Amrita Ahuja: We sit at the counter in between the seller and the buyer, millions of sellers and tens of millions of buyers through Cash App or through Afterpay and through Square. And so there are fairly unique things that we can do to enable that commerce in a way that supports the overall flywheel, buyers finding interesting incentives at sellers, sellers finding new buyers or greater loyalty. We think money can move faster on a global stage.

Bob Safian: That’s Amrita Ahuja, COO and CFO of fintech company Block, which operates Square, Cash App, and more. With financial markets churning, I wanted to talk with a business leader whose stock has been dramatically impacted by 2025’s volatility and who also sees disruption as an opportunity.

Block faced a dramatic one-day share drop of 20% in early May, and then a rebound that was equally dramatic. At the same time, Amrita is executing an aggressive strategy to remake how we all deal with money, using levers from AI to Bitcoin to data on billions of transactions. Our conversation also touches on video gaming, Gen Z habits, and lessons Amrita’s learned from tech icon Jack Dorsey, Block’s CEO.

So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Amrita Ahuja, COO and CFO at fintech company Block. Amrita, thanks for being here.

AHUJA: Thanks for having me, Bob.

How Block is managing volatility

SAFIAN: You’ve said that as a CFO you need to have a stomach of iron during times of volatility. No doubt that’s doubly so when you hold two C-suite posts. We’ve certainly seen plenty of volatility in 2025 so far.

How’s your stomach doing?

AHUJA: Look, there’s ups, there’s downs. You’ve got to have the right balance of patience and impatience — impatience in the sense of moving as quickly as we can if our customers need it. In the recent macro environment, we’re dealing with all sorts of uncertainty around tariffs and around consumer spend, and we have to be there to help our customers move their money as quickly and seamlessly as possible and meet their customers wherever they are. So, that’s our impatience.

Our patience is to see through the ups and the downs and the volatility and keep the conviction on expanding access and empowering people to the economy.

SAFIAN: And when you’re, as a leader, looking at all of this volatility, I mean, you mentioned the tariffs, and consumer sentiment’s been unclear, the stock market’s been all over the place. You guys had a huge one-day drop in early May, and it’s quickly bounced back.

How do you make sense of all these external factors?

AHUJA: Yeah, our focus is on what we can control, and ultimately the thing that we are laser-focused on for our business is product velocity. How quickly can we start small with something, launch something for our customers, and then test and iterate and learn so that ultimately that something that we’ve launched scales into an important product?

I’ll give you an example. Cash App Borrow, which is a product where our customers can get access to a line of credit, often $100, $200, that bridges them from paycheck to paycheck. We know so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s a product that we launched about three years ago and have now scaled to serve 9 million actives with $15 billion in credit supply to our customers in a span of a couple short years.

The more we can be out testing and launching product at a pace, the more we know we are ultimately delivering value to our customers, and the right things will happen from a stock perspective.

Using tech to expand financial access

SAFIAN: Block is a financial services provider. You have Square, the point of sale system, the digital wallet Cash App, which you mentioned, which competes with Venmo and Robinhood, a bunch of others. Then you’ve got the buy now, pay later leader Afterpay. You chair Square Financial Services, which is Block’s chartered bank, but you’ve said that in the fintech world, Block is only a little bit fin, that comparatively, it’s more tech.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

AHUJA: What we think is unique about us is our ability as a technology company to completely change innovation in the space such that we can help solve systemic issues across credit, payments, commerce, and banking. What that means ultimately is we use technologies like AI and machine learning and data science, and we use these technologies in a unique way, in a way that’s different from a traditional bank. We are able to underwrite those who are often frankly forgotten by the traditional financial ecosystems.

Our Square Loans product has almost triple the rate of women-owned businesses that we underwrite. 58% of our loans go to women-owned businesses versus 20% for the industry average. For that Cash App Borrow product I was talking about, 70% of those actives, the 9 million actives that we underwrote, fell below 580 as a FICO score. That’s considered a poor FICO score, and yet 97% of repayments are made on time, and this is because we have unique access to data and these technology and tools which can help us uniquely underwrite this often forgotten customer base.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I mean, credit, sometimes it’s been blamed for financial excesses, but access to credit is also, as you say, an advantage that’s not available to everyone.

Do you have a philosophy between those poles, between risk and opportunity, or what you’re saying is that the tech that you have allows you to avoid that risk?

AHUJA: That’s right. Let’s start with how do the current systems work? It works using inferior data, frankly. It’s more limited data, it’s outdated, sometimes it’s inaccurate, and it ignores things like someone’s cash flows, the stability of your income, your savings rate, how money moves through your accounts, or how you use alternative forms of credit, like buy now, pay later, which we have in our ecosystem through Afterpay.

We have a lot of these signals for our 57 million monthly actives on the Cash App side and for the 4 million small businesses on the Square side, and those, frankly, billions of transaction data points that we have on any given day paired with new technologies, and we intend to continue to be on the forefront of AI, machine learning, and data science to be able to empower more people into the economy. The combination of the superior data and the technologies is what we believe ultimately helps expand access.

How does TIDAL fit into Block’s portfolio of companies?

SAFIAN: I had almost forgotten that Block also owns music streamer TIDAL. How does that fit in with the rest of what you guys do?

AHUJA: Yeah. If you think about an artist as a small business, the creator is someone who needs to ultimately reach their fan base, their audience, and that is increasingly moving direct to your audience, direct to the consumer in the way that we’ve done for small businesses or for a consumer and individual using Cash App to manage their financial livelihood.

In those similar ways, we hope to inspire artists and creators to be able to take control of their own platforms. Whether it’s uploading directly to streaming platforms, connecting directly with their fans, selling merchandise tickets, et cetera, we see an opportunity there to take what we’ve learned and done with Square and Cash App and enable artists.

“Bitcoin is the most likely candidate to be that global currency”

SAFIAN: When Block changed its name from Square, I guess three and a half years ago or so, there’s this implication that Block is a nod to blockchain, that you’d be running headlong into crypto. What has that meant?

AHUJA: We want to live in a world that has an open protocol for money. We think money can move faster on a global stage. We think Bitcoin is the most likely candidate to be that global currency, if you will, an open protocol for money because it is the longest-lived, it’s transparent, and we’re trying to build towards a more accessible, higher-utility, and greater security ecosystem for Bitcoin. When you look at open protocols, whether it’s through the development of the early stages of the internet to the development of Bitcoin to creating future open protocols around AI technology, as we’ve done with Goose, which is our open-source AI agent, we believe open-source technologies ultimately are more resilient and more durable.

So, we’ve got a couple of key irons in the fire as we experiment towards that future world. One is we enable people to buy and sell and hold Bitcoin within the Cash App. We’ve had 23 million actives do that since inception. We enable people to get some of their paychecks direct-deposited into Cash App and convert into Bitcoin. We enable our sellers to convert up to 10% of their gross processing volume into Bitcoin. So, that’s really all about accessibility, payments, and utility.

We also have two key efforts underway that are enabled by hardware. If you think about Square, actually what’s unique about us is that we have deep hardware expertise because of the payment readers that we’ve built since our inception, software expertise, payments expertise, and a stake in the world in which Bitcoin is a global currency, and there are not that many companies that have those elements lined up.

So, we have built and will be launching in the back half of this year a Bitcoin mining chip, a three-nanometer mining chip, as well as a mining rig. We see it as a way to help really diversify the mining systems that people use today. Most of that market sits in one supplier that is China-based, and so we see a lot of miners, large and small, who are very interested in the innovation that we’ve built and the diversity that we bring to this overall ecosystem.

SAFIAN: I mean, whether you’re talking there about Bitcoin and crypto or when you’re talking about Cash App or Square, you’re not shy about defying financial industry convention. You sort of want to look at the business in a different way?

AHUJA: We think that that’s part of the company’s history, frankly, to question the way things have been done before, to acknowledge that there’s some things that we should continue, and there’s some things that we can create whole cloth.

Inside Block’s open-source AI agent

SAFIAN: You mentioned Goose, your open-source AI agent. Goose, named after Tom Cruise’s flight partner in Top Gun, is that right?

AHUJA: I’m not sure—

SAFIAN: Or is that just what people say now?

AHUJA: We love birds. The company was almost called Squirrel, actually, before they decided on the name Square, so maybe it’s an animal thing.

So Goose is an open-source AI agent that sits atop really any of the LLM models to plug into other software tools. We’ve got 60% of our workforce using Goose on a weekly basis, so it’s like 6,000 employees using it weekly, and our engineers tell us that they’re saving eight to 10 hours a week. And for manual tasks, we’re seeing upwards of 50 to 75% of time saved. And when we released goose on GitHub earlier last year, it was a trending topic and it’s something that we’re seeing multiple people outside of Block even use.

It’s a foundation of a technology that will ultimately both help Block run more efficiently and faster, but also help ultimately our customers. We’re looking to build a COO agent and CFO agent using Goose to help our customers create that same efficiency and speed to insight.

SAFIAN: So that everybody who uses Square can have access to essentially you, is that what it is?

AHUJA: To me. Automate me.

SAFIAN: Defying conventional wisdom is so important, rejecting the shackles that can so often stifle innovation, but how do you navigate new territory when time-tested wisdom isn’t available? We’ll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Block’s Amrita Ahuja shared how the company wields Square, Cash App, and Afterpay in quest of a new financial ecosystem. Now, she shares lessons from her time in the video game industry, how Block is approaching Gen Z and other younger consumers, and what Block founder and CEO Jack Dorsey has taught her about leadership. Plus, her goal to make Block a “Rule of 40 company, one that delivers combined revenue growth and profit margin of 40% or more.” Let’s jump back in.

Lessons from gaming

You have a financial background but not in the financial services industry. Before Block, you were a video game developer at Activision. Are financial businesses and video games similar? Are there things that are similar about them?

AHUJA: There actually are some things that are similar, I will say. There are many things that are unique to each industry. Each industry is incredibly complex. You find that when big technology companies try to do gaming, they’ve taken over the world in many different ways, but they can’t always crack the nut on putting out a great game. Similarly, some of the largest technology companies have dabbled in fintech but haven’t been able to go as deep, so they’re both very nuanced and complex industries.

I would say another similarity is that design really matters. Industrial design, the design of products, the interface of products is absolutely mission-critical to a great game, and it’s absolutely mission-critical to the simplicity and accessibility of our products, be it on Square or Cash App.

And then maybe the third thing that I would say is that when I was in gaming at least, the business models were rapidly changing from an intermediary distribution mechanism, like releasing a game once and then selling it through a retailer, to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection. And similarly with banking, people don’t want a bank from 9:00 to 5:00, six days a week. They want 24/7 access to their money and the ability to, again, grow their financial livelihood, move their money around seamlessly. So, some similarities there in that shift to an intermediary model or a slower model to an always-on, direct-to-consumer connection.

SAFIAN: Part of your target audience or your target customer base at Block are Gen Z folks. Did you learn things at Activision about Gen Z that’s been useful? Are there things that businesses misunderstand about younger generations still?

AHUJA: What we’ve learned is that Gen Z, millennial customers aren’t going to do things the way their parents did. Some of our stats show that 63% of Gen Z customers have moved away from traditional credit cards, and over 80% are skeptical of them, which means you’re not using a credit card to manage your expenses, you’re using your debit card, but then layering on a transaction-by-transaction basis, or again, using tools like buy now, pay later or Cash App Borrow, the means in which they’re managing their consistent cash flows. So that’s an example of how things are changing, and you’ve got to get up to speed with how the next generation of customers expects to manage their money.

Does Block need to educate their customers?

SAFIAN: What kind of obligation do you feel to educate people about how to manage their finances? Because these are just tools, and they could be used well and they could be used poorly.

AHUJA: Yeah. We want to be on the forefront of that, frankly. We think education is really important. We had a campaign, recently, earlier this year around scams and how customers can spot them and look out for them, be wary of them. We have scam protections too if people are indeed scammed without getting a warning ahead of time where we cover you, we have your back. There are many other forms of education, whether it’s through spending, saving, or investing, all of which you can do within Cash App, that we think is an important responsibility.

Lessons from Jack Dorsey

SAFIAN: You joined Block as the chief financial officer, and you then added the role of chief operating officer, so you’re wearing two hats. Your boss, Jack Dorsey, Block CEO and founder, also wore multiple hats at one time. He was CEO of Square and Twitter at the same time. Has he given you any advice about how you manage two roles?

AHUJA: There’s a lot that I’ve learned from Jack. He is always incredibly present. You can imagine a day like his, a day like mine, but certainly a day like his, has a tremendous amount of context switching in it where you’re moving from decision to decision, meeting to meeting, research area one to research area two. That may be very disparate across a wide range of scope, and yet he shows up to every meeting completely ready and present in that moment. And so that level of focus is really, really important to be able to withstand that sort of context switching.

I think the other thing that I’ve learned is that I’m not a discipline expert in all of the areas that I look after, but I have wonderful people who I trust and who I can ask simple questions to and get really deep so that I am learning and helping to push the thinking in thought-provoking ways with these discipline experts, but I won’t be able to cover all of the things. So, you’ve got to empower decision-making at a local expert level.

Block’s approach to building a diverse culture

SAFIAN: Thinking about a lot of businesses that are deprioritizing or renaming ESG efforts, sustainability or DEI, in Trump’s second term, that these words have become like a lightning rod, how much are you recalibrating programs at Block?

AHUJA: We believe that our ESG programs are critically important to representing our customers within our company, and so what that means is that we look for multiple forms of lived experience as well as demographics in our employee base, and we believe ultimately that’s what will create an employee base and a company that can create more and more customer value over the time.

What does that mean? We look for people from underrepresented demographics, different income groups. We look for people who were sellers and we look for people who were the first to go to college in their family. We don’t have targets around these things, but we want to make sure that we have fair hiring practices such that we can include, again, that multiple forms of lived experience.

Another really important part of our program around inclusion is our employee community groups. We have 13 different affinity groups around the company. That helps the company that’s 10,000 people and spread out around the world to feel smaller and to feel like every voice matters. This is really important work for us as we think about building culture within the company.

SAFIAN: When people think about Block or look at Block, what do you think they miss most?

AHUJA: I think the thing that’s most under-appreciated about Block is the power of the potential connections across our ecosystems. We sit at the counter in between the seller and the buyer where we’re serving, again, millions of sellers and tens of millions of buyers through Cash App or through Afterpay and through Square. And so there are fairly unique things that we can do to enable that commerce in a way that supports that overall flywheel of buyers finding interesting incentives at sellers, sellers finding new buyers or greater loyalty amongst their customer base that we can help create.

If you think about all the very different terms and meanings of the word block, it’s also the neighborhood. And so this neighborhood network that’s very local, built around Square sellers and their buyers and consumers in the neighborhood is something that we think we can uniquely fulfill.

SAFIAN: What’s at stake for Block right now?

AHUJA: This is an important year for us. We have launched a number of new products on the Square business over the past year that we’re now bringing to market. We had 100-plus new products and new features launch last month in May that we’re bringing to existing and new customers alike. We’ve got an exciting new campaign going with Cash App and new features in the works around peer-to-peer as well as banking that we think are going to really help, again, potentially tens of millions of people manage their money better.

This is an important year for us to not only, again, be very grounded in what our customers need and that product velocity and product innovation, but also to re-accelerate our growth, which is something that we believe we’re going to strongly be doing in the back half of this year, and ultimately on that path to being a Rule of 40 company.

SAFIAN: Amrita, this was great. Thanks so much for doing it.

AHUJA: Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it. It was a pleasure.

SAFIAN: Amrita has no small ambitions, from helping money move faster, as she puts it, to making Block a fintech powerhouse. I’m struck by the interplay in her strategy between speed of action, efficiency, and customer focus. Maybe it’s because she’s both COO and CFO, but in our fast-shifting economy, we all need to better understand how the different levers of our business impact each other. In disruptive times, silos are breaking down, whether that’s between functions in an organization or between the definitions of entire sectors, such as the blurring lines of finance, tech, and consumer brands.

One thing is for sure: we all have to keep moving. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.