Square Exec Downplays PayPal Merger Talk

The back-and-forth over mobile payments continues — and Square is calling out, well, everybody.

On Saturday, Steve DeWald, head of strategic planning and analysis at Square, put a kibosh on talk of a possible merger with PayPal while answering a question on Quora.

The question was posed: Has PayPal approached Square and discussed an acquisition yet?

After the caveat, "To be clear, I'm not a spokesperson for the company. These are just my opinions," DeWald lit into PayPal.

"I don't think we would ever consider working with PayPal in any capacity," he wrote on the site. "Our cultures are too different and fundamentally incompatible. Square still has the mentality of a startup. Most of us genuinely believe that what we do matters. We have friends and family that are small and medium business owners, and we'd like to think that we're helping them compete in a marketplace that's increasingly hostile to them.

"PayPal is a part of the problem. They're just another card processor that doesn't care about their customers. I think they did a good job at enabling online payments in the beginning, but they've since fallen short of their vision and stagnated. As Elon recently pointed out they haven't innovated in almost a decade.

Selling to PayPal would be like giving up, and we've only just gotten warmed up."

The thread was first noticed by tech blog TheNextWeb.

Any marriage of the two companies does not make much sense now that PayPal has launched its Here device, which mirrors Square's technology and its reach to small merchants.

PayPal is not the only mobile payment company Square has tangled with in a public forum recently. About two weeks ago, Square sent a strongly stated letter to British mobile payment company mPowa implying that mPowa's technology might too closely mirror its own. At the same time, the letter insisted that mPowa stop using a similar image to a photo Square runs on its website.