Square hires former PayPal Vice President Alex Petrov to lead its partnerships effort

Mobile card payment service Square has added a new executive to its ranks as it looks to rapidly expand its offering. The company has hired former PayPal executive Alex Petrov to be its Vice President of Partnerships in charge of driving strategic business development and customer acquisition.

The symbolism behind today’s news may be interesting. After all, Square is competing with PayPal and enticing Petrov away has got to be a bit of a victory for Square. Nevertheless, Petrov’s addition will hopefully help the startup expand its reach with merchants and retailers to help get them to adopt the service.

While he was at PayPal, Petrov oversaw the retail marketing part of the company, dealing with merchant marketing and helping to launch the service into an offline retail environment. Petrov also has a rather extensive background in the retail industry, having been president of Safeway subsidiary, Lucerne Foods, Inc., and also a marketing executive at Nestle.

Petrov says that “Square’s passion for innovation and its relentless focus on the customer experience completely change how retailers can do business. I look forward to bringing Square to merchants of all sizes, from local businesses to the largest retailers in the world.”

With Petrov behind partnerships, he joins another recent addition, Francoise Brougher. A former Google executive, Brougher was hired last month to also help in the business development department, so it’s quite likely that the two will work alongside each other to not only expand the company globally, but to grow its customer outreach.

Square has not yet dabbled in many countries outside of the US — in fact, the only country that it supports is Canada.  But as the company seeks to grow its offering in more countries and see a larger adoption, having two experienced individuals will most likely help.

The company shared that not only is it seeing more usage of its Square reader device on smartphones, but adoption is picking up on iPads — mostly because customers have been using it as a “full point-of-sale system.” In fact, iPads now represent nearly 50 percent of Square’s processed total payments and the average payment volume processed is more than double the average volume processed by those using the smartphone.