Square starts shipping its chip card reader with Apple Pay support; Samsung Pay now supports Chase cards
Square rolls out readers to accept Apple Pay — NEW YORK — Square is rolling out new mobile payment readers to 100 local businesses around the country, allowing such merchants …
Context & Ripple Effects
Square's fall 2015 rollout delivers on its own June announcement of an Apple Pay-ready NFC and chip reader: the first hundred units are going to local businesses around the country rather than big chains, keeping the company anchored in its small-merchant base while upgrading them from swipe-only dongles to EMV-and-contactless hardware.
The timing matters on two fronts — the US chip-card transition was forcing merchants to replace terminals anyway, and rival wallets were racing to sign issuers, with Samsung Pay adding Chase card support the same week. Square kept deepening the Apple relationship afterward, putting the reader in US Apple stores for $49 and later extending Apple Pay to its virtual payment cards under Jack Dorsey.
First-order effects
- Roughly one hundred local merchants gain the ability to accept tap-to-pay from iPhone and Apple Watch customers plus chip cards through a single reader, closing an acceptance gap that previously pushed Apple Pay users back to cash or swipes.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's move to support Chase cards signals that wallet makers will compete for issuer integrations, pressuring banks to support multiple wallets and pushing Square to keep its reader compatible across Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay rather than locking to one ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If contactless acceptance becomes table stakes at small merchants, the hardware itself starts to shrink toward software — the arc this story sits at the start of runs from a $49 external reader to Tap to Pay on iPhone inside Square's Point of Sale app, where no extra device is needed at all.
The trend: Small-business payments are shifting from proprietary card-swipe dongles to standardized NFC acceptance, first via cheap add-on readers and eventually via software-only tap-to-pay built into merchant phones.