Square Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar wants to prove that cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin, can be a genuine financial tool with the latest version of its Cash App for iOS now supporting the protocol.
“We’re a payment innovator. And therefore I think it behooves us to always know, where are our payments going?” Friar told “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer on Wednesday. “When we develop products at Square, we spend a lot of time listening to what our customers want, and what we heard from individuals – so this isn’t sellers asking to accept bitcoin, this is individuals using Square Cash to make payments… saying, ‘We want an easy way to buy and sell bitcoin.'”
Friar than added that the fastest way to understand a new product is to build products around them.
Bitcoin, in turn, has experienced a surge in both popularity and price over the course of 2017 and briefly gained 11 percent following Friar’s announcement.
“Ultimately, you have to be out there taking some risk and being able to go where innovation is going,” she said. “It feels like the early days of the internet or the early days of the shift to the cloud. How many people said, ‘We’ll never take data outside our data center, that’s not safe’?”
“I look at digital currency like that. I don’t think we know yet what it’s going to be, but I think, absolutely, as an innovator, Square has to be there to let a customer do what they want to do,” Friar told Cramer.
The Square Cash App is available for free and requires iOS 10.0 to install and run.