Jack Dorsey: Square will accept Apple Pay in 2015

In an interview with CNN, Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO of the mobile payments platform provider Square, hinted that Apple Pay compatibility was on its way to the Square platform, squashing the notion that the two services were competitors.

"We're not building a credit card. We're not building a payment device. We're building a [cash] register, and this register accepts all these forms of payments," Dorsey said in the CNN interview.

ZDNet was able to independently confirm with a representative from Square that contactless payment acceptance is indeed on the horizon, with a rollout expected in 2015.

The compatibility with Apple Pay, and contactless payments in general, will take some retooling of the Square hardware. Currently, Square only accepts payments via credit and debit cards, not via NFC, which is the wireless transaction method utilized within Apple Pay.

Square's inclusion of Apple Pay could be seen as a hat tip to the growing mobile payments service, seeing as how it has managed to attract more users and more business and payment partners than many of its mobile payments competitors.

It's also in line with Square's efforts to become a one-stop shop for the merchants using its platform. In recent months, Square has tacked on a new invoice feature, an online scheduling tool for SMBs and most recently, the Square App Marketplace, which is touted as a digital repository where merchants can find relevant apps from Square and its bevy of partners.

Square has also already started the process of transitioning its signature card reader dongle into an EMV-compliant chip card reader. Short for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, EMV is the payments standard at the center of the upcoming migration planned for October 2015, in which all US payment terminals must be able to accept cards embedded with microchips.

Chip cards are considerably more secure than the currently used magnetic stripe cards. However, Square's plans for its chip-card reader do not appear to include acceptance of chip-and-PIN transactions, which are considered to be the safest, as they require not only the chip-card be inserted, but also that users enter a PIN. Instead, Square's device will likely only accept chip-and-signature transactions.

Update: This article was updated to include confirmation of upcoming contactless payment acceptance from Square.