Payments is an industry brimming with personality. And in our new series, we will spend time spotlighting the personalities involved across the ecosystem and telling their stories.

In this first installment, we chat with Gabriel Le Roux, Primer’s Co-founder and CEO. 

Gab has been in the payments space for ten years, starting at Braintree as a commercial and product leader in Europe and the US before launching Primer. In this interview, we’ll discover his journey of building a successful payments startup, what motivated him to become a founder, and his vision for the payments ecosystem. 

You started your career in payments working at Braintree and PayPal. Was a career in payments always part of your plan? 

Not at all. I was always interested in tech, but payments weren’t on my radar until I started looking for a job. As it turned out, every company I applied to was somehow involved in the payment industry.

The more I explored the payment space during the interviews, the more fascinated I became. It’s such a hidden yet essential process that affects everything we do. I could see how payments would evolve, and I wanted to join a leader focused on innovation. So it made sense to join a company like Braintree with a strong product and vision.

I became very passionate about them. I saw how powerful they were and how, as an engine, they could allow merchants to unlock an enormous amount of value. What I loved—and still do—is the complexity and intricacy of payment challenges and the creativity required to solve them.

There are few, if any, specific qualifications in payments. How did you learn about this space? 

That’s true, but I think it will change soon. Payments is such an exciting and dynamic industry that I’m sure we’ll see more specialized courses and programs emerge, especially as the ecosystems and technologies evolve.

For me, however, it was mostly learning by doing, talking to businesses, and thinking beyond just products. And it’s an ongoing process. I still spend most of my time talking to merchants and our partners to understand as many perspectives as possible and dive deep into how every aspect of payments works. I also urge every team member at Primer to do the same.

Your career with Braintree took you from heading up a commercial team in EMEA to its product team in the US.  What was behind that decision?
It was a natural transition. As I was selling and delivering solutions to customers in EMEA, I was also collaborating with the product team in the US to adapt our products to that market. They saw the value of my insights and experience and invited me to join them in expanding usage, working with partners, and discovering new use cases.

That’s how I ended up moving to San Francisco in 2019. It was an exciting place; everyone works in tech, and discussions are always tech-centric. It’s not as diverse as locations like London, where you have people from all backgrounds joining in the payment conversation.  

Why did you decide to start your own payments company?

I was constantly in touch with all kinds and sizes of merchants: understanding their needs, designing their roadmaps, and figuring out what they wanted from infrastructure.

And I realized that they needed more than a single PSP could provide, no matter how robust its product offering was.

Every business wanted to work with many services, from PSPs to payment methods and beyond. They wanted to be agile, using payments to fuel growth, stand out, and create new customer experiences. And they wanted to do all this without adding a ton of complexity in the backend and hiring a vast payment team to manage it.

I could see that a processor-agnostic Unified Payments Infrastructure was the solution, and that’s how the idea of Primer came to life.

Did you always want to start a business?

Not really. Being an entrepreneur is something you discover along the way. As I grew up, I realized I had a knack and a drive for solving and creating things.

I used to jot down ideas on my phone of things I wanted to fix or improve someday. It took me a while to find the right opportunity. Working closely with global merchants opened my eyes to the potential of payments as a catalyst for their business and the gap in the market.

How did that feel when you made the decision to start Primer?

Motivated.

Paul and I understood the complexity and challenges of payments, and how difficult it was for businesses to plan and execute their strategies—especially with the constant changes in regulation, payment methods, and customer behavior.

With our merchant background, we knew a radical change towards a more automated and flexible infrastructure was necessary. And we were determined—and still are—to make it happen.

When you started Primer, how did you position it to merchants and investors? 

We focused on listening and learning. We talked to as many merchants as possible to understand their pain points, aspirations, and challenges with the payment stack.

They were clearly frustrated with multiple integrations, constant learning curves, and scattered data. All of this resulted in poor customer purchasing experiences for their customers and higher costs for them.

This gave us the insight to shape our products. We created real value with an underlying unified infrastructure that enables merchants to do anything they want with payments in a very simple and elegant way. As a result, we had merchants eager to use our product and had several on board within our first year.

The merchant demand and our vision also appealed to the VC community and helped us secure funding from Iconiq, Accel, Balderton, RTP Global, and recently, Tencent.

And, of course, we’ve tweaked our positioning over the years. But at its core, it’s the same: Primer is a Unified Payment Infrastructure that empowers every business to unleash its payment potential.

You started Primer just before COVID-19. Did that impact your becoming a remote business? 

No, it didn’t. We made that choice deliberately before the pandemic. Paul was in the UK, and I was in the US, so Primer was born as a remote company. 

We’re a global business, and we want to hire the best talent from around the world to offer local expertise and support our merchants’ needs. Today, we have people from 34 nationalities working in 26 countries, and we’ve built a strong team culture by creating opportunities to connect, share, and have fun together. 

What are the big payment themes you’re seeing play out today? 

People are becoming more aware of the power of payments and what they can do for their business. They no longer see payments as a separate function but as a tool for the entire enterprise, from ecommerce and fraud to finance, marketing, and CX teams.

It’s why Primer resonates. Our Unified Payments Infrastructure has multiple use cases relevant to all these teams. For example, if marketing wants to build the best checkout experience, they can with our Universal Checkout; if payments want to optimize authorization rates, they can use tools like Fallbacks and Network Tokenization; and if finance wants to streamline operational processes, they can use our Reconciliation engine.

These are just some of the use cases that are available today. The beauty of Primer is that merchants can use it however they want, and we’re seeing merchants find new use cases almost every week at the moment.

Looking ahead, I foresee the idea that payments are a siloed function will completely vanish. Instead, it will be integrated into every team and seen as a valuable tool to enhance loyalty and differentiation.

What advice would you give to a new founder looking to start a fintech or payments company?

Firstly, you need to believe in yourself and your proposition. You must also be resilient, keep an open mind, and be ready to listen to others. But the most important ingredient for success is to surround yourself with the right people. A talented team is what's going to make your company successful and help it scale. It’s a recipe that certainly worked for Primer.