It looks like Square is getting serious about the market it’s “playing” in.
The mobile payments startup announced yesterday it has hired Visa’s chief marketing officer, Kevin Burke, to lead its customer acquisition team.
“Square is transforming the way people buy and sell around the world,” said Burke in a Square press release. “I’m really excited to join Square as they continue to deliver on their promise to make commerce easy while helping independent businesses thrive.”
Even for Square, known for its high-profile hires from Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, this is a big deal.
It’s an incursion into financial services, and suggests Square is playing for keeps. Burke can’t have come cheap, and rumor has Square running low on cash, though the company has denied this and does have demonstrable revenue. (Much of this is kicked back to, well, Visa.)
More to the point, Burke’s hire suggests Square is serious about signing larger clients, where PayPal has found mixed results and Apple Pay is running rampant and causing mobile payments chaos. Though it was born in the consumer/micromerchant space, analysts have suggested that it’s time for Square to grow up and get serious about the enterprise space, and this move says Square is listening.
Square is also involved in lending to small businesses, as is PayPal, and the company’s marketing still focuses on the small-scale and folksy, as in the video below from late November, where CEO Jack Dorsey interviews a coffeeshop owner in — you guessed it — San Francisco.