UK’s Primer launches with payments API for merchants

By Edil Corneille

Today, UK-founded FinTech company Primer launched with its unified payments API and checkout. The FinTech helps merchants to consolidate their payments stack and easily support future payment methods.

Providing an open payment infrastructure to merchants through a single integration, Primer manages the front-end checkout process and backend consolidation of payments services. This leads to supercharging payments with data-driven insights and clean, flexible experience for end consumers.

Primer co-founder and Head of Product and Engineering Paul Anthony apprised, “Merchants don’t want to be constrained by payments any longer. They want to offer customers the experience they expect, wherever they are, and without compromising on UX and optionality at checkout. The payments landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, and merchants need to leverage best-in-class technologies at every step in the checkout process. Primer is designed to put merchants on the leading-edge of payments, and to keep them there.”

Unifying payment service providers (PSPs), proprietary payment methods, fraud providers, and other third-party services (including loyalty and reward schemes), Primer enables merchants to take advantage of any payment service — both current and future. This means Primer can work with any merchant; in turn, merchants can connect the likes of Stripe, Klarna, Amazon Pay, GoCardless, and WeChat, without writing code.

Primer’s “Workflows” capability enables merchants to build sophisticated payment flows and routing, unify their fraud mitigation efforts and gain greater visibility of transactional information through connections to business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.

Gabriel Le Roux, co-founder and Head of Business Development and Strategy at Primer elucidated, “Managing multiple PSPs and proprietary payment methods is no mean feat, yet larger merchants — particularly those operating in more than one geographical region — are often stuck supporting endless payment methods, resulting in poor user experience, lack of transparency, complex pricing and substantial technical overhead. Merchants need all the help they can get when it comes to scaling payments globally, which is where Primer comes in.”

Anthony and Le Roux met at Braintree, a division of PayPal, where they worked with merchants to optimise their payments strategies, expand to new markets and offer new commerce experiences to their consumers. Primer was founded in January 2020.

Built to unify merchants’ entire payments stack through an agnostic integration, Primer announced a £3.8 million seed fundraise in May 2020, led by Balderton and joined by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. Seedcamp, Kima Ventures, and Speedinvest also participated in the round.