Enabling Safe & Responsible Cash Deposits for Small Businesses

Square may have started by making it easier than ever to accept credit cards, but that hasn’t meant the end of cash. Even as commerce has become increasingly digital, cash is still a significant component of revenue for small businesses. In the last year, 106,000 Square Checking customers collected $988M in cash payments.

This is why we introduced Cash Deposits for sellers, giving businesses the ability to make cash deposits at participating retailers to fund their Square Checking account. Those funds can then be used by sellers to make purchases using their Square Debit Card and pay bills using Bill Pay, giving them more streamlined operations, flexible cash flow, and the convenience of being able to deposit funds without having to seek out a bank branch. Since we launched Cash Deposits earlier this year, month-over-month usage has steadily increased, with just over 5,600 sellers depositing $3.8M in August.

To manage the risks that come along with offering this feature to our sellers, Square has implemented measures to protect its customers and platform including:

• We define eligibility through a set of customer and account criteria to only offer these products to lower-risk customers who have had their identity verified on Square.
• We operate controls to help us reduce the risk that someone other than the Square seller is making cash deposits into the seller's account.
• Square sellers are sanction-screened initially and on an ongoing basis.
• We’ve set deposit limits for individual transactions, as well as total deposits over rolling 7- and 30-day periods.
• Transaction monitoring designed specifically for the feature.
• As always, we work to detect suspicious activity and deposit limit evasion.

Square will monitor the performance of these controls through its ongoing risk assessment, monitoring, and testing, and audit exercises to ensure it continues a responsible offering of the Cash Deposit feature.