The New York Times
Thousands of small enterprises that use Square to process their credit card transactions — including plumbers, legal consultants and construction firms — have complained that the company recently began holding back 20 to 30 percent of the money they collected from customers. The withholdings came with little warning, they said, and Square asserted the right to hang on to the money for the next four months.
Square told them that it was doing this to protect against risky transactions or customers who demanded their money back. But several affected businesses provided documents to The New York Times showing they had not had any returns or risk flags.
Square was unfairly keeping money from them at an economically vulnerable time to protect its own bottom line, they said. That had thrown their small businesses into financial difficulties, they added, forcing them to lay off employees, cut expansion plans, take out loans and miss mortgage payments.
Square published a blog post to explain its new “rolling reserve” policy, the one that some merchants have experienced. In the post, which Square shared with The Times ahead of publication, the company said it had begun holding back money late last year and expanded the practice after the virus-related lockdowns as a way to protect consumers against losses. It said it had put reserves in place on only 0.3 percent of its millions of merchants.
