A new vision for payments

Unified Payments Infrastructure

Story

Team

Gabriel Le Roux

Co-founder & CEO

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.

They needed

an infrastructure that could scale with them

Primer

For the past decade, businesses have had little choice but to try to cobble together an increasing number of payment services themselves. Few have managed to do this effectively, and it's clear why: payments aren't their core competency, nor should they be.

Arjun Muralidharan, Director of Product at GetYourGuide, a world leading travel experience platform, articulates this well.

“With payments, the more you try to build in-house, the greater the risk of diverting focus and resources from your core competencies. That’s something we’ve strategically chosen to avoid by using Primer.”

Arjun Muralidharan

Director of Product, GetYourGuide

A new vision for payments

We built Primer, the world's first Unified Payment Infrastructure, to abstract the complexity of payments and provide businesses with the infrastructure, framework, and tools they need to transform their payment processes. This empowers merchants to unleash their payments potential, driving business innovation and revenue growth.

We’re well on our way to realizing our vision. Primer powers payments for some of the world’s biggest and most ambitious businesses, including GetYourGuide, Conforama, Maisons du Monde, AppsFlyer, and Beam.

We’re winning the trust of these businesses by pioneering an entirely new vision for payments—one that’s open, unified, flexible, and scalable and that makes it possible for every business on the planet to unleash its payment potential.