Square rolls out its Cash App in the UK

Square launched its mobile payments service in the UK in March, 2016. It has since made confident inroads into the British card payments market, despite competition from rivals like Paypal, iZettle, and SumUp.

A factor that drove the success of Venmo and the Cash App in the US is the difficulty and expense in making immediate person-to-person money transfers. That’s just not an issue in the UK, where the Faster Payments Service has existed for nearly ten years. This free service is present in virtually all day-to-day bank accounts, and allows people to send cash to other Britain-based bank accounts in seconds, provided you know the other parties’ sort code and account number.

In addition, some of the new challenger banks, like Monzo (which already boasts around 500,000 customers) offer peer-to-peer money transfers. In the UK, the Cash App will face strong competition.