Square And Griffin Debut An Integrated Merchant Case
Last year, Square debuted Stand, a piece of hardware that turns a merchant's iPad into a card-swiping register. The idea was to provide a simple and elegant …
Context & Ripple Effects
Square has spent four years pulling its business out of the phone dongle and into the store: Apple began stocking Square readers at retail back in April 2011, Card Case was rebuilt as 'Pay With Square' in March 2012, and last year Stand turned a merchant's own iPad into a card-swiping register. The Griffin case extends that arc one step further out from the software — Square now shapes the physical enclosure merchants set on the counter.
Hardware partnerships are also defensive territory for Square: in August 2010 Mophie and Intuit shipped an iPhone card-reader bundle explicitly aimed at undercutting Square, so locking up Griffin — one of the best-known iOS accessory makers — keeps that flank occupied while the company redesigns its reader with help from an Apple Lightning-plug engineer.
First-order effects
- Griffin gains a marquee co-branded product line in merchant accessories, and Square merchants get a single integrated enclosure instead of jury-rigging an iPad into the Stand setup.
Second-order effects
- Rival accessory makers are pushed down the same path — Mophie already proved the category by bundling card hardware with Intuit in 2010 — so other payment providers now need their own named accessory partner to match Square's counter presence.
Third-order effects
- Point of sale continues migrating off proprietary terminals onto consumer tablets wrapped in branded peripherals, moving value toward whoever controls the enclosure-plus-software stack rather than the terminal manufacturer.
The trend: Merchant point-of-sale is being rebuilt around consumer tablets plus co-branded accessory hardware, letting payments companies capture the counter itself rather than just the transaction.