Dreams square, the platform that dreams of breaking the banks

Dreams square, the platform that dreams of breaking the banks

Ablier on the back, Elhadj Keita presents a pair of Nike on the plane of struggle. 

A few brush upsets quickly give a new lease of life to the red of the iconic crates. "It's still another pick", welcomes the supporter of Maison Sneakers, a shop based in Levallois-Perret, north-west of Paris. His speciality ? Retype the bushels. "De assortment", hastens to specify the thirty-something, surrounded by fifty of the most beautiful specimens. But the real star of the place is the little white box placed on the counter. "The first customers who saw it thought it was Apple," says Elhadj Keita. What we actually like to take for an iPhone is in fact a payment terminal. Maison Sneakers is one of the first French companies to have swapped its good old terminal for a digital box from the American Square, which has just landed in Europe.

 Few French people have heard of Square. In the United States, however, the company quickly became a payment giant. Especially with small businesses, independents and start-ups in mind. Like other Silicon Valley glories like Uber, the company was created on a whim. It was in 2008. At the time, Californian Jim McKelvey ran, among other activities, an art gallery on the West Coast, and he regularly misses a sale because he has no terminal. payment for bank cards. In the United States, the box and its software are relatively expensive. In the order of a few hundred dollars a year.

 Frustrated by this system in the hands of the banks, Jim McKelvey talks about it over a dinner to one of his friends, who is none other than Jack Dorsey, whose days are already busy developing a whole new social network called ... Twitter. Convinced that there is something to be done, the two friends decide to create their own solution with a simple goal: to be as cheap as possible and to capture the small business market. 

Square, in reference to its now famous square case, was born. A galaxy of banking services Since then, the company's white terminals have invaded all of the United States. "There was a real avenue towards start-ups, and they took it," rewinds Julien Maldonato, partner at Deloitte. In the United States, more than 1 million companies, 99% of which are very small businesses, work with Square, which has become in a few years a real alternative to traditional players. But the success of the company comes mainly from what it has developed inside its boxes, that is to say its technology.

 "The payment terminal is only the first brick", underlines Romain Franczia, vice-president for Southern Europe of Seismic, a company specializing in software. It is also a platform that has relied on the payment business to build a whole galaxy of banking services.