pymnts Profile:
Square, Inc. (NYSE: SQ)
Square, Inc. is a financial services, merchant services aggregator, and mobile payment company based in San Francisco, California. The company markets several software and hardware payments products, including Square Contactless and Chip Reader, Square Stand, Square Register and Square Magstripe Reader, and has expanded into small business services such as Square Capital, a financing program, Cash App, a person-to-person payments service, Appointments, Gift Cards/eGift Cards, Invoices, Virtual Terminal, Marketing, Loyalty, Employee Management, and Square Payroll.
Block Strategy Points to AI Shaping Corporate Infrastructure
February 27, 2026
It was probably one of those moments where you remember where you were when you heard it. Block announced Thursday (Feb. 26) that it will cut roughly 4,000 jobs, or ...Read moreFederal Agency Vows to Fight States Over Prediction Market Crackdown
February 27, 2026
Imagine placing a bet on whether LeBron James will retire this year. But instead of doing it through a sportsbook, you do it on a federally regulated financial exchange. That’s the basic idea ...Read moreThis Week in Stablecoins: FinTech, Big Tech and Regulation
February 27, 2026
Stablecoins are out there; now they just need to work. The next phase for stablecoins may focus less on issuance and more on interoperability in practice. Multiple stablecoins, operating under different ...Read moreBlock Slashes Staff as Primary Banking Actives Jump 22% to 9.3M
February 26, 2026
Block’s massive staff cuts dominated the news surrounding its fourth quarter earnings release and conference call Thursday (Feb. 26). As the company culls its workforce from more than 10,000 employees to ...Read moreThe Digital Fairness Act: A New Layer in the EU’s Digital Rulebook?
February 26, 2026
This article analyzes the proposed EU Digital Fairness Act and its place within the already dense EU digital rulebook. The authors argue that while the initiative seeks to address dark ...Read moreOnline Consumer Protection: Some Perspectives from Law and Economics
February 26, 2026
This essay traces the evolution of online consumer protection from the opening of the Internet to commerce in the mid-1990s through to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, arguing that ...Read moreSquare Builds Out App Marketplace Ahead of Block’s Earnings Report
February 20, 2026
Global business platform Square continues to expand its partner ecosystem and now has almost 1,000 partners in its Square App Marketplace and its Square Specialists directory, the company said in ...Read moreFTC, State Regulators Step Up Scrutiny of Data Collected From Connected Vehicles
February 20, 2026
Federal regulators are intensifying scrutiny of how automakers collect, use and monetize data generated by connected vehicles, with geolocation and driver behavior information emerging as the focal point of enforcement. A ...Read moreSoFi and Square Show Why Bank Charters Matter Now
February 20, 2026
A FinTech can launch a polished banking app in months, but becoming a bank can take years. The difference isn’t marketing. It’s legal authority. It’s also one of the hottest financial stories ...Read moreMarket Power and Governance Power: New Tools for Antitrust Enforcement in the Decentralized Gig Economy
February 19, 2026
This Article advances a new framework for digital-age antitrust enforcement by integrating measures of market concentration (such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) with novel metrics of governance concentration (the Nakamoto coefficient ...Read more
Google Aims at Merchants With Open-Source Universal Agentic Protocol
January 12, 2026
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol marks a shift in how the company wants transactions to happen online. Instead of sending users from search results to merchant websites, Google is beginning to ...Read moreBlock’s Third Quarter Puts Spotlight on FinTech Realities, Not Crypto Dreams
November 6, 2025
As the lines between financial services, consumer banking and commerce blur, sitting at the intersection of technology and money movement starts to look attractive. At the enterprise level, at least. ...Read moreStablecoin Orchestration Becomes New Blockchain Battleground
November 3, 2025
As payment innovations scale, settlement and infrastructure have traditionally reared their heads as the strategic chokepoints. In the early days of the digital payments revolution, for example, industry titans like Mastercard, ...Read moreTrulioo Says the Next Evolution of KYC Is KYA
October 29, 2025
Watch more: What’s Next in Payments: Trulioo, Zac Cohen Commerce is changing fast, and verification has never mattered more for payments companies. As October unfolds, surprises abound and may touch on everything ...Read moreMastercard Wants to Make Commercial Payments Plug-and-Play
October 16, 2025
The golden rule of business is that operational inefficiency can cost enterprises both their time and their money. It’s the golden rule of business payments, too. But unlike the consumer payments space ...Read moreBlock Targets Traditional Card Users With Expanded Rewards Program
October 10, 2025
Some of the new features offered by Block’s Square and Cash App brands take direct aim at the fees charged by card networks, Bloomberg reported Friday (Oct. 10). The company is ...Read moreBlock Pushes Past Payments Into Bitcoin, Banking and BNPL
August 7, 2025
Block, owner of Square and Cash App, is betting that the future of money won’t look a lot like its past. Per its executive remarks during Thursday’s (Aug. 7) second-quarter 2025 earnings ...Read moreBakkt Inks Deal With DTR to Become Crypto, Stablecoin Infrastructure Provider
May 12, 2025
In today’s operating environment, adaptability is more than a competitive edge. It can mean the difference between survival and insolvency. Bakkt Holdings, Inc., a once-diversified digital asset platform, is living that ...Read moreBlock Renews Bets on AI, Ecosystem Lending as Growth Softens
May 1, 2025For a company long hailed as a tech disruptor in financial services, Block’s Q1 2025 results present a paradox. One of slowing growth amid a flurry of innovation. The question looming ...Read moreCash App’s Growing Number of Direct Deposits Marks Progress in Expansion Efforts
April 3, 2025
Block’s Cash App is reportedly making progress in its efforts to offer banking services to customers who mostly use the app to make payments. The number of the app’s users who ...Read more
AT&T Slashes AI Costs 90% by Swapping Large Models for Small Ones
February 27, 2026
AT&T boosted the efficiency of its internal Ask AT&T personal assistant by reworking the orchestration layer and shifting more of the work from large language models (LLMs) to small language ...Read moreAI Pioneer Andrew Ng Expects Decades-Long Wait For AGI
February 27, 2026
Artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng said the industry is decades away from developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). In an interview with Fast Company posted Friday (Feb. 27), Ng said he defines ...Read moreJPMorgan’s $20 Billion Tech Bet Could Shrink FinTech’s Innovation Edge
February 25, 2026
Updating the banking core has traditionally been viewed as akin to docking a cruise ship, with modernization serving as shorthand for incrementalism. Digitize the front end, bolt middleware onto aging ...Read moreThe Clearing House: Trust Is the Gatekeeper for What’s Next in Payments
February 24, 2026
Watch more: What’s Next in Payments With The Clearing House’s Sal Karakaplan A single word rarely captures the trajectory of an entire industry. Yet during periods of structural change, language often ...Read moreUber Debuts New Services for Autonomous Vehicle Partners
February 23, 2026
Uber has debuted Autonomous Solutions, a suite of services and capabilities designed for autonomous vehicles. These capabilities have already begun helping partners build and commercialize autonomous vehicles (AVs) in markets worldwide, Uber ...Read moreMulti-Agent Systems Move Business AI From Chatbot to Operations
February 20, 2026
For the last two years, enterprise artificial intelligence has been stuck in the assistant phase, a world of smarter emails and faster document summaries that boosted individual productivity but left ...Read moreEarnings Season Made It Clear: Digitize Supply Chains or Fall Behind
February 20, 2026
Logistics is moving from a game of scale to one of smarts. As global trade shifts under the weight of ongoing uncertainty and geopolitical strain, knowing where goods are, what condition ...Read moreMeta Looks to Take on Apple With First Smartwatch
February 19, 2026
Meta has reportedly resurrected its smartwatch project, aiming to release the device this year. That’s according to a report Wednesday (Feb. 19) from The Information, which notes that the company’s efforts are happening as ...Read moreBillion-Dollar Firms Swap AI Hype With Long-Term Capital Discipline, Data Shows
February 19, 2026
Hype can go hand in hand with immediacy. Since artificial intelligence first went mainstream, the innovation has been framed as having an immediate impact. As a result, the goals for enterprise buyers ...Read moreRegulatory Concerns Temper Agentic AI Adoption Across the Tech Sector, PYMNTS Finds
February 19, 2026
The fastest way to spot where agentic artificial intelligence will land next is to watch the technology sector, where it is already being built and tested. Inside tech, familiarity is translating ...Read more
Morgan Stanley’s OCC Application Is Wall Street Colonizing Crypto’s Back Office
February 27, 2026
Digital assets have gotten boring enough that their growth is now buried in procedural filings, not viral social media headlines. Take, for example, the news that blue-chip global bank Morgan Stanley ...Read moreBarclays Accelerates Push Into Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits
February 27, 2026
Barclays is looking to build a blockchain platform that could handle stablecoin payments and tokenized deposits, Bloomberg reported Friday (Feb. 27), citing unnamed sources. The bank has sent a request for ...Read moreInComm Payments and SKUx Launch Blockchain Aid Payments Platform
February 27, 2026
InComm Payments and SKUx announced Friday morning (Feb. 27) a strategic partnership to improve how digital payments are distributed for humanitarian aid and other applications for emerging markets. The announcement ...Read moreFigure Doubles Consumer Loan Volume and Adds Auto Lending
February 26, 2026
Blockchain-native capital marketplace Figure Technology Solutions saw its Consumer Loan Marketplace volume double year-over-year in the fourth quarter. The volume rose 131% over that period to reach $2.7 billion in the ...Read moreWho Needs Whom? Card Networks, Stablecoins and the Future of Payments
February 26, 2026
Here is the question nobody in polite payments circles wants to ask out loud: Do the card networks need stablecoins—or do stablecoins need the card networks? It sounds almost impertinent. Stablecoins ...Read moreStripe Builds Its Own Blockchain for Cross-Border Payments
February 25, 2026
FinTech Stripe has spent much of its operational history making it easier for merchants to plug into the financial system. Now, it is trying to redesign the system itself. According to ...Read moreInteroperability Is Missing Layer Connecting Blockchains to Merchant Systems
February 25, 2026
Interoperability in crypto payments has long been discussed as a technical aspiration. Over the past several months, it has started to look more like a commercial necessity. As stablecoins and digital ...Read moreBinance Teams With Ondo to Offer Tokenized Securities
February 24, 2026
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance is offering tokenized securities on its Binance Alpha platform, according to a Tuesday (Feb. 24) announcement. The company joined forces with Ondo, a blockchain-based platform focused on tokenizing ...Read moreStripe Reaches $159B Valuation as Global Volume Hits $1.9 Trillion
February 24, 2026
Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a tender offer designed to provide liquidity to current and former employees, the programmable financial services company said in a Tuesday (Feb. 24) ...Read moreFigure Debuts Tokenized Stock on Its OPEN Network
February 19, 2026
Figure is reportedly introducing a tokenized class of stock that trades on blockchain rails. Company officials told Coindesk Thursday (Feb. 19) that Figure’s FGRD token will be available on its Onchain Public Equity ...Read more