In Southeast Asia, there’s no single way customers expect to pay. Payment methods change by country, city, and use case. Merchants are expected to support them all, creating a level of complexity not seen anywhere else in the world.
HitPay was built to help businesses in the region navigate this complexity. It helps them support local payment methods across online and in-store channels without managing multiple integrations. Today, HitPay supports thousands of businesses across the region, including Charles and Keith, Nodspark, and Bob the Baker Boy.
As HitPay’s merchant base matured, its needs began to change. Businesses that once served primarily local customers started expanding into new markets and accepting payments from overseas buyers. A Vietnamese exporter selling handcrafted goods wanted to reach customers in the US, while a boutique hotel in Thailand began attracting more guests from Europe.
“There was a clear shift in how merchants were using HitPay,” says Aditya Haripurkar, Co-founder and CEO at HitPay. “They weren’t just focused on local payment coverage in Southeast Asia anymore. More and more of them wanted to sell to customers overseas and charge in currencies their buyers were familiar with.”
Enabling global card acceptance meant working with acquirers outside Southeast Asia to improve authorization rates and support foreign currencies. This is where its story with Primer begins.
Solving the global acquiring challenge
HitPay operates as a merchant of record for export-driven businesses across Southeast Asia. While these merchants are based in markets like Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, or Malaysia, many of their customers are in the US, UK, and Europe. Supporting those transactions requires processing card payments in foreign currencies while settling funds locally within a merchant-of-record model.
The challenge was at the acquiring layer. Using local acquirers in Southeast Asia to process USD, GBP, or EUR transactions often led to lower authorization rates, higher costs, and tighter risk constraints.
Improving acceptance required access to acquirers based in the markets where those cards were issued, with underwriting and risk parameters aligned to the model. This wasn’t a matter of adding payment methods or another integration. It required a different acquiring setup.
HitPay turned to Primer with a clear requirement: support global card acquiring for its merchant-of-record flow through a single integration.
“We had a specific problem around how to support these merchants globally,” says Aditya. “I brought that problem to Primer, and they introduced us to the right partner. It solved something we’d been trying to address for some time.”
Primer worked closely with HitPay to connect them to an acquiring partner that could support card payments in key global markets. Together, the teams navigated underwriting and compliance to ensure the model was robust from day one. Once approvals were in place, going live was fast, and the technical integration required minimal development effort.
“From a technical perspective, the integration was seamless because Primer’s stack was straightforward for our engineers to work with,” Aditya recalls. “The real effort was in underwriting and compliance, which is exactly where we wanted to spend our time.”
The result is an acquiring foundation that allows HitPay to support global card acceptance without compromising its merchant-of-record model or maintaining multiple PSP connections as it expands.
Early traction across high-growth verticals
Within weeks of launching the new capability, HitPay saw immediate demand. Interest first came from ecommerce, where cross-border customers drive a significant share of revenue in markets like Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
“Our merchants had been waiting for this,” he notes.
HitPay can now support merchants through every stage of growth, enabling them to offer familiar payment experiences to global buyers while removing operational and technical barriers. What previously required multiple providers and significant operational effort is now delivered through a single capability, enabled by HitPay’s integration with Primer.
A partnership that scales
Looking ahead, the relationship between HitPay and Primer will continue to evolve, with HitPay becoming one of the first payment services to onboard using Primer for Partners, a new program that allows payment providers to build directly into Primer, manage their own integrations, and distribute their services globally across Primer’s global network.
“Our merchants were going global, but international merchants also needed a way to serve Southeast Asia,” says Aditya. “Joining Primer for Partners lets us support both sides. This model is transformational. It feels like an app-store approach to payments infrastructure. As a provider, you get distribution, visibility, and the freedom to innovate faster.”
For both HitPay and Primer, this marks the start of a broader collaboration that replaces complexity with solid infrastructure and gives merchants the confidence to expand globally.
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