Block (NASDAQ:SQ) founder Jack Dorsey will step in as CEO of Square following the announcement that Alyssa Henry will exit the subsidiary of Block.
The change in leadership was revealed in an 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company stated:
“Alyssa Henry, the Square Chief Executive Officer of Block, Inc. will depart the Company effective October 2, 2023. Ms. Henry has worked at Block for over nine years and provided significant contributions to the Company during that time. Jack Dorsey, the Company’s Block Head and Chairperson, will also serve as the Square Head.”
Block-Square is one of the largest publicly traded Fintechs in the world. Square provides a payments and transaction platform for over 4 million businesses globally, which includes four billion transactions a year and more than $4 billion in loan originations. Recently, Square endured a painful disruption for some customers, with Square recently taking to X to apologize for its failure. The issue was apparently caused by a DNS flaw, with Square stating there was no evidence of an attack.
Our systems have fully recovered and are operating normally. We also want to provide more details about what happened and the steps we’re taking to help protect against these types of issues in the future: https://t.co/oeFwCsCKTX
— Square (@Square) September 11, 2023
Square said it was making changes to its operations by expanding offline capabilities and promising to communicate faster across its channels.
While Square benefits from early entrant status, competition for small business transactions has increased dramatically. This means 100% uptime is vital for relevance as others aim to siphon business away – like Apple’s new payment process which does not require any additional hardware only needing the ubiquitous iPhone.
