Square’s Cash App Launches Zero-Fee Stock Trading Option

• Square has added stock trading option it its P2P Cash App, with $1 being the minimum amount requirement.
• This brings Square in direct competition with Robinhood.
• Various other fintech startups have also introduced fractional trading to their process.

Square, the popular merchant services aggregator and mobile payment firm, has been introducing new features and concepts in its Cash App for last many years. 

In the beginning, the San-Francisco based company had launched Cash App with a simple option of letting users send money to their friends. It then expanded into debit cards and last year, they added the functionality of buying and selling bitcoin in real-time in Cash App. This made it easier for the users to employ cryptocurrencies, while helping Cash App acquire over 15M active users.

Today, Square has announced that they are rolling out the ability of stock trading from within the app.

With this new feature of stock trading, users will be able to buy fractional stocks of minimum $1 worth, which will aid investors in the purchase of a portion of more expensive stocks like Amazon. They also disclosed that they are releasing a simple guide to make it easier for users to step into the stock market who have no experience. Besides, this guide will inform them about the issues and challenges associated with the process, which will eventually help them in participating securely.

“Really proud of the team for making buying stocks and building wealth accessible to more people,” said Jack Dorsey, Chief Executive of Square.

The team also shared that the Cash App will work with the zero-fee trading mechanism, the model with which Robinhood attracted a $7.6B valuation and 6M+ users. Meaning, the users won’t have to pay any transactional charges while trading in the stock market.

But, what’s differentiating is that Square’s Cash App, unlike Robinhood, will operate with fractional trading mechanism. This will bring Square in direct competition with the former, making both Fintech Entrepreneurs and mobile app developers shift their interest from evaluating Robinhood-like app development cost to the cost for making Square-clone app.

However, Square is not the first ever company that will be operating with this model in Fintech domain. Various other startups like SoFi are already working with fractional trading mechanism for first-time traders. And, it is expected that various other finance enthusiasts and app developers will be adding this model into their Stock trading app development plan. Meaning, Square is going to get more competition in the marketplace in the future.

As per the Square team, this feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks. And the brokerage service will be executed in-house via Cash App Investing LLC.