LONDON (AFP) - Twitter's co-founder outlined plans to make cash registers a thing of the past on Thursday as he held a global launch for new software that he said would help small businesses grow.

Mr Jack Dorsey, who is chairman of Twitter and chief executive of the mobile payments company Square, said the software would allow shopkeepers to track sales and provide digital receipts.

"We think it's a great replacement to any cash register," he said at a Financial Times conference in London.

"It means we're now a global company," he said.

The software, Square Register, was only available in Canada, Japan and the United States, where it tracked around four million sales a day.

It can now be downloaded for free everywhere else and supports 130 currencies, although it will not allow actual payments for the moment.

The company offered testimonials from businesses in Australia, Hungary, Mexico, Philippines and Vietnam and Mr Dorsey said many had already begun using the software by getting around national controls.

Square teamed up with the smartphone app Snapchat earlier this week for a service that allows users in the United States to send money to friends by simply typing dollar amounts into new "Snapcash" messages.