How Cleeng and Primer are powering the future of subscription payments for D2C

By 2028, the subscription industry is set to hit a massive $1 trillion globally. 

But in a world where subscribers can cancel with a single click, keeping them engaged is the real challenge. 

That’s where Cleeng comes in.

As the leading subscription management platform, Cleeng powers global brands like the NHL, Optus Sport, Sinclair Broadcasting Group, and Big Ten Network, helping them reduce subscriber churn, maximize retention, and drive revenue growth.

One of the core pillars of Cleeng’s platform is ‘Merchant’, which handles payments for its clients as a Merchant of Record. Cleeng’s promise to its customers is simple: “You get the money. We take care of the rest.”

To deliver on that promise at scale, Cleeng has partnered with Primer, leveraging its Unified Payment Infrastructure to build a world-class, global, multi-processor, data-driven payments strategy.

We sat down with Enzo Bermond, Cleeng’s Merchant's Senior Product Manager, to discuss the company’s journey, ambitious growth plans, and how it’s using Primer to power the next generation of subscription payments.

Cleeng has grown impressively as a bootstrapped company. Can you share insights into its journey, key milestones, and current market position?

Founded in 2011, Cleeng set out to simplify subscriber management and retention. 

With a scalable SaaS model, AI-driven solutions, and a customer-first approach, we’ve built a market-leading solution for D2C media, entertainment, and sports brands that allow them to build best-in-class subscription and retention strategies.

Now, we’re expanding our focus to support subscription apps in fitness, well-being, e-learning, and other D2C categories, where our proven solutions are ideally suited to drive growth and engagement.

A key driver of our success? Deep industry expertise. Our team includes talent from Apple, Philips, Disney, and ESPN. They bring extensive knowledge of digital subscriptions, payments, and retention strategies, and their experience has been crucial in developing tailored solutions that help subscription businesses across industries scale and succeed.

How critical are payments to Cleeng’s overall offering, and what challenges have you faced in optimizing them?

Payments are crucial. 

Merchant is our subscriber billing and tax management solution. It’s designed to handle every stage of the payment process, from checkout and retries to fraud detection, tax compliance, and dispute management.

As a Merchant of Record (MoR), we’re legally responsible for processing payments and all related tasks, such as retry logic, tax collection and remittance, and chargeback disputes on behalf of our customers. We ensure seamless transactions, regulatory compliance, and optimized revenue collection in one streamlined solution.

Our goal is to maximize payment success rates, minimize chargebacks, and keep our customers' subscribers paying month after month.

Historically, we’ve successfully operated with a single payment service provider (PSP) in Europe and North America. But as we’ve expanded to support platforms with subscribers across MENA, LATAM, and Southeast Asia, we began to see limitations with this approach.

For example, genuine transactions were declined because our processor’s data formatting didn’t align with local issuer expectations in certain regions.

It was clear we couldn’t rely on a single processor anymore and needed greater flexibility and control over our payment operations to deliver higher approval rates, support regional payment preferences, and reduce friction at checkout.

Instead of building your own integrations with new PSPs, you chose Primer—why? 

Building our own payment processor integrations was an option, but the time, cost, and engineering effort required made it impractical, especially since we aimed to work with multiple processors.

We didn’t want internal resource constraints to slow our customers’ growth, so we sought a more scalable solution. That’s why we chose Primer.

With Primer’s Unified Payment Infrastructure, we can connect to any payment processor in weeks instead of months on custom integrations. This flexibility allows us to support merchants expanding into new regions, where local processors are essential for higher approval rates and better customer experiences.

Partnering with Primer was the obvious choice. It enables us to move fast, scale effortlessly, and offer merchants the best possible payment setup. We plan to integrate at least three payment processors through Primer by H2 2025, ensuring we can adapt to regional needs and maximize authorization rates worldwide.

You considered multiple orchestration providers. What key decision factors led you to choose Primer over the competition?

We comprehensively evaluated Primer and other providers, assessing functional and technical capabilities such as workflow configuration, fraud provider integration, charge testing, scalability, and security.

Primer consistently outperformed the competition in nearly every test. It became clear that Primer is a battle-tested platform built to handle the complexities of global payments. Given the diverse needs of our customer base, we needed a resilient, adaptable solution that could address a wide range of challenges across different markets.

Beyond the technology, the strong alignment between our teams—up to the CEO level—reinforced our decision. With Primer, we’re not just getting a payment infrastructure platform; we’re partnering with a team that understands our vision and is committed to helping us scale.

How do you see Primer improving your ability to serve customers? What specific outcomes are you aiming for?

Primer allows us to use the best local processors in MENA, LATAM, and Southeast Asia. We can run A/B tests across multiple payment processors and dynamically route transactions based on historical performance and real-time success rates.

This is key to maximizing authorization rates, particularly for recurring payments. If a transaction fails, we can automatically retry it through a different processor using Fallbacks, increasing the chances of recovery by presenting payment data that aligns with issuer expectations.

Ultimately, Primer enables us to optimize payments at every level, ensuring higher success rates, fewer failed transactions, and a seamless payment experience for our customers and their subscribers.

With this solution, our clients can easily expand into new markets, leveraging Primer's capabilities to navigate regional payment complexities and unlock growth opportunities worldwide.

What are your broader ambitions for this partnership, and how do you see it evolving?

Primer’s deep global payments expertise gives us valuable insights into processor performance, strengths, and weaknesses. Their guidance on which processors to integrate with and how to optimize routing rules has been instrumental in maximizing our payment success rates.

As Primer continues to expand its capabilities—adding fraud detection, network tokenization, agnostic 3DS, and more—we see even greater potential to enhance our payments strategy.

We’re committed to deepening our partnership, leveraging Primer’s expanding ecosystem to optimize payments further, reduce friction, and drive long-term customer growth.

Get in touch to learn how Primer can help make payments a strategic growth level in your business.