Yesterday Square formally launched Square Cash, a product which allows anyone to send money to contacts via email. Square’s goal is to reduce friction around sending and receiving mobile payments. Squares core offerings, including its iPad register and swiper, allow merchants to accept payments easily. Square is making a direct path to compete with Google’s Gmail integration with Google Wallet. Paypal recently purchased Braintree which will allow the company to make sending money to non-PayPal users easier.
To use Square Cash you can simply email [email protected] and CC’s the person you want to send money to with the amount of money either in the subject or body of the email. The recipient will immediately get another email from Square telling them that they have received money from the sender with a link to add the recipient’s debit card, billing ZIP and expiration date. Once Square has your card information, the payment will be deposited in 1 to 2 days.
Square has also released a iOS and Android app that incorporated email. When you launch the app on your phone you’re prompted with amount of money to send. Then the application will allow you to select the email client you’ll use to send the email with the money. The email is pre-filled with all the necessary information, you’ll just add a recipient.
So far Sqaure Cash looks like the one of best frictionless P2P payment system deployed yet. Google has a lot of competition considering this is not requiring any extra accounts and little information is collected. Twitter’s be abuzz with talk about how well the app works, and how this could help solve mobile p2p payments. This is a simple and small fix that could bring others to do the same, however Google was first to offer this.
What do you think about Square Cash? Will you be using the service, or maybe you’ve been using Google’s Gmail integration with Google Wallet? Or do you reserve sending money to friends via check or cash? Tell us below!