Earlier this year there were rumors that Apple and Google were thinking about acquiring Square, a payments company who had recently managed to raise another $100 million in funding. Given that we’re several months down the road from the original report and with Apple debuting their own Apple Pay service, what has become of the acquisition?
Well according to a report from TechCrunch, it seems that negotiations between Apple and Square have fallen through as the latter company had declined Apple’s offer of “around $3 billion” to acquire the company. In fact it seems that the price might have been the reason why Square decided to walk away.
It was reported that Square’s valuation at that time had been $6 billion and that Apple was only willing to pay for less than half of that. The report goes on to state that Apple had shown off a payments system of their own which Square felt was too similar to their own offerings. It is possible that Square executives could have gotten a glimpse of an early prototype of the Apple Pay service.
In any case we guess perhaps it all worked out for the best anyway. Apple has their own mobile payments service and have since partnered up with major retailers and food outlets. Now it’s just a matter of seeing how fast consumers and retailers are willing to use Apple Pay as a standard.