When my Co-Founder Paul and I conceptualized Primer five years ago, we had a clear vision: to build a core infrastructure that unifies a merchant’s global payment stack, allowing them to optimize costs, boost performance, scale at pace, and make payments a competitive advantage.
It was an opportunity so obvious that we couldn’t quite believe somebody hadn’t already taken it. Anyone working in payments at that time could see that the ‘full-stack’ offering promoted by payment service providers (PSP) couldn’t meet the needs of modern businesses.
Merchants were increasingly finding they needed to use multiple PSPs to achieve optimal performance across different markets. While the additional services offered, such as fraud prevention, often fell short of what was provided by the specialist solutions on the market.
Paul and I worked at Braintree then, helping enterprise clients across the world build their payment strategies. We saw firsthand the rejection of the 'full-stack' offering. Merchants didn't want to use all of Braintree's services—or any other PSP's, for that matter. Instead, they wanted to customize their payment stack to suit their unique needs, using the best services—processors, wallets, fraud solutions, identity verification platforms, payouts solutions, and more—available in different markets and across the payment lifecycle.
They wanted optionality, flexibility, and freedom in how they built and managed their payments.
