TechCrunch

Primer, a U.K. fintech that wants to help merchants consolidate their payments stack and easily support new payment methods in the future, has quietly raised £3.8 million in funding.

Leading its £3.2 million seed round is Balderton Capital — which mostly does Series A — with participation from Taavet Hinrikus, who co-founded and previously led TransferWise.

Founded by ex-PayPal employees – via PayPal’s acquisition of Braintree — Primer is busy building out a payments API to (hopefully) rule them all, with the explicit aim of bringing greater transparency to a merchant’s payment stack.

The thinking is that larger merchants, especially those that operate in more than one geography, have to support an array of payments methods, which brings with it significant technical overhead, a poor user experience, and lack of transparency.

Primer wants to carry out a lot of that heavy-lifting on behalf of merchants, essentially building a payments platform that is payment method agnostic. By doing so, it aims to reduce friction when adopting new payment methods as they come to market, and provide better insights into things like how well each checkout option is performing, and how much it is really costing.

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