Square CEO Alyssa Henry to Exit on Oct. 2

Square CEO of Block Alyssa Henry will depart the company on Oct. 2.

Henry will be succeeded by Jack Dorsey, the company’s Block head and chairperson, who will also serve as the Square head, the company said in a Monday (Sept. 18) filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“Ms. Henry has worked at Block for over nine years and provided significant contributions to the company during that time,” the company said in the filing.

No further details were provided in the filing.

A Block spokesperson emailed the following statement to PYMNTS Tuesday (Sept. 19): “As CEO of Square, Alyssa Henry helped transform the business into a software-led technology company, guided the team during the uncertainty of global pandemic lockdowns, and expanded our breadth of services for small businesses around the world. Square is what it is today in large part because of Alyssa’s leadership and we wish her the best in her future endeavors.”

The announcement comes about two weeks after Square said it would investigate and publish a full review of an outage of the payment platform that impacted merchants for about 19 hours on Sept. 7 and Sept. 8.

The company said in a Sept. 8 post on X that sellers were unable to access accounts or process payments due to the outage within Square. In a post on the day before, it said that it had been experiencing issues with multiple Square services.

In an update on the outage offered in a Sept. 11 blog post, Square said there was no evidence that the issue was a cybersecurity event or that any seller or buyer data was compromised during the outage.

“While making several standard changes to our internal network software, the combination of updates prevented our systems from properly communicating with each other, and ultimately caused the disruption,” the company said in the post.

The company added in the post that it has already made a number of updates to its systems to protect against the issue it saw, that it is expanding its offline payment capabilities, and that it plans to communicate faster across all channels.

During a Block earnings call held in May, Dorsey highlighted the potential for further penetration of the Block/Square ecosystem in the retail, restaurants and beauty verticals.

Dorsey said that “the key differentiator to our mind is our ecosystem of tools. And it’s not just about any one particular vertical but how everything works together ultimately. We have over 30 products, including some vertical-specific software. And there’s a developer platform, which if our customers don’t find the tools they need in our platform, [they] can always build their own or hire [a] developer to do the same.”