Airalo is using Primer to turn payments from a cost of growth into a source of customer and commercial advantage, reducing payment processing fees by more than 30% in three months while building a more seamless experience for its global customer base.
As the world’s first global eSIM provider, Airalo is on a mission to make global connectivity effortless for travelers.
Today, Airalo serves more than 30 million travelers across 200+ destinations and reached unicorn status in 2025, following an investment to power the next generation of travel with borderless mobile access for consumers and businesses alike.
Every traveler’s Airalo journey begins with a purchase. In the company’s early years, the priority was growth: payments needed to work reliably wherever customers were, but there was little room to optimize either the checkout experience or the economics behind each transaction.
As Airalo’s footprint expanded, both became more important. The purchase needed to feel simple and dependable for travelers worldwide, while the cost of processing each transaction became an increasingly meaningful lever for the business.
“Payments were at a very nascent stage,” says Siranjani Sundaram, Head of Payments at Airalo. “There was a lot we wanted to do to improve the customer experience. From a finance perspective, we were also asking more questions about the economics of every transaction.”
Airalo brought in Primer to build the foundation for that change, turning payments into a lever for profitability, performance, and future growth.
Optimizing the economics of every payment
At first, payments at Airalo had one job: accept transactions reliably while the business grew.
Airalo processed all card payments through a single Singapore-based merchant ID, or MID. And with an authorization rate above 90%, the setup did its job. But as its volumes grew, the economics of that setup came under scrutiny.
“Payment processing is a cost of goods sold, so it directly affects gross profit and EBITDA,” says Siranjani. “Our authorization rate was strong, but the economics behind each payment were not. We were incurring significant FX and processing costs across a large share of our volume.”
Airalo began opening merchant accounts through its existing provider in markets where the provider already had entities. This created an immediate opportunity to route transactions through the right entity and reduce avoidable cross-border costs.
But the team needed a way to manage that growing setup without diverting engineering resources from Airalo’s core business. It also wanted a foundation that could support new providers and payment strategies over time.
“We had a clear vision for payments, and Primer gave us the path to deliver it,” says Siranjani. “We can manage routing across a growing setup without building or maintaining the logic ourselves, realize value quickly, and keep evolving as Airalo grows.”
That ability to put a new routing strategy into practice delivered an immediate financial return. Within three months of going live with Primer, Airalo reduced payment processing fees by more than 30% by strategically routing card payments across MIDs in Singapore, the UK, and the Netherlands.
“One of our goals is to reduce the cost of payments without compromising the experience for travelers,” says Siranjani. “Primer is already delivering on that. Seeing results so quickly has made a meaningful difference to our financial performance.”
Putting every assumption to the test
The initial savings proved Primer’s immediate value.
But for Airalo, the more transformative change was being able to test the customer and commercial impact of each decision before rolling it out more widely.
“Previously, we could see revenue by currency, but that was largely where the analysis stopped,” says Siranjani. “With Primer, we can break down each decision and quantify its ROI, cannibalization, customer benefit, and cost. It gives us the evidence to understand not only whether something is working, but where it can work better.”
The company's work in Brazil illustrates the value of that approach. Airalo wanted to determine whether routing Brazilian cardholders through its US or Netherlands MID would increase the likelihood of a successful payment.
“Primer makes payment experimentation practical and gives us a simple way to validate our assumptions,” says Antanas Dapkus, Senior Product Manager at Airalo. “We can configure tests in Workflows and see the results in Observability. For example, we learned that routing our Brazil payments through our Netherlands MID delivered a 1.8% lift in authorization rates. We can now weigh that performance gain against the cost before deciding how to route the traffic.”
Using the granular payment data Primer provides, Airalo could also identify why some Brazilian cardholders were struggling to complete transactions presented in Brazilian real.
Airalo uncovered a provider-specific constraint shaped by local regulation. The provider could use a balance held in Brazilian real to process a US-dollar transaction, but it could not convert funds held in another currency into Brazilian real. That meant some transactions presented in Brazilian real could not be completed, even when the US-dollar alternative was approved.
The insight gave Airalo the evidence to stop offering that Brazilian-real flow, rather than continue with a currency option that was creating avoidable friction.
“Primer helped us get to the bottom of what was happening,” says Antanas. “We can break down a scenario, understand what is happening at an issuer level, and test the right response rather than relying on an assumption.”
Turning signals into immediate answers with AI Companion
Not every important payment question starts as a planned experiment. Some arrive as an alert that needs an answer immediately.
When Airalo spotted a sudden rise in unsuccessful payment attempts, the team needed to establish whether it was an isolated issue or a pattern requiring action. It also needed to identify the affected accounts quickly, without adding friction for legitimate customers.
AI Companion became the team’s investigation layer. It queried the relevant payment data, ranked accounts by decline behavior, and helped Airalo isolate the pattern and take targeted action within 20 minutes.
“The initial signal told us something had changed, but not what was driving it,” says Tudor Munteanu, Technical Product Manager at Airalo. “AI Companion helped us move from an alert to a clear understanding of the accounts and behavior involved, so we could act quickly and confidently. That level of speed and control is transformational for the team.”
The investigation also gave Airalo the insight to strengthen its payment controls and determine what to monitor next.
AI Companion is also helping Airalo identify and remove friction from the checkout experience. For travelers purchasing from a new country, an unfamiliar or irrelevant currency can create hesitation and increase the risk of cart abandonment.
To find out whether currency choice was contributing to that friction, Airalo compared the currency shown at checkout with the currency associated with each customer’s card issuer. In 17.3% of orders, the two did not match.
AI Companion then helped the team trace the issue to an incorrect mapping between a user’s location and the preferred currency shown to them. Airalo is now working on a fix to ensure customers see the most appropriate currency when they purchase.
“Previously, getting to this level of detail would have required advanced analytics and taken weeks,” says Tudor. “With AI Companion, we can investigate a question with simple prompts, uncover a pattern, and decide what to test next. It gives more of the team the ability to think and act like payments experts.”
The underlying infrastructure for Airalo’s next phase of growth
With Primer, Airalo is now expanding its payments setup with specialist providers. Riskified is one example.
After comparing fraud prevention providers, Airalo selected Riskified, an AI-powered fraud and risk intelligence platform, and added it through Primer, strengthening its fraud capability without rebuilding the payment flow.
“It was straightforward to add on top of Primer and it is already benefiting us,” says Antanas. “We can bring in specialists for efficiency, performance, or new features, rather than expecting one provider to solve every problem.”
The same logic applies to payment service providers (PSPs), with Airalo actively looking to onboard one or two additional providers. This gives the team more ways to improve payment performance by market, while continuing to make checkout feel simple and reliable for customers.
“Primer gives us the data and flexibility to assess what is working in each market, what is not, and where a different provider could deliver more value,” says Siranjani. “We can move towards choosing specialists rather than relying on a bundled service.”
Airalo also plans to extend its use of Primer across the full payments journey, using tools such as Reconciliation, ensuring Primer is the single source of truth for every payment.
“Reconciliation is straightforward while we have one PSP,” says Siranjani. “As data starts flowing in from more sources, consolidation can quickly become a nightmare. Primer’s Reconciliation tool will make that far simpler for our controllership team and ensure we have a single source of truth for every payment.”
From a profitability initiative to a global payments advantage
For Airalo, Primer began as a finance-led profitability initiative. Its first proof point was a 30% reduction in payment costs. Since then, its value has extended far beyond the balance sheet.
Airalo can now test and improve customer-facing payment decisions, investigate risk, introduce specialist providers, and understand the economics of every payment with far greater precision.
“Primer gives us the ability to work like payments experts without needing years of payments experience,” says Antanas. “We can ask better questions, test ideas, and make decisions with confidence.”
As Airalo expands its vision for effortless global connectivity, Primer gives it a payments operation that can evolve with the business, improving the economics behind every transaction while helping keep checkout simple and reliable for travelers anywhere in the world.
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