Primer - The next frontier in payment infrastructure

Payments has become one of the fastest growing areas of Fintech over the past few years. It started with the great unbundling of financial services on the consumer side with companies like Paypal and Venmo, and has since been followed on the enterprise side by the rise of a new generation of Payment Service Providers (PSPs) such as Adyen, Stripe and Braintree who have become core to the payment infrastructure of the modern merchant.

With the rise of cross-border commerce, merchants are increasingly trying to figure out how to adapt their payment stack. Today, many merchants will work with multiple PSPs to expand their geographical footprint (PSPs are not all created equal in terms of local reach). This helps merchants not only control costs but also increase their book of business by offering more payment options to end-customers. As a result, merchants are under pressure to build complex integrations with individual PSPs and third party software, all of which requires significant effort to maintain. Additionally, a slew of new regulations including Open Banking and 3DS are additional hurdles that put pressure on merchants’ growing payment infrastructure. 

In a world where every service will soon resemble a fintech business - and companies like Uber and Shopify have paved the way by getting their own payment licences - the problem is only multiplying. Indeed, many merchants are being left behind in a race that has only just begun. This was the realisation that became so clear to Gabriel and Paul while at Braintree that they decided to take it upon themselves to solve this problem, and that’s how Primer was born. 

Primer, through a single integration, offers access to a wide range of PSPs as well as a no-code interface where users can create workflows with an if this then that type logic that puts the merchant’s payment infrastructure on autopilot and directs payment flows where most effective (i.e. highest conversion rates, authentication rates and where rates are the cheapest). As a result, merchants now have the ability to customize their payment infrastructure without requiring external intervention, as well as the ability to connect third party solutions that are best-of-breed for fraud, KYC, 3DS, CRM or BI directly into their payment infrastructure without creating additional burden on their payment and tech teams.

At Accel, we have been lucky to be among the first investors in fintech infrastructure companies such as Braintree or Galileo that have been among the first generation of leaders in the space. We are now excited to be partnering with Gabriel, Paul and the entire Primer team to help them push the boundaries of that new frontier. From our first meetings, we were impressed by their commercial instincts and seeing their product chops in action subsequently convinced us to lead their Series A. Congratulations to the Primer team on this important milestone!