Jack Dorsey’s company Square – which is now referred to as “Block” – is looking to shift gears a bit and doesn’t want to be viewed purely as a payment firm. Rather, it wants to be looked at as a financial “ecosystem” as described in a recent investor meeting due to its love of crypto and bitcoin projects.
Block Will Take a Huge Bitcoin Route
CFO of Block Amrita Ahuja commented in an interview:
Calling [our company] a payments company is like calling Amazon a bookseller. We’ve grown in so many ways across multiple dimensions.
In the meeting, Dorsey kicked things off by saying that bitcoin would have a huge role in the direction Block took in the future. He stated:
We are no longer just a payments company. A lot has changed since our last investor day.
It was also uncovered that Block is doing better than a lot of companies that share its space. For last year alone, profits were up by more than 30 percent, with roughly 12 percent of those profits being derived from use of the Cash App. At the time of writing, Cash App has roughly 46 million active users and about 80 million people altogether using it on an annual basis.
Ahuja commented:
Wall Street analysts are going to want to understand our growth profile and our margin structure as a company. You can see based on our track record we are outgrowing the rest of the industry. We operate in a large and growing market and are still taking share.
Not long ago, Block closed a major deal – worth close to $30 billion at press time – to purchase After Pay, an Australian fintech firm. The company’s goal is to expand to the international loan market, and roughly six percent of Cash App users are now utilizing After Pay.
When it comes to crypto use, Ahuja stated that millennials and younger generations are likely to shift more towards this financial sector given that there is allegedly too much distrust of standard financial industries. She said:
Millennials and Gen Z are quite frankly skeptical of traditional forms of credit that leave people in debt spirals.
Branching Into Other Regions
The company has also purchased a music streaming service known as Tidal for roughly $300 million. Tidal was founded by Jay-Z, the rapper husband of Beyonce. Dorsey stated:
This will be a massive economy in the future, and we see an opportunity to be a big part of it, all using the tools and platform we’ve already built. We acquired Tidal because we saw that artists take a path similar to small businesses, and that there’s a significant gap in the market around artist tools.
Despite all the hype surrounding bitcoin, as of the end of quarter one of this year, BTC only accounts for five percent of the company’s overall profits.
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