Square's new platform lets sellers build customized apps on top of its payment service
Square has started to think beyond what it can do in the commerce space. During the company's Q4 2015 earnings call, CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged that his company wouldn't be able to build everything …
Context & Ripple Effects
On its Q4 2015 earnings call, Jack Dorsey conceded that Square could not build everything sellers need on its own — and this developer platform is the structural answer to that admission: instead of shipping features in-house, Square exposes its payment service so sellers assemble their own commerce tools on top of it.
The move extends a pattern the related coverage keeps documenting. Square had already pushed beyond card readers by opening its lending business to merchants outside its own payments base, and later simplified online selling with Online Checkout so sellers could take cards without building a full store. Years on, the same logic resurfaces at larger scale when Dorsey spins up a dedicated business line for developers building financial products, culminating in the TBD decentralized-finance effort centered on Bitcoin. The 2016 platform is the first clear statement that Square sees itself as infrastructure others build on.
First-order effects
- Sellers on Square's payment service gain the ability to customize their own commerce tooling rather than waiting for Square's product roadmap — the constraint Dorsey named on the Q4 2015 call is now handed to customers.
Second-order effects
- Opening the payment service as a build surface pushes adjacent Square businesses toward the same openness: the lending arm that later served non-Square merchants and Online Checkout's store-free payments both treat third-party sellers as first-class users of Square rails, widening the funnel feeding those services.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, a payments company's competitive position shifts from feature breadth to how much of its stack outsiders depend on — the trajectory that led Square, under Dorsey, to eventually formalize developer-facing business lines like TBD rather than treating third-party builds as an afterthought.
The trend: Square is converting its payments product into open infrastructure that sellers and outside developers build on, a platformization arc running from the 2016 app platform through its later lending and decentralized-finance expansions.