Inside Square's First In-Person Reseller Event: What It Means for the Channel
Square invited resellers to their St. Louis office for a first-of-its-kind two-day event. Here's what they covered, what stood out, and what it signals about Square's commitment to the reseller channel.
Published March 7, 2026 by Sam Maddox
Square has never done this before. In early February 2026, they invited resellers to their St. Louis office for a two-day, in-person event packed with product deep dives, strategy sessions, and direct access to the people building and running the platform. No virtual webinar. No pre-recorded slides. Resellers in the room with Square's team, face to face, for two full days.
For anyone who has worked in the payments industry, that's significant. Square has historically been a self-service platform. You sign up, you figure it out, you call support if something breaks. That frictionless model made Square dominant in the small business space: fast to deploy, easy to adopt, and built to scale without a sales team. But that model has a ceiling. Larger, more complex merchants don't make high-stakes technology decisions through a free trial. They need someone who understands their business, guides implementation, and shows up when things get complicated. That's what resellers do best, and it's exactly why Block, Square's parent company, made the strategic decision to open the channel. The reseller program is barely a year old. Square brought on its first Head of Resellers in early 2025. And yet here we are, two full days in St. Louis with the entire product team. That's not a company dipping its toe in the water. That's a company that has decided.
Here's what went down.
Day One: What Square Actually Showed Up With
The day opened with remarks from Mike Collins, Square's Head of Resellers, who set the tone early: this wasn't a product pitch. It was a working session designed to make resellers sharper in the field. The morning centered on Square for Restaurants, easily the most valuable block for anyone selling into food service, followed by a session on Square's loyalty, marketing, and gift card ecosystem. These are products most merchants underutilize, and for resellers, they represent a real opportunity to change the nature of the conversation. When you're showing a client how to drive repeat business instead of just talking about rates, that's a different kind of sale.
The afternoon moved through the operational layers of the platform: menu building, staff management, and banking. The banking session had the standout detail. Square Banking now includes business checking, savings, and loans directly within the dashboard, but what's worth calling out is the instant transfer capability. Merchants with a Square Checking account get immediate access to their funds with no added fees and no waiting on a standard transfer to clear. That applies to third-party marketplace revenue as well. DoorDash and UberEats sales settle the same way. For a restaurant doing meaningful delivery volume, that's a real cash flow advantage. The day wrapped with a group dinner that turned out to be one of the more valuable parts of the event. Getting resellers in the same room, off the clock, is where the honest conversations happen.
Day Two: Broader Platform, Bigger Opportunities
Day two widened the lens beyond restaurants. Sessions covered Square for Retail, ecommerce and omnichannel selling, the franchise suite, hardware installation best practices, and a developer platform deep dive for merchants with custom integration needs. The franchise session stood out from a reseller standpoint. One sale into a franchise group can mean dozens or hundreds of locations. That's a different scale of deal, and Square has built the tooling to support it.
The day closed with a formal introduction to Square's account management team and a clear framework for how resellers work with them: named contacts, defined escalation paths, and direct lines into the people who can actually move things. That kind of support structure has been a gap in the channel, and addressing it directly was the right call. The event wrapped up with a look at what's ahead for the reseller program. The overall message was clear: this is the beginning, not a one-off.
What This Event Signals
The agenda says everything. Square didn't invite resellers to St. Louis for a generic overview. They put the actual product teams in front of us for two full days covering every major vertical: restaurants, retail, ecommerce, franchise, banking, staff management, and developer integrations. That level of organizational commitment doesn't happen unless leadership has made a real decision. And to be clear about who's making that decision: Square is owned by Block, a publicly traded company with billions in annual revenue and the resources to back up its bets. The reseller program launched just over a year ago. They hosted this event in year one. That's intentional, and proof it's working.
The product they're investing behind is worth that commitment. What was presented over two days isn't a card reader company anymore. It's a full-service POS for restaurants, retail, and franchise operations. A loyalty and marketing platform. Business banking with instant fund access. A developer platform for custom integrations. All native, all connected. Square's Food & Beverage vertical is where the evolution is most visible. The restaurant product reflects the kind of perspective you only get from people who actually run restaurants. That shapes a roadmap grounded in operational reality, and it's pushing Square into territory it wasn't previously competing in. For resellers, the product now belongs in conversations it couldn't have entered two years ago.
What It Means for Merchants
If you're a business owner evaluating POS systems, here's the honest take: Square deserves serious consideration in a way it didn't a few years ago. Think about what the platform actually is today. A full-featured POS for restaurants, retail, and franchise operations. A loyalty and marketing suite built in. Ecommerce and in-person sales synced. Business banking with instant access to funds, including revenue from DoorDash and UberEats. Staff management, scheduling, and time tracking. A developer platform for custom integrations. All from a single provider, on a single dashboard, backed by a company that's actively investing in making it better. That's a compelling stack for a lot of businesses.
And if you work with a reseller like BridgeWave, you're getting the benefit of the training, relationships, and firsthand product knowledge that comes from events like this one. We left St. Louis with a deeper understanding of the platform, better tools for supporting our merchants, and direct relationships with the Square team. That matters when something needs resolving quickly.
Looking Ahead
This was the first reseller summit. It won't be the last. For BridgeWave, every session and conversation translates directly into better service for our merchants. We left St. Louis more confident than ever in Square as a recommendation. If you want to talk through whether it's the right fit for your business, reach out.