Primer, the UK-founded fintech company that helps merchants consolidate their payments stack and support future payment methods, has launched 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 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; and, 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.
“Merchants don’t want to be constrained by payments any longer,” said Paul Anthony, Primer co-founder and Head of Product and Engineering. “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.”
Primer was founded in January 2020 by Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux, who met at Braintree, a division of PayPal. Built to unify merchants’ entire payments stack through an industry-first agnostic integration, Primer announced a £3.8 million seed fundraise 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, Primer is headquartered in London with 18 employees across seven countries, with the company driven by insights gleaned from conducting in-depth technical workshops with almost 80 merchants globally.
Gabriel Le Roux, co-founder and Head of Business Development and Strategy at Primer, said: “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.”
