A payment mechanism is not necessarily a payment mechanism. So says the man who founded both Twitter and Square. Jack Dorsey may see Square as a mobile payment device company, but he sees it as going in a fundamentally different direction than Apple. Hence, he says that he sees no competitive problem.
“It’s not a threat because we don’t build a credit card, we don’t build a payment device at all,” Dorsey said, according to a CBC report. “They’re building something that allows a credit card to be used in another place, but they’re not building a terminal. We are a terminal, we a register and we accept payments, so there’s no threat, there’s no competition there at all. We’re building a register so that sellers can accept a credit card, so they can accept cash, so they can accept a check, so they can accept Bitcoin and so they can accept any form of payment that comes across the counter including future ones and burgeoning ones like Apple Pay.”
Square itself had a wallet app—called Square Wallet—but the company quietly killed that product back in May. ” “We don’t believe that’s enough utility, we don’t believe that it’s actually enough for people to do it again and again, we don’t believe there’s enough value in terms of speed or convenience over just swiping a card,” Dorsey said.