Primer launches with payments API for merchants to banish technical burden of managing payments
Today, Primer — the UK-founded fintech company that helps merchants seamlessly consolidate their payments stack and easily support future payment methods — launches with its unified payments API and checkout. Providing an open payment infrastructure to merchants through a single integration, Primer manages the front-end checkout process and backend consolidation of payments services — supercharging payments with data-driven insights and a clean, flexible experience for end consumers.
Unifying payment service providers (PSPs), proprietary payment methods, fraud providers, and other third-party services (including loyalty and reward schemes), Primer enables merchants to take advantage of any payment service — both current and future. This means Primer can work with any merchant; in turn, merchants can connect the likes of Stripe, Klarna, Amazon Pay, GoCardless, and WeChat, without writing a single line of code. Primer’s “Workflows” capability enables merchants to build sophisticated payment flows and routing, unify their fraud mitigation efforts and gain greater visibility of transactional information through connections to business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.
Primer was founded in January 2020 by Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux, who met at Braintree, a division of PayPal, where they worked with the world’s biggest merchants to optimise their payments strategies, expand to new markets and offer new commerce experiences to their consumers. After recognising the complexity, and vast technical burden merchants faced in scaling their payments ecosystems, maintaining their current payments stack and adapting to wider changes in the payments landscape, both sought to solve this problem for merchants — Primer was born.
Built to unify merchants entire payments stack through an agnostic integration (an industry-first), Primer announced a £3.8 million seed fundraise just four months later in May 2020, led by Balderton and joined by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. Seedcamp, Kima Ventures, and Speedinvest also participated in the round. Now, just one year after its founders left PayPal, Primer — headquartered in London with 18 employees across seven countries — has launched, driven by insights gleaned from conducting in-depth technical workshops with almost 80 merchants globally.
Commenting on this news, Primer co-founder and head of product and engineering Paul Anthony, said: “Merchants don’t want to be constrained by payments any longer. They want to offer customers the experience they expect, wherever they are, and without compromising on UX and optionality at checkout. The payments landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, and merchants need to leverage best-in-class technologies at every step in the checkout process. Primer is designed to put merchants on the leading-edge of payments, and to keep them there.”
Gabriel Le Roux, co-founder and head of business development and strategy at Primer, added: “Managing multiple PSPs and proprietary payment methods is no mean feat, yet larger merchants — particularly those operating in more than one geographical region — are often stuck supporting endless payment methods, resulting in poor user experience, lack of transparency, complex pricing and substantial technical overhead.
Merchants need all the help they can get when it comes to scaling payments globally, which is where Primer comes in.”
