Ex-Paypal execs’ no-code ‘app store for businesses’ eyes APAC next

Businesses today interact with several software and apps, dealing with everything from payments to productivity and logistics to customer support. This complexity – and burden – only goes up as firms undertake cross-border expansion.

Former PayPal and Braintree executives Gabriel Le Roux and Paul Anthony recognized this problem by speaking to founders and businesses across the world. They then co-founded Primer, a no-code payment and commerce automation platform, in 2020 as the solution.

Primer co-founders Gabriel Le Roux and Paul Anthony

“We realized very quickly that, fundamentally, one thing that was lacking was the underlying infrastructure to support all these services and the use cases that merchants were trying to create in order to guarantee payments success,” Le Roux tells Tech in Asia.

Primer is positioning itself as the one underlying infrastructure layer that strings together different apps – whether it’s payment services like Stripe, GrabPay, and Xendit or communication tools like Mailchimp, Slack, and Zendesk.

It’s like an “app store of services,” the co-founder says.

Online businesses can choose from over a hundred apps on the Primer platform to integrate into their payment and commerce flows with just a few clicks.

Its solution might resonate particularly with cross-border businesses operating in Southeast Asia, where a fragmented payments market means that any merchant has to deal with multiple domestic e-wallets and payment methods to bolster their chances of a successful sale.

“In APAC, we know that 72% of transactions by 2025 are going to be through e-wallets [and] it’s already quite high today,” Le Roux says.

A merchant typically has to integrate each payment service provider into their platform individually, which can be tedious and time consuming. Primer gives an online merchant a one-stop shop to enable several payment modes – be it via e-wallets, buy now, pay later, or even cryptocurrency. And it doesn’t stop at payments.

We’re seeing a 20% growth, month on month.

Instead of integrating with 10 to 12 different apps individually, Primer allows them to do the same through a “single API integration,” Le Roux explains.

Not surprisingly, the Asia Pacific has been one of the fastest-growing regions for the startup. Payment volume among its live merchants in the Asia Pacific is growing twice as fast as its other markets, which include the UK, the US, as well as Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

In the last 12 months, “we’re seeing a 20% growth, month on month” in total payment volumes processed, the co-founder notes.

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