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[OPTIONAL: This section will dissect the three main ecosystems, providing insight into their growth revenue strategies, current Q1 2022 earnings, and integration possibilities. This segment includes additional findings for Question 1, but due to its length and verbosity, it’s better suited as a separate entity. ] SQUARE (SQ) The original ecosystem from Block Inc., is their payment platform Square Seller, which provides commerce solutions, business software, and banking services for merchants. Square has experienced positive growth revenue, despite aligning itself to small to mid-market merchants. Square’s revenue strategy is subscription-based, i.e. the more merchants that use Square’s services the higher their revenue. (an important note: this differs for the other ecosystems in the business.) Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of their subscriptions existed in brick-and-mortar locations, though they do provide digital invoices and virtual terminals. Their prior subscriptions existed mainly in physical locations, when consumer behavior changed during the beginning of the pandemic, their growth rate was stunted. However, their digital invoices and virtual terminals options proved to be beneficial in the later months of the pandemic seeing volume grow fivefold from pre-pandemic levels. Given the current and future integrations of Afterpay into Square’s ecosystem they allocated 50% of their revenue and gross profit into Square’s margin, making Q1 2022 gross profit $661 million for 41% YOY. Excluding Afterpay, Square gross profit was $615 million up 31% YOY. Square has exponential growth opportunities; continuing to expand their current customer-base to include larger sellers, sementing themselves as head software-integrated payment solutions provider, expanding current product offerings, and tapping into the international market. For example, J.P Morgan noted they liked the payroll potential, evidenced by success at rival Toast that has seen 30% payroll attach on new bookings. In April 2022, they introduced Square Stand to all of their markets. For their online Square Seller’s they’ve integrated their Afterpay services into the ecosystem, and are planning to integrate the system for their in-person sellers soon. CASH APP Block’s second largest ecosystem is Cash App, a mobile payment service developed by Block in 2013, originally providing P2P money transfers. Since its inception it has grown rapidly now providing banking, cryptocurrency, and investing opportunities. Similarly to Square, Cash App has experienced positive growth revenue, taking on its largest competitor Venmo. Interestingly, Cash App growth was largely influenced by word-of-mouth, culture-led viral marketing, aggressive product innovation, and the government aid stimulus payments. Cash App’s revenue strategy is multifold, their primary revenue derives from instant balance transfers (to a bank account) and credit-card use for P2P transfers. Subsequent revenue includes their banking interchange fees and interest, and investments. Again, during the early pandemic they experienced a decrease in revenue and growth opportunities. However, in-part with the stimulus payments and volatile cash economy, Cash App exploded growing to 40 million active-users. Likewise to Square, given the current and future integration of Afterpay into Cash App’s ecosystem, they allot 50% of Afterpay’s revenue and gross profits into Cash App’s margins. Cash App saw Q1 earnings of $624 million gross profit, an increase of 26% YOY. Excluding Afterpay, Cash App gross profit was $578 million, up 17% YOY. Cash App is quickly becoming a dominating force in the mobile payment industry. Their growth opportunities are expansive and seemingly never ending. J.P. Morgan segmented 7 key strategic priorities: Community growth, increased Financial Services, expanding Crypto initiatives, building Trust, refresh of the Operating System/User-Face, increased Commerce Accounts, and International Expansion. For example, “Pay with Venmo” is now included on millions of merchants' websites, a key offering Cash App lacks. Current expansions include: Users with an active Cash App card can invest a percentage of their paycheck into Bitcoin with no transaction fees, integration of Afterpay into the Cash App user face, and introduction of FDIC with the Cash App card. AFTERPAY Block’s third largest ecosystem is Afterpay, a buy now pay later service, acquired in late-January 2022. The acquisition of Afterpay was a strategy to implement the system into their other ecosystem’s (Square Seller and Cash App), to compete with their competitors PayPal and Affirm (through Shopify). Afterpay is a key tool to the company’s expansion and has already proven to be beneficial. Afterpay already has an established revenue strategy, the vendor does not charge the consumer, instead charges the merchant 4% to 6% for each transaction. Since the acquisition Afterpay contributed $92 million of gross profit to the overall company portfolio. According to Block’s Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja, Afterpay currently has 144,000 merchants and 20+ million annual active consumers on their platform. Question 2: What questions might investors be thinking about when evaluating Block? Block Inc., hosted an earnings call for the period ending March 31, 2022 on May 5th. Than held a subsequent investors day on May 18th, most likely because of their recent acquisition of Afterpay. Both events had extensive Q&A portions, the latter being summarized in a J.P. Morgan report. For originality purposes, the questions below are hypothesized inquiries I felt were left unanswered. Block mentioned the implementation of their Afterpay system into physical Square Seller locations. How do you plan to keep each transaction time effective, assuming each transaction uses the Afterpay system? Should there be a concern about the overuse of Afterpay transactions by one consumer over multiple physical and digital locations? A significant portion of Cash App’s growth strategy is the Bitcoin offering for app and banking users. The main question is: Why is Cash App focusing on one cryptocurrency vendor given the instability of the market? Considering the ever-changing currency landscape, is Cash App able to adjust to other possible forms of currency I.E. NFT’s? Afterpay is currently positioned positively, given America's current economic affair. Similar to Square Seller and Cash App during the pandemic, the platform may experience a surge in users and profit margins. However, there was a notable dip in growth “post-pandemic”. Are you accounting for this possible growth surge, and in what ways will you try to maintain profits after the economy regulates? Question 3: How does this Forum transcript add insight/value to the client? This Forum transcript is unique compared to the other available information about Cash App’s growth potential. Currently, Cash App is in the position of becoming Block Inc.’s largest ecosystem, meaning it has the most to gain and to lose. Their expansions are exciting and highly anticipated. They've been relatively forthcoming with their information; however, they've left major gaps in the conversation. Mainly surrounding the Cash App Card, and overall banking services. These two growth avenues could expand Cash App into a highly competitive full-service banking system. Panzarella divulges into those possibilities, and their prior position as Operations lead allows them to provide a detailed analysis. This is touched on heavily throughout the entire transcript but addressed in-depth on pages 9 & 10. Seemingly the main investors' questions were about Cash App's relationship to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Other supplementary documents don't provide the same level of insight regarding Cash App attachment to Bitcoin, and Panzarella's response was a reassuring outlook from Cash App's perspective. As well, this transcript does a remarkable job dissecting Cash App's current customer base and potential customers. The untapped market of up-incoming Gen Z'ers, as a potential customer base, was not touched on in any other documents. The court of public opinion is in favor of Cash App right now, so no time like the present to promote a discussion with a former executive at Square Inc., that confirms preexisting beliefs about the company. Confirmation bias at its finest! Question 4: If you were to promote this Forum transcript to a current or prospective client in 2 sentences, what would you say? This Forum conversation with Michael Panzarella (Former Deposit Operations Lead at Square Inc.) provides the current and future competitive positioning of Cash App, Block Inc.'s second-largest ecosystem, through high-level human insight. Featuring exclusive details into the ongoing Bitcoin and Cash App relationship, Cash Apps super app capabilities, and possible opportunities to expand their customer base. All condensed into a straightforward segmented discussion that can be accessed anytime and anywhere.