Primer and HitPay Join Forces to Accelerate Southeast Asian Merchants’ Global Growth

13 January 2026

KUALA LUMPUR: Primer and HitPay have announced a strategic partnership aimed at unlocking faster access to international markets for merchants across Southeast Asia.

With the region’s cross-border e-commerce market anticipated to surpass USD 76 billion by 2030, more merchants are selling to customers worldwide. However, navigating complex licensing requirements and managing multiple PSP connections can hinder payment performance and delay market entry.

As the merchant of record for Southeast Asian businesses selling internationally, HitPay manages cross-border payments, compliance, and settlement for merchants in markets such as Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia, enabling them to sell seamlessly to customers in the US and Europe.

In Southeast Asia, where MSMEs make up 97% of all businesses, expanding internationally has become a strategic necessity. Singapore encourages local businesses to be ‘born global’ through government grants and high-value partnerships with MNCs. Malaysia has recently increased efforts to raise MSME export contributions to 15%, while the Philippines, traditionally cautious due to market complexities, now sees 32% of MSMEs interested in expanding abroad this year.

Through Primer’s integrated infrastructure, Singapore-based HitPay can access local acquirers across key global markets, facilitating multi-currency card acceptance beyond the region and providing locally optimised, high-performance payment experiences for ground-level companies.

Aditya Haripurkar, Co-founder and CEO of HitPay, said: “Our merchants have evolved from serving primarily local customers to selling globally, from Southeast Asian exporters reaching the US to travel and hospitality businesses attracting European clients. Faster access to new markets and improved local payment performance will be transformative. The integration was swift, with minimal engineering, but the impact has been immediate, especially in fast-growing segments like travel.”

Gabriel Le Roux, Co-founder and CEO of Primer, commented, “Helping merchants scale internationally remains one of the biggest challenges in payments. Partnering with HitPay opens new markets for their merchants and lays the groundwork for sustained global growth. This partnership demonstrates how an open, unified payments infrastructure can genuinely drive growth for fintechs and the millions of businesses they serve.”

The collaboration is bidirectional, with HitPay integrating into Primer as part of the newly launched Primer for Partners Programme. This initiative allows PSPs, APMs, and fraud providers to build and manage their own integrations on the Primer platform, making their products accessible to all Primer merchants while benchmarking and monitoring their performance.

With one of the region’s most comprehensive portfolios of alternative payment methods, covering over 700 local options, the partnership will enable Primer’s clients to access new markets across Southeast Asia’s fragmented payments landscape without additional integrations.

“HitPay’s extensive coverage across Southeast Asia is impressive,” added Le Roux. “Combining HitPay’s regional expertise with Primer’s global infrastructure creates a dual expansion model, connecting Southeast Asian merchants to the world, and vice versa.”

For both companies, this partnership signals the start of a broader collaboration dedicated to simplifying payments through resilient infrastructure, empowering merchants to expand internationally with confidence, without compromising on performance, control, or speed.