Square nabs former PayPal VP to help run partnerships unit

Square has announced that it is bringing on Alex Petrov as its new vice president of the business partnerships unit.

The new hire's resume is significant considering Petrov has a lot of experience in offline retail environment.

Petrov most recently served as VP of retail marketing at PayPal, where he was responsible for both merchant marketing as well as getting PayPal's digital payments platform into more brick-and-mortar stores.

Before the eBay subsidiary, Petrov was vice president of consumer brands at Safeway. During his tenure with the supermarket giant, he led the launches of more than 1,000 new products for Safeway's private brands.

Square noted in a statement that Petrov's extensive retail background should help support the San Francisco-based company's "business development and customer acquisition" strategies.

Then there's this snippet from Square's announcement:

While Square usage continues to grow on smartphones, it is growing at a faster rate on iPads, where customers are using Square as a full point of sale system. iPad customers now represent nearly 50% of total payments processed by Square. The average payment volume processed by these customers is also more than double the average volume processed by Square customers using smartphones.

So with Petrov's help, we could be seeing Square tack on some more major partnerships (much like its current one with Starbucks) as well as build up its portfolio with some new acquisitions.