PayPal mobile payment rival Square has said that it now processes approximately $4 million daily in mobile payments, $1 million more than Square advertised it handled at the end of May.
Square has clearly sailed beyond any shadows cast by the nasty volley begun by CEO of competitor VeriFone, Doug Bergeron, and answered by Square’s CEO and co-founder, Jack Dorsey that called into question the security of Square’s credit-card reading attachment for mobile devices.
Instead, the increased processing numbers reflect Square’s booming growth, a rise that has been bolstered by a sizable investment from Visa in late April. A recent funding round of $100 million has swept the payments start-up to a $1 billion valuation.
Despite the important uptick for Square in particular, it and the rest of the mobile payments market have a long way to go. To put payments into perspective, credit card companies will process billions of dollars in payments on a given day, and mobile payments–still an inchoate, although rapidly expanding portion of the industry–can hope to garner a tiny percentage of total credit card activity this year.
Analysts at the Yankee Group forecast that mobile transactions will surge from $162 billion globally in 2010 to $984 billion in 2014, according to Fierce Wireless.