SQUARE'S NEW iPAD PAYMENT SYSTEM MIGHT REPLACE CASH REGISTERS

Mobile payments startup Square is announcing big numbers today—500,000 Square card readers shipped, 1 million Square transactions in May, and the startup is now processing $3 million in mobile payments per day. Clearly the company is on a roll in terms of traction and usage. And CEO Jack Dorsey is also revealing the next generation of Square. And Square is about to get a whole lot more disruptive.

Today, Dorsey is revealing Square Register, a high-powered point of sale replacement for cash registers and point of sale terminals. And the company is taking it one step further for consumers by launching the Square Card Case, a way for purchasers to access a local merchants’ goods, prices, location, loyalty card and more.

For background, Square offers an iPhone, Android and iPad app which allows merchants to process and manage credit card transactions with a handy little credit card swiping device that plugs into the headset/microphone jack. The device and service is the brainchild of Twitter co-founder and recently appointed product lead Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey. And Square recently raised $27.5 million in new funding, and announced a strategic investment from credit card company Visa. In Q1, Square did $66 million in payment volume (the company expected $40 million) and is now in track to process $1 billion in payment volume within a year.

Square’s COO Keith Rabois tells us that as the startup has created a payments product for small businesses, they’ve learned that many businesses have more needs than simply having a credit card processor. One of these needs is being able to not only accept cards, but also communicate with customers more efficiently. So today, Square is launching this brand new version of its iPad app, Square Register.

Rabois says the iPad app makes these expensive and cumbersome terminals obsolete for merchants. Not only is the reader and app free (and beautifully designed), but the register is designed to help create and maintain meaningful relationships with customers. Historically, Square’s readers always stored every purchaser’s receipt for merchants and allowed merchant’s to send a copy of the receipt to the purchaser via SMS and email. It was fairly simple.

Now, with the upgrade, merchants can send customers a link to download an app on their mobile phone called a Square Card Case. And this gives merchants a whole new level of engagement with their customers. And data is another big component of Square’s announcement—Dorsey says merchants will have Google Analytics style data that merchants can access, such as how many muffins were sold, and to which types of customers, and more.