Wall Street Journal

Square Inc.’s Cash App looks a lot like a bank — digitally storing and transferring money for users. Investors don’t seem to mind.

Square shares have rallied 28% in the past month and are up 166% since the start of the year, while bank stocks have fallen sharply. The run-up is mostly due to the popularity of its Cash App offering, which lets consumers send money to one another via smartphone, purchase things with a prepaid debit card and invest in bitcoin and slices of individual stocks, analysts and investors said.

Those businesses took off during the coronavirus pandemic. Cash App revenue more than doubled to $325 million, excluding sales of bitcoin, in the second quarter from a year earlier.

Thanks in part to Square’s making it easy for individuals to accept their stimulus checks and unemployment benefits in Cash App, the amount of money stored there reached $1.7 billion in the second quarter, 3 1/2 times more than in the same period last year. Monthly active users topped 30 million in June.

Square shares closed at $166.66 Tuesday, up from $61.84 a year ago.

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