Square signed deals with its one-time competitors to help attract larger customers

Square, the San Francisco-based payments company, is continuing to develop new avenues for growth, including partnering with software firms that might have been competitors in the past.

Square has inked deals with Vend and TouchBistro, two companies that provide checkout or “point-of-sale” software for retail stores and full-service restaurants, to allow their merchants to use Square tools such as payment processing and its chip-card reader without using Square’s own point-of-sale system.

These types of deals, which Square teased in March, are aimed at letting Square still sell payment processing and other products to merchants that don’t use its core software. These specific partnerships are also designed to attract larger businesses that may need more specialized point-of-sale software than what Square offers. Unlike Vend and TouchBistro, Square doesn’t charge for its PoS software.

For years, Square has been best known as a favorite of micro-merchants using the basic credit card dongle to accept charged payments via their phone. But over the past year, Square has been trying to prove to Wall Street that its tools are useful to bigger companies. In the second quarter, Square said its payments volume among merchants doing $125,000 or more a year in sales grew 61 percent year over year.

“We are showing clear intent to continue to grow our large-seller customer base,” said Francoise Brougher, the low-profile but high-impact executive Square poached from Google in 2013, in an interview.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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