Square Cash, one of the third-party P2P (person-to-person) payment services to hit the market in the last couple of years, has been redesigned from its initial app-based product. Originally released in October 2013, the application was designed to feed into the sender’s email, with the mobile application putting a simple front-end interface to generate the email. The new mobile application, downloaded to my iPhone today, enables me to Request or Send funds to contacts from my contact list, let’s me add my profile picture, and enables me to see my activity on Square Cash.
It also offered me $1 for each of my contacts that signs up for Square Cash based on an invitation the application sends out when I set-up the new release of Square Cash. Square cash works as follows:
“To use Square Cash as an email service, senders compose a message to the recipient and to “[email protected],” with the dollar amount listed in the email’s subject line. After this message is sent, the recipient would also get an email explaining how to enroll a debit card account to receive the funds. As of a February update, users could also request funds by sending an email and copying “[email protected]” as a recipient.”
As an original Square Cash user, I found the changes to be simple, minimal and necessary to reduce consumer friction in using the service. It still is one of the easiest of the P2P services, since it currently operates without a ewallet. By eliminating the ewallet requirement, it reduces the additional amount of information needed to function and to cash out funds to one’s checking account. That being said, other P2P apps still seem to have the upper hand in users and usage – and other P2P services offer a social media tie-in that Square Cash still does not offer. I was disappointed, however, that it requires me to re-enter all of the personal information into the app, even though I had done it already on the previous version.
Overview by Ron Mazursky, Director, Debit Advisory Services
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