The Cateys 2026 sponsor spotlight: Square

Fi Sellick, head of UK strategy at payment technology firm Square, describes how the company’s payment solutions work for time-pressed hospitality businesses. 

Describe your product portfolio in five words

SME point-of-sale provider (and) funding options.

What types of hospitality operators are your products aimed at?

Anything from your local coffee shop to bars, pubs, quick-service restaurants, full-service restaurants and pop-ups. Our product suite is also aimed towards multi-location groups, from independent operators to growing regional brands.

What challenges do your products help operators meet?

We help business owners and their teams get that all-important time back. It’s not easy running a small business, so we handle the ‘Square stuff’ – whether that’s managing payments, improving service speed, helping our sellers secure real-time business insights or managing staff and inventory.

We also help our sellers overcome growth challenges. It can be difficult as a small business to secure the capital needed to grow, which is where Square Loans and Square Cash Advance can provide operators with the cashflow they need to scale, all without having to go through an arduous process with traditional lenders. Sellers simply repay through a percentage of daily Square sales.

How do your products provide value for money?

We provide a customisable, all-in-one payments, point of sale (PoS), and funding partner. Our integrated system reduces the need for multiple vendors, and our focus on economic empowerment for all means we’re not just about payments – we help our sellers run smarter and more profitable businesses by increasing revenue and cutting costs.

How do your products assist operators with their sustainability efforts?

Paperless receipts, digital reporting and inventory tools mean we can support sellers with reducing waste and becoming more efficient. The data insights operators can secure through our platform means they can optimise ordering, staffing and sales patterns to save on resources, money and time.

What are your top three brand values?

Economic empowerment for all, which means making financial services accessible to everyone and creating opportunities for businesses of all sizes to participate in the economy; innovation and simplicity: we build simple solutions to complex problems by making our technology user-friendly; and customer-first: we’re focused on creating trusted tools that solve real problems, building based on seller needs.

What trends are you noticing in your product sector?

Customers want experiences in-person, online and through delivery, so we need to help our sellers keep up with these demands through their PoS, ensuring the back-end is seamless.

We’re also seeing a growing demand for better insights. Whether this is how many slices of banana bread were sold in a week so the team knows how many to order, or how many people are ordering 0% Guinness in Dry January, it’s vital for sellers to have this data in real time and the tools to analyse trends at the click of a button.

How do you ensure your customer service quality?

Just as our sellers want personal relationships with their customers, that’s what we want too. We work collaboratively to make sure our products and solutions are designed with their challenges in mind, and then we measure this through performance monitoring and ongoing training.

Overall, the quality of our customer service rests in the trusting and transparent relationship we nurture with each one of our sellers.

What are your brand’s unique selling points?

We’ve got an all-in-one ecosystem that provides sellers with simple and easy to understand insights into how their business is performing, and scalability for growing businesses through our tailored funding options. Our strong focus on economically empowering all our sellers means they have the tools and knowledge to grow and thrive.