
When I founded Primer six years ago, I had a clear vision: to build the infrastructure layer that sits across a merchant's entire payments lifecycle, giving them control, visibility, and the freedom to choose the best tools for every market, every risk profile, every customer.
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.
I saw this firsthand at Braintree, where I worked with enterprise merchants building their payment strategies. What merchants had was a take-it-or-leave-it model that forced compromise at every stage. What they wanted was optionality, flexibility, and freedom.

