Cash App And Square Are Key for Block As It Looks to AI for the Future

The 12-year-old Cash App wallet remains a key driver for Block Inc. Cash App gross profits grew 24% year over year during the third quarter of 2025, which helped contribute to Block’s overall gross profit of $2.66 billion during the quarter, an 18% increase from a year earlier, Block chief operating officer and chief financial officer Amrita Ahuja told analysts during Block’s third-quarter earnings call late Thursday.

To grow Cash App, Block has been focusing on “re-accelerating actives growth and increasing network density,” Ahuja said. The payoff from these efforts is that Cash App reached 58 million monthly active users in September. Growth in Cash App actives is being driven by improvements in “experiences across the app, including onboarding, referrals, and core payment flows, reducing friction while boosting engagement and retention,” Ahuja added.

Cash App’s gross profit per monthly transacting active user was $94 during the quarter, up 25% year over year.

In addition, new products like as post-purchase Buy Now, Pay Later on the Cash App Card reached $3 billion in annualized originations in early October. During the second quarter of 2025, Block shifted the origination of the majority of Borrow loans over to its bank, SFS.

During the quarter, Block expanded Cash App Borrow to eligible active users and improved its underwriting process. The result was 34% growth in originations “while delivering stable risk loss and strong annualized net margins of 24%,” Ahuja said.

Square’s gross profit grew 9% year-over-year in the third quarter, while gross payment value grew 12%. Block says Square enjoyed growth both in the United States and internationally. In addition, Square remains focused on profitable market share in target verticals such as food and beverage, as well as with larger sellers, and outside the U.S.

In his letter to shareholders, Block chairman and co-founder Jack Dorsey said growth in gross payment volume in the food-and-beverage market “accelerated to 17% in Q3 2025 from 10% a year ago, and food and beverage new volume added accelerated to 30% from 2% over that same time period.”

Dorsey added that Block executives believe those types of results “can be adapted and repeated across other verticals and international markets.”

Dorsey also noted that Block is using Square Bitcoin to connect its ecosystems “to help sellers grow and never miss a sale because of how their customer wants to pay.”

Square Bitcoin is an integrated Bitcoin payments and wallet solution for businesses that will enable sellers to accept Bitcoin payments and automatically convert sales into Bitcoin. “And it will be fully rolled out this month. Expanding distribution to reach more sellers,” Dorsey said in the shareholder letter.

Other areas of development include testing daily tip distribution through Square’s payroll product in the quick-service restaurant market. “Over the past year, weʼve focused on winning the quick-serve restaurant industry,” Dorsey said in his letter.

Block is also investing in artificial intelligence. “Today, Square AI enables sellers to easily explore their data to uncover even more complex insights,” Dorsey’s letter said. “Soon, it will proactively suggest actions to optimize growth or improve efficiency and implement them with a tap. We expect the AI tools we build will be available to all our sellers across our product tiers to help every seller in the neighborhood grow and run their business better.”

Block’s quarterly results were received positively by William Blair & Co. analyst Andrew W. Jeffery. In a research note, Jeffery found it encouraging that Square’s gross payment volume “accelerated to 12%, ahead of our 11% estimate and up two points, sequentially.”

“We expect ongoing modest acceleration, perhaps into the low teens, as the company benefits from distribution efficiency,” Jeffery adds. “We also highlight 25% international gross payment volume growth and note that it is now more than 20% of total.”

Square is the best integrated solution for small and medium businesses in William Blair’s opinion, Jeffery said, adding that Square’s pace of innovation has accelerated “meaningfully” over the last several quarters.

“We do not believe it will face competitive or pricing pressure similar to Clover. In fact, we see Square as a beneficiary of Clover’s challenges,” Jeffery said. Clover’s “challenges” can be traced directly to parent Fiserv Inc.’s financial woes. Last month, Fiserv released disappointing third-quarter results, prompting stock analysts to express a lack of confidence in the payments company’s ability to make a course correction.