Money Like Email

Square Cash was one of those fintech ideas that shouldn’t have existed. You could send money by writing an amount in an email subject line. Not through a banking app or some sleek interface—just email. The simplicity was disarming.

My first thought wasn’t how convenient. It was what if I borrowed someone’s phone and sent myself a few hundred dollars across multiple transactions? Completely implausible as a crime, would fail instantly, would get me arrested. But the fact that my brain went straight to theft instead of thinking about actual utility tells you something. Remove enough friction and people don’t think about legitimate use cases first—they think about how to game it.

The app only worked in the US when it launched, which added another layer of absurdity. Certain people got access to nearly frictionless money transfer while everyone else waited for lawyers and regulators to figure out whether it was legal. They did eventually approve it, probably by which point the novelty wore off and was replaced by three other apps doing the same thing with more conspicuous safety measures. People trust safety theater more than genuine simplicity.

What stuck with me was how honest it all was. Fintech usually wraps itself in nice interfaces and makes you feel like you’re doing something sophisticated. Square Cash just said: you already have email. That’s enough. All the other infrastructure I’d accepted as necessary was just habit made comfortable. The moment someone proved you could move money through email, it became clear how much of what I assumed was mandatory was actually optional.

I never had the chance to actually use it—it wasn’t available where I lived. By the time it might have been, I’d moved on to whatever else the market was promising. But that moment of realizing email was sufficient, that all the infrastructure of banking apps was optional? That stayed with me longer than the app itself.