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Square, best known for its white credit-card readers that plug into smartphones, is part of a wave of the tech giants making inroads into the banking business, the Wall Street Journal reported. The firm, run by Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey, is already well-versed in financial services through its payments business. Last week, the San Francisco company took another step towards banking: It filed paperwork to open its own bank in Utah that would make loans to small businesses and offer deposit accounts to both companies and the general public. Square’s new push puts it at the forefront of technology firms aiming to challenge banks not just on payments or digital apps but on the banks’ core business of making loans. Tech firms’ vast troves of customer data can give them a built-in advantage. PayPal Holdings Inc. has extended more than $6 billion in small-business loans since 2013, using data it collected by processing payments for Internet retailers. Over the past seven years, independent merchants that sell goods on Amazon have borrowed more than $3 billion from the e-commerce giant, which approves loans based on sellers’ historical volumes, Amazon reviews and other factors.

A Middleton, Wis., distillery that filed for bankruptcy last month is one step closer to new ownership that would keep the company locally owned, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Travis Hasse and Tom Maas, partners in Dancing Goat Distillery in Cambridge, submitted under the Midwest Custom Bottling name the high bid for Death’s Door Distilling at a bankruptcy auction last week in Madison. The $2.48 million bid submitted on Thursday at the end of a five-hour auction that took 24 rounds and included two other bidding groups, was approved Friday by Judge Catherine Furay in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. A closing will likely be held in early January following the holidays, said Hasse. Hasse, Maas and Maas’ son, Nick Maas, who serves as head distiller at Dancing Goat, opened their nearly $7 million, 21,000-square-foot distillery in December 2017 within the Vineyards at Cambridge. The 73-acre development, located on the village’s west side, includes housing and vineyards while the winery is located in the building that had housed the Matt Kenseth Museum before it moved to the village’s downtown.