Jack Dorsey Outlines Block's Bitcoin-Centric Future, Says Company Is No Longer Just A Payment Firm

On Wednesday, the Block SQ executives, on its first investor day in five years, agreed that the company no longer wants to be seen as a single-product company.

The San Francisco company held the company's first investor day in five years on Wednesday, in which C-suite executives pitched Wall Street that its money app, along with its crypto and music streaming businesses, ought to be valued as an ecosystem.

“Calling Block a payments company is like calling Amazon a bookseller,” CFO Amrita Ahuja told CNBC in a phone interview. “We’ve grown in so many different ways across multiple dimensions.”

In 2009, Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey founded Square as a tech startup. The company, now called Block, has grown into a multi-billion-dollar financial powerhouse since it was founded 13 years ago.

“We are no longer just a payments company,” Dorsey said during the live-streamed event adding, “a lot has changed since our last investor day.”

Square was renamed Block in December last year as the name “acknowledges the company’s growth” and “creates room for further growth.”

In addition to an FDIC-insured bank, consumer payments platform, stock trading, and physical debit cards, Block now offers stock and cryptocurrency trading. It also acquired Jay-Z's music streaming service Tidal, as well as buy-now-pay-later provider Afterpay.

“This will be a massive economy in the future, and we see an opportunity to be a big part of it, all using the tools and platform we’ve already built,” Dorsey said. “We acquired Tidal because we saw that artists take a path similar to small businesses and that there’s a significant gap in the market around artist tools.”

Amrita Ahuja, Block’s CFO said the company is outperforming its peers on profitability as the company released updated profit margins Wednesday. 

Last year, Block had an adjusted profit margin of 34 percent. 12% came from Cash App. As of March 2022, Cash App had 46 million active monthly users and 80 million active annual users.

Based on this record, Ahuja remarked, “You can see based on our track record we are outgrowing the rest of the industry. We operate in a large and growing market and are still taking share.”