APAC micromobility giant Beam expands in five markets with Primer

Singapore-founded, Asia-Pacific (APAC) micromobility leader Beam has seen 134% payments growth month-on-month since going live with the world’s first payments and commerce infrastructure provider.

The partnership with Primer has enabled Beam to expand to five new international markets, giving Beam users quick and seamless access to pay and ride its fleet of electric scooters, bikes, and mopeds.

Beam, which operates in 60 cities across 8 countries worldwide, chose Primer’s solutions to enable customers to use the payment method of their choice when using a Beam device. Primer’s ecosystem of merchants, payment providers, and payment processors supports a wide range of methods for users, including local digital wallets and over-the-counter payments.  

By giving Beam instant access to local payment methods, Primer’s solution greatly streamlined and simplified Beam’s expansion into Indonesia, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia within the past year.

In the past six months alone, Beam has processed more than 300,000 payments via one of Indonesia’s top payment processors, Xendit, through Primer. This connection has enabled Indonesia Beam users to pay through local payment methods including ShopeePay, Dana, and Ovo.  

“Managing payment options across such a diverse and fragmented range of markets, where each customer has their own preferred payment method, was going to add significant complexity to our expansion,” said Bhavin Shah, VP of Product Management of Beam.  

“Primer’s solution has removed much of the complexity around payments and enabled us to focus on building a meaningful presence in these new markets.  

“In Indonesia for example, Primer has supported us in quickly scaling our growth from Bogor and Semarang to places like Bali, Canggu, and other cities. In Australia and New Zealand, two of our largest markets, we work with Primer to unlock smoother card and digital wallet payments like ApplePay and GooglePay. We are looking forward to expanding our payments options with Primer in more areas.”  

Beam has also seen a commitment to route at least USD$35 million annually through Primer from the payment processors it works with in Australia, enabling greater visibility of transaction data across different payment providers. This is part of Primer’s goal to connect the different omnichannel payments and commerce options for its partners – making it easy to analyse and optimise payments through no-code technology.

Kailash Madan, Head of APAC for Primer said: “Our partnership with Beam has helped their team unlock the full potential of payments within the micromobility sector across APAC.  

“It’s been exciting to roll out new markets and support them with new features to ensure a frictionless payment process wherever they expand. In Malaysia, we have built support for iPay88, a hyper-localised payment service provider, offering Beam and their customers deep local market expertise.

“We are proud to be part of Beam’s rapid growth into a micromobility leader across APAC, and we’re looking forward to developing more connections and innovative features with them.”  

Founded in 2020 by PayPal alumni Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux, Primer has helped merchants worldwide – from medium sized businesses to some of the world’s largest enterprise merchants – tackle their most complex digital payments challenges.    

Hear more about Beam's payment journey.