Block’s Square, the company that built a business on catering to smaller businesses, is bolstering its bid for restaurant clients.
Square plans to sharpen its voice ordering and cost control systems for restaurant clients, along with integrating more artificial intelligence tools and increasing options for restaurants to accept bitcoin, the company said in a post on its website Wednesday.
“This sweeping set of innovations is designed to help restaurants of all sizes reach more customers, manage costs more effectively, and optimize operations for growth in any economic environment,” the company said in the post.
San Francisco-based Block, led by billionaire entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, is incorporating the new services for eateries as the war to attract such business clients has increased among payments players.
Over the past decade, rivals such as Toast, Fiserv’s Clover, Shift4 and Adyen have increased the intensity of the battle to process transactions for the expanding $1.5 trillion-dollar U.S. restaurant industry.
While Square built its business on smaller merchants, it’s been attempting to attract larger restaurant clients for at least two years, and has landed some, including the national chain Shake Shack. The company has also expanded internationally.
Some of its restaurant clients have been asking for upgrades, such as including functionality to accept customer deposits for restaurants that host group events.
Still, Square’s rivals in the restaurant arena have also been cooking up new features. Boston-based Toast, which launched its competing point-of-sale hardware in 2012, has become widely used at U.S. restaurants in recent years. Clover, founded in 2010, has souped up its payments capabilities with additional resources since its 2019 acquisition by mega-processor Fiserv.
More established stalwarts in the industry, including Oracle’s Micros Systems and NCR Voyix also contribute to fierce competitive pressures.
Square announced the restaurant service upgrades as part of a pack of announcements it makes twice a year.
The company also said it’s ramping up services aimed at enabling neighborhood businesses generally to better compete with larger national chains. To do that, the company is trying to build up connections between its Square merchants and the consumer users of its digital wallet Cash App by way of rewards program benefits, marketing and processing rate changes.
All of the Block’s new campaigns are also designed to benefit from its increased attempts to integrate AI insights into the services it offers its merchant clients and to increasingly allow such businesses to accept bitcoin payments, the company said.
