How Our Products Put Our Purpose into Action

Equity and access are essential to our shared purpose of economic empowerment at Block. Across our ecosystem, we make simple tools that help create more equitable and inclusive financial services — here are a few.

Square Banking offers loans, savings, and checking accounts to small businesses, which have historically faced barriers to accessing key financial tools. Integrating financial services at the point of sale expands access and allows businesses to qualify on the merit of their performance alone. Square Savings, a product of Square Banking, helped sellers set aside more than $100M in 2022. The service helped sellers meet specific business goals and financial needs — like buying new equipment or paying taxes.

Square for Spanish-speaking sellers

Starting in 2022, Square made its entire ecosystem available in Spanish to sellers in the U.S. A study commissioned by Square in conjunction with the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce revealed the biggest challenges facing Hispanic business owners, which include raising capital through financing or credit-building opportunities, sourcing raw materials or inventory, acquiring customers, growing their staff, and effectively marketing to new or returning customers. Making Square’s ecosystem of tools accessible to Spanish-speaking sellers will help address these challenges and unlock more business-critical capabilities.

Cash App’s mobile-check and paper money deposits help cash-dependent customers participate in the digital economy. Customers can scan checks and add physical cash to their Cash App balance at more than 30,000 participating retailers across the U.S.

Afterpay lending

The Afterpay Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) tool offers a zero-interest, zero-account fee model that allows customers to pay for purchases in four installments over six weeks. This approach offers historically under-resourced groups improved access to the benefits of traditional credit, including budget support and consumption smoothing.

TIDAL RISING offers up-and-coming artists funding and educational resources to make it easier for them to focus on making music. From mentorship on growing and strengthening their audiences to opportunities to build personal networks and create a community with other artists in the early stages of their careers, TIDAL RISING supports a diversity of artists with the education, connections, and amplification to better navigate the music industry.

Empowerment through bitcoin

Bitcoin can be an important tool for economic empowerment. Spiral focuses on improving the bitcoin ecosystem with projects like the Lightning Development Kit, which helps make instant bitcoin transactions more accessible. The independent team’s grant program supports free and open-source (FOSS) bitcoin developers and designers in over a dozen countries (and counting).

TBD is building infrastructure to help open the decentralized financial world to everyone. Currently, the team is working towards solutions to enable cheaper, faster bitcoin transactions. The project will serve the billions of people worldwide who send and receive money across borders daily.

Bitkey is a reliable, easy-to-use self-custody wallet created to help all people everywhere safely own and manage their bitcoin. Self-custody reduces the cost of owning bitcoin, and Bitkey’s user-friendly design helps make self-custody more accessible to a larger population.