Primer, the UK-founded fintech backed by Accel and Balderton, has announced the launch of Primer Connect, an open app framework that enables third-party payments services to build integrations, or ‘connections’, on top of Primer’s unified checkout and payments APIs. Primer’s open app framework is the first of its kind, with Klarna, Mollie, Worldline, Truelayer, GoCardless, Sift, Laybuy, Bridge, Banked, Fonoa, and others as early participants.
Primer is an automation engine for payments, similar to Zapier for web apps. Merchants can rapidly add or ‘connect’ PSPs, payment methods, fraud providers, and other payments-related services to their checkouts and payment flows, with no development effort required due to Primer’s low-code approach. Merchants can maintain a unified checkout experience and centralised storage of saved payment information, streamline recurring payments, quickly expand to new markets, unify fraud, and optimise their payments services stack for performance, cost, and redundancy.
Paul Anthony, Co-founder and Head of Product & Engineering at Primer, said: “We’re extremely excited by the launch of Primer Connect and the opportunities this presents for both merchants and third-party payments services. Merchants have never before had this degree of flexibility in managing their payments ecosystems, and third-party service providers have long struggled to reduce go-live timeframes and maintain best-in-class integrations across their customer base.
“Our goal has always been to enable merchants to craft a better payments experience for their customers, and by opening up our platform, we remove ourselves as the barrier to achieving this much sooner.”
Primer was founded by ex-PayPal employees, Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux in January 2020, securing Balderton-led seed funding in May the same year pre-launch and Accel-led Series A funding post-launch in November.
Anthony added: “With Primer Connect, we enable payments-related services to significantly reduce go-live timeframes, increase distribution and ensure customers maintain up-to-date, best-in-class technical integrations. Primer is a fully agnostic payments integration. By opening up our framework, we ensure merchants can gain access to best-in-class products and services across their payments services stack at all times.
“Gone are the days of having to compromise on UX, and manage increasingly complex, interdependent APIs and integrations. Merchants can now focus solely on building the best possible payments experience for their customers. Our ‘connection’ types include payments processors, payment methods, fraud providers, BI tools and accounting providers, with many more on the way.”
Primer Connect is currently in closed beta and is expected to be widely available to developers in Q2 2021.
