Square’s Loss Of Key Customer Concerns Wall Street

Silicon Valley’s mobile payments company Square Inc. is causing ripples of concern on Wall Street as the competition closes in and one of its customer walks, Bloomberg reported on Thursday (Aug. 29).

Now that Square has lost the Danish company Joe & the Juice, Wall Street is concerned about competition for larger sellers. It is thought that the company moved to competitor Adyen in order to have a single global processor for all of its markets.

Morgan Stanley Analyst James Faucette told Bloomberg that although the revenue Square received from the company was “relatively immaterial,” Joe & the Juice was considered a “key customer case” of Square’s ability to get larger clients.

“As Square enters this market, it is not only competing on price, but also on hardware capabilities and breadth of offerings,” Faucette said.

Square’s earnings missed the mark and its stock has been down 27 percent in the past year. Faucette said it seems Square is not yet able to offer a competitive advantage on the global front.

When Square released its first set of developer application programming interfaces (APIs) about five years ago, the focus was to attract partners who could provide its sellers with tools to more effectively manage their point of sale (POS) data. But the Square development platform and its purview have significantly grown and changed.

What started with fewer than 10 partners has now expanded to more than 270. The focus has changed, too, from merely making the information within Square more easily accessible to building a broader commerce and financial services platform that will enable any developer to create applications that help Square sellers better grow their businesses.

Square’s primary area of focus over the last few years has increasingly been on the emerging omnichannel. Offering order online and pick up in-store was the next logical step in building that capacity. It is a natural outgrowth of how merchants are already using their points of sale, enabling them to meet and serve potential customers wherever they happen to encounter them.