In the age of Square, PayPal, Apple Pay and countless other ways to make a payment digitally, Dustin Magaziner \u201915 has built his own institution dedicated to the power of plastic.<\/p>\n
Magaziner is the founder and CEO of PayBright, a company skilled in the art and science of processing credit card and debit card payments.<\/p>\n
He started out with a men\u2019s clothing store, a client he secured while enrolled at Furman. He\u2019s since built the company into a multistate operation with 45 employees.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur road map is to double our size over the next 18 months,\u201d says the New Jersey native.<\/p>\n
The idea to launch a payments-processing company came from his father, who ran several retail businesses. During summer breaks, Magazine worked for his dad, sifting through invoices and bills. The younger Magaziner noticed that invoices for the stores\u2019 credit-card processing fees were the most difficult to decipher.<\/p>\n
\u201cI noticed that it was a lot of money, and the amount of confusion and misinformation around it was crazy,\u201d Magaziner says.<\/p>\n
A brainstorm occurred. If the statements were hard for him to understand, they had to be difficult for others, too. There was a business opportunity lurking \u2014 to create a payment processor with fee schedules that didn\u2019t require an engineering degree to calculate.<\/p>\n
Thus was born PayBright. The next part was licensing the technology and finding customers, which he did by knocking on doors in Greenville when he wasn\u2019t studying. Company leadership includes three former Furman students:\u00a0Jake Wolff ’15,\u00a0Chris Pogue ’15 and\u00a0Caleb Avery ’14.<\/p>\n
These days, Magaziner readily acknowledges how Square has changed how small merchants accept card payments with its now-iconic plastic dongle.<\/p>\n
But he believes Square can be beaten.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re the most well-known, but they\u2019re not the only ones,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Magaziner knows that Venmo rules with millennials in the art of sending money to friends and family for everything from Christmas gifts to tickets to a school football game. And he\u2019s fully aware that the country\u2019s largest banks have billions of dollars at their disposal to make their presence known in the payments market.<\/p>\n
Still, Magaziner has his sights set on continued growth. He\u2019s already locked up scores of restaurants in Greenville\u2019s world of fine dining and cuisine, from Trio in downtown Greenville to Flat Rock Grille in the Cherrydale shopping center.<\/p>\n
And as he prepares to move PayBright\u2019s headquarters from New Jersey to Raleigh, North Carolina, Magaziner wants to expand into more states, including Tennessee and Texas.<\/p>\n
But reflecting on his time at Furman, he recalls one of his favorite mentors, Economics Professor Nathan Cook, with whom he did his senior seminar.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was game theory, which shifted the way I view business and making decisions,\u201d remembers Magaziner. \u201cIt has helped me tremendously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mock trial at Furman also helped him get where he is today.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt helped build confidence, my public speaking and analytical thinking,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the age of Square, PayPal, Apple Pay and countless other ways to make a payment digitally, Dustin Magaziner \u201915 has built his own institution dedicated to the power of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":8055,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-alumni","category-economics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}