Square Cfo With Caviar Were Trying To Make Restaurants Omnichannel

---

With Caviar, Square is trying to bring the 'omnichannel' experience to restaurants: CFO

Square CFO Sarah Friar explains how her company leverages small business data to make transactions more seamless in an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer.

Friar tells the "Mad Money" host that Caviar could be Square's key to changing the restaurant space.

Square trying to bring 'omnichannel' experience to restaurants with Caviar: CFO Square trying to bring 'omnichannel' experience to restaurants with Caviar: CFO
12 Hours Ago | 01:15
Enough about retail. Now, fintech giant Square is trying to cultivate an "omnichannel" approach in the restaurant industry, the company's CFO, Sarah Friar, told CNBC on Tuesday.

To push this strategy, which could involve sweeping changes at some smaller and more high-end restaurants, Square will leverage its fast-growing food-ordering subsidiary, Caviar, Friar said.

"What we want to make sure [of] with Caviar and with the broader Square platform ... as we integrate it into things like Square for Restaurants, [is] that a restaurant can now fully serve their customer regardless of where the customer shows up," the CFO told "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer in an interview.

Maintaining that Caviar, which is showing 100 percent year-over-year growth, was only "one piece of the portfolio," Friar said that Square would use its connection to the client to build omnichannel capabilities.

"Our strategy there is to be a food-ordering platform. So it's different from the delivery companies," she said.

Because Square already works with most of the small businesses on Caviar, it can use its powers of integration to ensure that restaurants are able to meet in-house, take-out and delivery demands.

And for Friar, whose $36 billion company boasts remarkable 60 percent revenue growth, that efficiency is "all about the cohesiveness of the system."

"We know the data of your business, so with that, we're able to do things like underwrite you for Square Capital to facilitate a loan," she said. "Elsewhere in the system, we can take something like time cards, so where someone's clocking in and clocking out, and then we can automate the payroll. So everything we do is about, how do we save that business time?"

The best part? Few companies are able to catch up to what Square has achieved, the CFO said.

"No one else has pulled it all together. Others talk about integrated this and integrated that, but there's no integration if it's actually built seamlessly from the get-go," she told Cramer.

Shares of Square ended Tuesday's trading session up 1.3 percent, at $87.99 a share. Also on Tuesday, Friar spoke at Recode's annual Code Commerce conference in New York about her vision for her company's peer-to-peer payment app.

By Elizabeth Gurdus
September 18, 2018
Source: CNBC.com