How this Columbia medical company is capitalizing on credit cards

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Debate is ongoing worldwide about whether or not a “cashless” society is on the horizon, when all payments will be made with the swipe or tap of a card or through an app on a phone.

Nobody can deny, however, that payments through credit and debit cards have quickly become the norm for many, whether for major business transactions or just the purchase of a soft drink at vending machines that now take cards.

The leaders of a Columbia-based medical company, Rhino Medical, are using their knowledge of the credit card and financial industries to help businesses save money when processing all those card payments.

In 2022, they launched Rhino Merchant Services, a company that offers a variety of services designed to streamline payment processing services for businesses of all types — and save them money in the process.

Branching out into payment processing services was nothing new for the partners at Rhino Medical, because several of them had a background in the banking industry and, in fact, payment processing was CEO Lance Brown’s first excursion into starting his own business.

After several years of managing regional merchant services with Wells Fargo, Brown started SwypeFast, a credit card processing company, back in 2017. He made the jump to medical supplies when he saw a need at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Swypefast still is in business, but the decision to create a large-scale payment processing company that specializes in the needs of medical providers and business-to-business payments came about after the partners at Rhino Medical, who collectively have more than 30 years in merchant services, saw what some of their customers were dealing with when it came to payments.

“Working with Rhino Medical’s distributors and manufacturers, we saw there was a need to be able to provide even more value for these customers,” said Spartanburg-based Rashad Brown, one of Rhino’s managing partners. “Through the Rhino Medical space, we realized our customers were looking for more ways to save money, and through a payment processing service, we could use our experience in the industry to help customers save more money, especially on business-to-business transactions. We saw that there was a real opportunity to add an additional service to what we do.”

Payment processing costs are not often the first thing on a business owner’s mind when it comes to budgeting, and as a result many business owners find themselves trapped in long-term contracts or lease agreements using outdated equipment and programs — and being charged exorbitant rates to process card payments, according to Rhino Merchant’s  managing partner J.D. Waugh III.

“Processing payments is one of a business’s biggest expenses, just behind payroll and rent — it’s one of the top five things they have to account for,” Waugh said. “It’s a very important part of how a business runs but often something many people don’t think about or want to talk about very much.”

Waugh said some businesses sign up with a payment processing service and then discover that, for instance, their contract specifies that only a few types of cards can be processed with a 1.5% transaction fee.

“They’ll find out that everything else charges a 3.5% or higher rate, and all of a sudden your bill is triple what you thought it was going to be,” Waugh said. “Something like that can cost a business thousands of extra dollars in fees that could be used to build the business.”

Rhino Merchant offers a wide variety of payment processing options for businesses, including programs to help streamline business-to-business transactions, in-person payment equipment and software for retail, and programs for e-commerce.

The overall goal is to help the business process payments in a faster and smoother way, with much lower fees on exchange rates for cards.

“Ideally, we get a merchant’s statement and we can basically diagnose the exchange rates on the card they’re taking, and show what we can do to make it better,” Waugh said.

Having an option like Rhino Merchant could be especially helpful to medical offices, which often find themselves tied into contracts with payment processing services that charge “astronomical rates,” Waugh said.

“Dental offices especially seem to be getting taken behind the woodshed when it comes to processing rates,” he said. “We recently saw back-to-back dentist offices that were dealing with the highest effective rates we’ve seen in our combined years of operating, rates that were absolutely beyond the pale. In these cases, we were able to get in there and save them substantial amounts of money to help them out in the future.”

Saving money on processing payments can be especially beneficial to smaller practices or businesses because it allows them to both provide streamlined payment experiences for customers and also frees up sometimes limited capital to be used for hiring, improvements to the business or payments for supplies — all an increased concern with ongoing inflation, the partners said.

With the wide variety of payment processing options it offers, Rhino Merchant also can be attractive to businesses that, for whatever reason, haven’t branched out into accepting card or ACH payments. Believe it or not, they still exist — businesses that accept only cash or checks.

They exist for two reasons, Rashad Brown said — either the business owner has only worked with cash payments in the past and is hesitant to expand, or else they’ve had a bad experience with credit card processors and high fees.

“There are business owners who have been taken advantage of and their reluctance to allow cards comes from a lack of trust,” Brown said. “What we encourage them to realize is that when you limit yourself to one tender type, you essentially impact your bottom line. Most people these days are not carrying cash and are especially not going to pay cash on a larger transaction, say $1,000 or above. Also, with so many people using credit cards to get rewards, they might not want to do business with a company that only accepts cash. We don’t force feed our product to customers — instead, we’ll ask them why they went to cash payments, and we’ll offer them options that will allow them to get back into the space of accepting credit or debit cards while also saving money.”

Currently the majority of Rhino Merchants customers are in South Carolina and elsewhere in the Southeast, but Brown said the company has the ability to help clients nationwide.

“We’ll help customers anywhere, but we do find that a lot of our customers here in the state enjoy the face-to-face interaction we’re able to have with them, and that’s something we really enjoy as well,” Brown said. “But we’ll help people anywhere, from the Carolinas to California. The key is that our customers have a full knowledge of the services we offer. As we get to understand their payment processing needs, we’re able to align our services with those needs.”

To learn more about Rhino Merchants, visit www.rhinomerchant.com or email sales@rhinomerchant.com.