This is part of a series of posts inspired by CFSI’s Underbanked Financial Services Forum.  At the conference, attendees were asked to complete the sentence, “in the future, the underbanked marketplace will…” on a square button.

By special guest, Ailian Gan

If you heard the oohs and ahhs from the crowd surrounding Jack Dorsey at the Underbanked Forum, you’d think he was a magician. There were no sleights of hand, but he performed magic of a different kind. He had just swiped $5 from the credit card of a man who wanted to make a donation with a little payment gadget called Square. Square allows individuals to accept credit card payments. The app interface was intuitive, the man could sign with his finger on the screen of the iPhone, and a receipt was emailed on the spot. Everyone was amazed by how quick and elegant the whole process was. Usually people get annoyed when you take their money, but Square delivered wow.

To begin with, any tool that can make people enjoy paying you is pretty powerful. That got me thinking about how different consumer  finance could be, if financial institutions made it a point to really impress their customers. There has been a lot of innovation around simple banking lately (like Betterment, BankSimple, Ally Bank and ING Direct). I’d like to see wow banking. I’d like to look forward to dealing with my finances and be thrilled to visit my bank.

Going back to Square, beyond its slick interface, the vision for Square has other elements of wow. While it is easy to think of Square as a tiny card reader, Dorsey spoke of Square as a platform that will eventually support a larger ecosystem, the way his earlier invention, Twitter, has become a platform for a much larger ecosystem. For this to work, platform builders need to open up their firehose of data. Users and innovators must be encouraged to define the many uses of the product. Whether it happens through Square or another product, I’d like to see finance open up in the same way – more information sharing, more piggybacking of great ideas, and hopefully a rush of innovation.