The company has tools to allow businesses to book appointments with customers, take payments — whether cash or card — and to access credit.
Its quite exciting that one company has been able to do all that, with a lot of great leadership from Jack and the team, Gilbert said. Square has introduced small business financing through Square Capital and this year debuted Square Payroll.
Earlier today, the San Francisco Business Times also published five top takeaways from Squares S-1 filing as part of its plans to go public.
Some coverage of the introduction of new services has been seen from a tech perspective as pivoting to Plan B. But from a financial services perspective, Squares series of new products and services is seen as broadening the menu of offerings and expanding the ability to cross-sell, or get existing customers to buy more products and services. (Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) has taken cross-selling to new heights in financial services.)
The collective power of our millions of sellers sustains a scale from which we can build valuable financial services and marketing services, creating reinforcing and virtuous cycles back to our core business of payments, Dorsey wrote in the companys S-1 filing, noting that Square currently generates about 95 percent of its revenue from payments and point-of-sale services.