Whether at your neighborhood coffee shop or a multilevel department store, the drill is the same: walk up to the cashier, pull out your card, pay for your item and walk out. For business owners, that simple swipe taps into payment processing, a mixed bag of different pricing structures, processor charges and interchange fees.
If the local convenience store owner isn’t careful, they can lose parts of their profits to hidden fees.
So Blueswipe, a Richmond startup that launched in 2013, wants to make the whole process simpler and more transparent. With the introduction of popular companies like San Francisco’s Square, the industry of payment processing has become rife with competition and innovation – Blueswipe wants to put some oxygen in it.
“We want to break through the noise out there,” Chief Growth Officer Ned Freeman said. “You don’t build a good company without that.”
Blueswipe is targeting small and mid-size businesses, which often suffer from the complicated pricing structures in other payment processing plans, and wants to be as simple as can be. For example, owners can see how much they’re paying when someone swipes a card to buy a latte.
There are three people you pay when you swipe a card, Freeman said. The people who issued your credit card, the credit card companies themselves, and the processor. So, a Capital One, a Visa and a Square.
“There’s a lot of ways, that if you don’t spend time trying to understand the pricing structure of the plan that you have, you have a gap.”
The startup analyzed thousands of statements to build a data set so owners can have the information in real time. Plus, it says it prioritizes having a full-time customer support team in case an owner has questions.
Blueswipe's biggest challenge is the amount of time a business owner needs to spend thinking about joining them, Freeman said. He said that as payment processing becomes a more active space, owners are constantly inundated with offers for new products and processing plans.
“Payment processing ends up being fragmented and marketed,” he said. Blueswipe wants to be the transparent option that changes the way owners experience payment.
The company was recently housed in Lighthouse Labs, a Richmond-based startup accelerator. Freeman said the experience, along with help from Startup Virginia, gave Blueswipe a “networking community and access to investor advice.”
The company closed a $900,000 seed round in April, he added. It currently has customers in 10 states, including New York, Florida and California.
As for their new neighbor in Crystal City? Freeman laughed at the mention of e-commerce giant Amazon moving about an hour away.
“Richmond has had its own rapid growth for the past few years,” he said. “This will just add to the madness.”
