Brad Smith
Analyst · Gil Luria of Wedbush Securities. Your line is open
Yes. Thanks, Gil. First of all, we are excited to see Square's success coming out. They're a good partner for us. It's good news for small businesses. Over half of small businesses still don't accept electronic payments. The more players who get into this space, get small businesses looking for new solutions. And of course, we want every one of these payments providers to work with QuickBooks. And so that's why having them as a partner is good news for small businesses, because their data flows seamlessly from their payments into their accounting. And it's good news for us, because it makes QuickBooks Online the operating system that small businesses all depend on. So we're wildly excited about their success and pleased to hear the results. In terms of their approach to payments as a razor, and then opening up to other blades, that's not unlike our own approach. We just happen to believe, and we already have a center of gravity called small business accounting, where people get money in and money out. They either have to accept the money or owe somebody money, and that happens to be called accounting. And with that, we have razor blades like payroll, payments, and other services, including third parties. Why we chose not to go the route of payments being the open door was quite frankly, our payments products was not architected to unlock into another product. We've been working on that with QuickBooks, excuse me, the QuickBooks payments Go Payment product is now working with QuickBooks Online, and so if you come in with Go Payment, we want to have you be able to unlock into accounting and other services. So we think the strategy makes sense. It just happens to be for us, we believe the center of gravity, the operating system is small business accounting. The other piece was financing, and the honest answer is why are we not ramping as quickly as maybe Square did, is because we chose not to. We were in test mode, we were in beta. We were testing the quality of lenders. We were testing whether or not we could get the lowest rates for small businesses, and we wanted to make sure the Net Promoter score was superior. As we started to see those things all go green in the direction that we wanted, we started to open up the throttle. So we haven't been in the market as long or as aggressively. We have been talking to you about it, as it's been in test mode, but we've just recently said, this is exactly where we want it to be, and we're leaning in. So I think you're going to see this continue to ramp.