Square Cements European Expansion With UK Job Postings

Mobile payments firm Square, led by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, posted new job openings in the UK on Thursday as the company ramps up its European expansion.

The San Francisco startup is most known for making card readers that can be used by smartphones. Square went public in November 2015, and has already expanded its service into Canada, Australia and Japan.

Hires

But the company has yet to move into the European mobile payment space, something that is about to change with the hiring of three new European employees.

Square is looking for a compliance analyst and a communications manager in London, and a technical customer support representative in Dublin, Ireland.

Square, which also provides invoicing software, will compete in Europe with Sweden’s iZettle and SumUp, a London-based startup.

It was July when Square quietly opened up its ‘Square Register’ point of sale app in the UK. A new Twitter account called @SquareUK appeared in June too, and documents first spotted by Reuters showed that Dorsey had incorporated a business called Squareup Europe Ltd in Britain.

Other clues to an imminent launch in the UK also come in the form of a dedicated UK website and URL, featuring screenshots of payments made in Pound Sterling.

In May, market research from Novonous predicted that the global mobile payments market will grow at an annual rate of 36 percent by 2020 as the availability of affordable mobile payments platforms reaches retailers and end users.

Rival Apple Pay, which currently holds the largest market share in terms of mobile payments, launched in the UK in 2015, with Google’s Android Pay coming soon after. But Dorsey, who shares his CEO responsibilities between Twitter and Square, is confident.

“We’ve built one of the fairest and most efficient payments businesses in the world,” Dorsey said when Square floated last November.

“We made it possible to accept card payments in less than five minutes,” he added, “We intend to make this big!”

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