Square Brings Tap to Pay to Merchants in France

Square has begun offering Tap to Pay on iPhone to merchants in France.

The new offering, announced Tuesday (July 9), lets businesses use an iPhone to accept in-person payments with Apple’s Tap to Pay contactless payment technology.

“The French business landscape is competitive and tech-savvy, always looking for solutions that can make running a business more efficient,” Saumil Mehta, chief product officer at Square, said in a news release.

“Tap to Pay on iPhone helps reduce some of the barriers to entry for new businesses and allows existing merchants to create new ways to sell with nothing more than their iPhone and Square software. They can set up in minutes and make sales in seconds.”

Square points to a number of benefits from the service, such as the fact that it lets mobile professionals like carters accept contactless payments no matter where they are.

“Retailers were able to improve efficiency by reducing queues and making it easier to help customers complete their purchases from anywhere in the store,” the company said.

“Hairdressers and beauty professionals have benefited from the speed and ease with which clients can pay for their services directly from their chair.”

The news comes weeks after a report by the Financial Times that Apple had offered concessions to the European Union related to access to its contactless technology.

Without commenting on this report, Apple told the FT: “Through our ongoing discussions with the European Commission, we have offered commitments to provide third-party developers in the European Economic Area with an option that will enable their users to make NFC contactless payments from within their iOS apps, separate from Apple Pay and Apple Wallet.”

The European Commission, which is the executive arm of the EU, had Apple with competition law violations in 2022, accusing the tech giant of blocking rivals from accessing the technology that enables “tap-and-go” payments.

Square’s decision to offer Tap to Pay in a new country comes as consumers are increasingly demanding more payment choice.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Consumer Inflation Sentiment: The False Appeal of Deal-Chasing Consumers” found that when buying non-grocery retail products, 16% of consumers cited the ability to use their preferred payment methods as being among the factors that influenced their decision of where to make their most recent purchase.

And major payment providers are seeing this demand shape consumers’ shopping decisions.

“Whatever calculus the user performs to determine the payment methods that they want to use, they want more options across more merchants,” Drew Olson, senior director at Google Pay, said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.