At some point over the past two and half years, most of us have handed our credit card over to some proprietor of a small business – whether to a cab driver ferrying you to the airport, or a food truck vendor down the block from the office – to have have them swipe it through a small card reader attached to their smartphone or tablet.

For the past few years, products from Square, VeriPhone and Intuit (GoPayment) have been offering something basic but previously inaccesible to many small and micro business owners: the ability to accept credit cards. When launched, these offerings were going up against giant financial institutions and forced to compete for customers who were thought of as “undesirable” and therefore traditionally ignored by banks –  those too small and with too little or poor credit history to get a merchant account. Now that they’ve established themselves and are handling billions of dollars a year in transcations, the question is: What’s next?

For Square in particular, there are two big things on the horizon that could be bigger game changers than the initial offering: …Continue reading