Mo’ Money: Square Now Processing $3 Million A Day In Mobile Payments

I have posted the following on HN a couple times; Square is a platform.

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I think that Square is an exceptional business enabled by a novel piece of hardware, their headphone jack card reader.

It would seem - then, that the card reader and payment service could actually be seen as a platform play.

Platforms are technologies that are useful themselves - but enable far reaching, broader use cases in ways, that at times, can be unforeseen.

Square could enable a range of cottage industries by providing other applications built on their solution.

We have the ability for mobile payments, as it were, and thus we should see a need for dead-simple mobile business management apps; inventory, supply chain, vendor management, invoicing, product lists etc.

This leads me to believe that Square is a platform that, through its deployment, applications can be built upon it that will change the way commerce can happen on the individual level.

Further - it would seem that there is also a great opportunity for sales distribution here as well. A product distributor could reach out to and enable a mobile sales force providing all these applications to their sales force in the field on a single device - as the merchants sell product, it can be tracked in real time and supplies replenished.

This could work very well in connected, yet less-developed countries such as rural Philippines, China and other parts of Asia. (areas where the vast majority of the population have mobile phones, but other forms of infrastructure are less developed)

Couple this with prepaid charge cards -- and the ability to LOAD cards in the longer term, and there are some significant opportunities that can be built using square alone.

Square charges a flat 2.7%, with no monthly charges. A merchant account with a payment gateway costs around $30 a month and 2.5%, accepting AMEX cost another $15 a month and the rate is 3.3%, but Squate does that for free.

Here's a good comparison calculator: http://feefighters.com/square-calculator

It's not possible to go below 1% because interchange is higher than that... more details on that (what interchange is, why it exists, etc): http://feefighters.com/page/ebook_download?force_download=tr...

Also, can anyone familiar with point of sale systems compare the two?

I saw an interview with Jack once where he mentioned cool reporting without going into details. It seems possible that the value of Squares should also include the cost/fees of POS systems (minus cost of your ipad/iphone/ipod that connects to your Square).