New Square Card Case = Massive #WIN

When I speak about the need to rebuild financial services from the ground up, I mean through innovations like this.  From TechCrunch:

Here’s how it works. Once Square’s technology detects you are near a merchant enabled store, the Merchant’s Square app will open a tab for the customer and show that customer’s account, name and photo as nearby. When the customer purchases an item, they say their name, and the cashier can verify the photo matches the customer and press the transact button and the charge will go through. The customer will get a push notification with the amount of the charge as well.

Square Card CaseThis version of Card Case, which has been updated to take advantage of iOS' support for geo-ringfencing, makes good on the inital promise of Square - the amount of friction caused by the payment process for transactions that take place "out in the world" is being whittled down to nothing.  Why anyone aside from the largest enterprises would use Verifone or any other "legacy" payment processor for merchant services is beyond me (and even then...).  I do wonder how easy it would be to hack something like this, and I'm unfortunately quite certain we'll find out soon enough.  There never seems to be a shortage of bastards out there who are willing jump through hoops of fire to try to steal other people's money...

Sure, Square is (right now) just a payment platform, and payments are a space where startups scale eternal.  But we badly need more players like these guys to try to shake things up in the world of personal finance - innovations like Card Case are showing us the way forward.