Category Archives: Payments

Earnings, Payments, Q4 2015, Square

Solid Progress at Square

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Square (finally) reported its Q4 2015 results today, and they demonstrate solid progress on the key things that matter. For a very quick primer on the keys to Square’s long-term success, see the video embedded below. For more detailed earlier analysis, see this piece and this piece.


Here’s an update on some key areas where Square is making progress. As a reminder, the core transaction processing business has pretty much fixed margins – Square takes a roughly 3% cut of transaction value, and keeps around a third of that (or 1%) as gross profit:
Square fixed marginsSo, no matter how much Square grows this side of its business, its margins are capped according to standard payment industry rates. However, Square isn’t just sticking to this business, but instead seeks to build an ecosystem around it through software and data products, so far mostly Square Capital (loans to Square payments customers) and Caviar (restaurant services). That business is very highly profitable because it has few incremental costs, and has been growing rapidly:Square margins by segmentSquare software and data growthAnother positive indicator this quarter was the fact that Square’s renegotiated contract with Starbucks, which was previously a heavy loss maker, broke even in Q4. This deal, which was originally done to drive scale for Square, has always been a drag on the business, but now promises to be much less of one:Starbucks gross marginThat also now means that Square’s three smaller reporting segments are collectively profitable on a gross margin level too:Square three smaller segmentsTo be sure, Square is still loss making overall by every measure but gross margin, but projects to be Adjusted EBITDA positive in 2016 and to start generating margins sometime beyond that. This quarter’s results suggest it’s very much on track for that goal, although it’s still a long way off.

Earnings, Payments, Q3 2015, Square

Quick thoughts on Square’s Q3 2015 numbers

Payments company Square filed an amended S1 with the SEC on Monday, with financial and operating metrics for Q3 2015. I previously talked about Square’s original IPO filing on Techpinions a couple of weeks ago, and today I’m just going to focus on a couple of elements of the new numbers. If you’re not familiar with Square, I suggest you take a quick read through that earlier piece as it will be helpful context for what’s below.

The charts here are taken from more in-depth analysis I do as part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service, a subscription service which provides slides on financial and operating metrics on some major consumer technology companies each quarter. I’ll post a screenshot of the slides in the Square deck, which went out to subscribers last night, at the bottom of this post. Any reporters reading this can contact me directly to receive copies of this and other decks from the service.

As a quick into, here’s Square’s revenue line by product:Square revenue breakdownAs you can see, revenue growth is pretty healthy, primarily driven by core transaction volumes, but helped also by a newer category called Software and Data Products. This is where Square Capital, Square’s cash advance business, sits, along with a couple of SaaS businesses it’s acquired and launched.

Importantly, Square’s gross margins from these different businesses are very varied, as the chart below shows:Square margins by productSoftware and Data Products have had by far the highest margins of all, although they’ve come down as Square has begun to incur costs of revenue around these businesses, which started out at almost 100% margins, with almost no costs. However, the Hardware business has historically been run at a loss, as Square essentially gave away many of its hardware products for free, although it’s now moving to a sell-at-cost model for some of its newer products. Lastly, you can see the huge discrepancy between the gross margins on Starbucks transactions, which have been consistently negative (around 20-30%), and all other transactions, which are very consistent at 35%.

Where things get really interesting is when you look at Starbucks transactions, which are fairly consistent in both revenue and gross profit dollars for now, in comparison to Software and Data Products. Square small segmentsThe latter is now just large enough to effectively cancel out the Starbucks gross loss, and at the current rate of growth it should fairly quickly outweigh it, which should help substantially with overall margins going forward. The ending of the Starbucks relationship (formalized this week with an announcement that Starbucks will indeed be going with another vendor going forward) combined with the growth of the Software and Data Products business are arguably the two keys to Square’s journey to future profitability.

A screenshot of the full set of slides from the Square quarterly deck I sent to subscribers yesterday is below:Square deck screenshot

Facebook, Payments, Retail

Facebook’s payments trojan horse

Facebook’s announcement of person-to-person payments through Facebook Messenger last week has a lot of people scratching their heads. The most puzzling part? It’s not charging for these payments, even though there’s a cost to Facebook, which means it’ll lose money on every transaction. So why would Facebook do this, and what implications does it have for payments and other services at Facebook?

Take a step back for a minute and look at Apple. For years, signing up for an iTunes account was almost impossible unless you were willing to provide credit card details for potential music purchases. As such, Apple collected credit card information for hundreds of millions of users, which enabled the later introduction of purchases of other forms of content such as TV shows, books and movies, and much later enabled the easy introduction of Apple Pay. Having a payment method on file makes creating new paid-for services much easier and more seamless, but getting the credit card information for the first time is the big hurdle. Just look at Google – it’s struggled for years to get users to pay for apps and content. There are certainly other reasons for this, but one of the key reasons is the fact that users don’t provide credit card information when they sign up for either a Google account or an Android device. In markets where Google has added carrier billing as a payment option, app purchases rise significantly, according to one of the companies I’ve spoken to which provides the underlying technology.

So, back to Facebook. Other than its fairly limited previous payments play with partners such as Zynga, Facebook has never really given users a reason to add payment information to their accounts. And that’s been fine, because Facebook’s main business model has been advertising, with payments and other fees dwindling as a source of revenue. But as Facebook attempts for a second time to create a platform for developers and businesses, payment information will be a critical element of many of the potential implementations. The biggest barrier? Most of Facebook’s users don’t have payment information on file. How, then, to incentivize these users to add their credit card details? I suspect fee-free person-to-person payments may well be the trojan horse Facebook is using to catalyze users into adding their payment details to their accounts. Give users a compelling reason to add their details, and then you’ve got them for other purposes too. Now all it requires is getting their permission to use the same credit card for other transactions.

So, what transactions could we be talking about here? Well, last year Facebook trialled some basic commerce solutions, such as a Buy button, and at last year’s F8 conference it announced Autofill with Facebook, in partnership with several other payment providers. But at today’s F8 event we got a much better sense of what it has planned. The Buy button together with Facebook’s Messenger platform announcement highlight various ways in which Facebook could benefit from having users’ credit card details on file. If that platform is to make money, in fact, it’s almost certain that it’ll need some way to allow users to make payments for various products and services, of which Facebook would naturally take a cut. But even beyond the platform announcement, Facebook is planning to bring more video and news content into Facebook natively, and having ways for users to pay for such content on a subscription basis would also be attractive, just as Apple allows its users to do today. In fact, almost all of the ways in which Facebook could diversify away from advertising require it to have ways for users to pay for things through Facebook, and that requires getting their payment details.

All of this brings us back to Google, which we touched on briefly earlier. Google clearly plans to get into the payments business itself with Android Pay over the coming months, and it would obviously love to increase users’ spend on apps and content as well over time. But Google has struggled throughout its history to get users to pay for things, especially since it’s taught them so effectively that its most useful services will be free, supported by advertising. What will Google’s vehicle be for getting users to add their payment details to their profiles? It could arguably take a leaf out of Facebook’s book here – find a way to incentivize users to add their credit cards to their accounts through a service that’s compelling in its own right. Once that’s done, all kinds of new opportunities will open up.

Apple, Bluetooth LE, Mobile payments, NFC, Payments, Techpinions, Wearables

This week’s Techpinions column – Apple and Mobile Payments

My column for Techpinions this week is about Apple and mobile payments, and was prompted by the current heightened interest in Apple’s plans in this area, driven both by the prospect of new iPhones and wearables. I quote survey results from my recent report on smartwatches, but also highlight the vicious circle that plagues the mobile payments space:

The mobile payments vicious circle

Aside from the overall challenges facing any company in the payments space, I talk about the major technologies Apple might choose to use, including both NFC and Bluetooth LE (Apple has so far favored the latter). You can read the whole thing on the Techpinions site. All my Techpinions columns can be seen here.