Square puts ACH and paper checks on its credit card, and stakes a claim on payables

Square has rewired its business credit card so sellers can pay vendors through Square Bill Pay using ACH or a mailed check, not just a card ^[1]. That matters because the payable, not the checkout, is where a small firm's operating cash actually leaves the building, and Block is moving onto that ground while Stripe closes in on deals to buy PayPal and OpenRouter ^[2].

Read the rate card, not the press language. Square set rewards at 3% cash back on Square Bill Pay transactions and 1.5% on purchases, redeemable as deposits into Square Savings ^[3][4]. Bill Pay pays double the rate of ordinary spend ^[5], which is a statement of intent: Block wants the recurring vendor file, the rent payment, the supplier relationship, and it wants the resulting balance to sit inside Square Savings rather than at a bank ^[3][4]. The article does not disclose what Square charges on those Bill Pay transactions or how the rewards are funded ^[6].

The pitch is coverage of vendors who do not take plastic. "It's a credit and a B2B platform. You can pay your vendors, suppliers, rent and others ... and you can do it digitally whether your vendor accepts a credit card or not," Andrea Raj, head of product for Square Money, told American Banker ^[7]. Raj framed the underlying problem as timing rather than access: businesses face a mismatch between money out and money in, which creates overdraft risk, and Square is now tracking incoming and outgoing B2B payments alongside consumer checkout ^[8][9]. Her line worth keeping is that income is "no longer just funds coming through a point of sale" ^[10]. That is the honest description of what a point-of-sale company becomes when card volume alone stops being enough: a payables and cash-position system with a credit line attached ^[11].

Timing is the part Block will not discuss. Stripe is either making or close to making two large acquisitions, PayPal and OpenRouter, with Block named as a potential investor in the PayPal deal, according to American Banker ^[2][12]. Stripe and Block did not comment ^[13]. American Banker also reports that Square did not upgrade its business payments technology as a direct counter to Stripe, while noting Square is not operating in a vacuum ^[14]. Both firms sell payment and e-commerce technology largely to small and mid-sized businesses ^[15].

The stated logic of the Stripe deals is AI scale, at a point when AI agents are mostly not making payments and are instead used in shopping, customer service and internal product development ^[16][17]. OpenRouter, which is not part of the rumored PayPal deal, lets developers research and switch between large language models from OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic ^[18]. Payments consultant Richard Crone told American Banker that the businesses his firm speaks with are using advanced AI across their entire operations, and that firms are becoming attached to specific models ^[19]. Analysts are unbothered so far: BofA Global Research cited healthy operating trends across Square and Cash App plus margin expansion, and William Blair described Block as taking share with tech-enabled point-of-sale ^[20][21].

Watch three things. Whether the PayPal transaction is signed and whether Block actually writes a cheque into it, since an investor in the acquirer is a strange kind of competitor ^[12]. Whether the 3% Bill Pay rate survives twelve months, because promotional payables rewards are the first line cut when funding costs bite ^[3]. And whether Block starts disclosing Bill Pay volume separately, which is the only way to tell whether sellers moved their vendor payments or just collected the cash back ^[1][3].