Dabble picks a winner by partnering with Primer

In the hours before Without A Fight crossed the finish line at the Melbourne Cup in November 2023, the Dabble team had more to think about than the race itself.

It was the biggest day in the company's short history. Bets were flooding in and their platform was handling a record number of active customers in real time. 

Anthony Cugnetto, Dabble's Head of Core Product, and the team weren't watching the horses, they were watching the numbers, holding their breath that Primer, the payments infrastructure they'd recently implemented, would hold up under the pressure.

It held up. In the run-up to the race, Primer handled the spike in volume, helping Dabble deliver a 96% authorization rate.

"This was a big moment in our history," says Cugnetto. "A frictionless experience for our customers is everything. If customers face issues while topping up their accounts, they might easily revert to the legacy players. That's the nature of the business. The fact we had no issues cemented our position as one of the top bookmakers in the country. And Primer played a major role in that achievement."

Three years on, Dabble has grown from a scrappy challenger into one of Australia's top bookmakers, expanded into the United States and the United Kingdom, and built a user base of over 3.4 million active users.

And that anxiety felt during peak moments? It's gone. Not because the stakes are any lower, but because Dabble now has a payments infrastructure it knows will perform under pressure. 

Building a payments foundation fit for growth

When Dabble first came to Primer, its goal was straightforward: to take control of its payments and be able to scale without burdening the engineering team and creating bottlenecks for the business.

“Primer offered the perfect solution,” says Anthony. “With a single integration, it gives us total control over how we manage our payments end-to-end. And without calling on developer resources, we can adapt and scale our payments as fast as the business demands."

And at Dabble, that flexibility and being able to self-serve is crucial.

Anthony sits in the product team, not a dedicated payments function. Dabble doesn't have a large payments operation,  it has a small group of people within its customer support team who handle the day-to-day operational side of payments, alongside Cugnetto managing integrations, processor relationships, and optimization from the product side.

"To be able to self-serve and complete projects like adding new payment methods without needing to bother our engineering team, who are focusing on our core product, is a huge advantage of using Primer," he says. "Without Primer we couldn’t move as fast as we do. Jobs that might have sat for weeks in an engineering queue can now be done in minutes directly in Primer.” 

That speed has been just as critical when expanding into new markets. Since Australia, Dabble has launched in the United States and the United Kingdom.

With Primer, expanding into a new market means duplicating and tweaking existing workflows while ensuring the right processor support is in place and switched on. 

“It makes what could be a quite significant undertaking almost routine,” he says.

Unlocking every percentage point

The speed and flexibility that Primer has provided Dabble has proven crucial, not just for keeping pace with business growth, but for giving it the ability to continuously tweak how it processes payments and meet its performance goals.

That 10% improvement hasn’t come from one decision or change. Instead, it came from constant experimentation and testing, observing, and refining how it manages payments market-by-market.

The ability to easily adapt routing logic has been key to that improvement. With multiple processors connected through Primer, Dabble can dynamically move volume to wherever it performs best. 

But Anthony and the team can only make the right decisions based on the visibility that Primer provides. "With Primer, nothing gets missed. We can see exactly what's happening across every processor, payment method, and market," he says. 

That visibility has allowed Anthony to catch issues that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. In one instance, he explains how he spotted a spike in declines on a prepaid card BIN. It turned out this was due to a card range that had changed on the issuer side and was now being incorrectly blocked. 

And the ability to act on those insights quickly is where Primer's Workflows come into their own. "It's incredibly intuitive to create and adjust workflows in Primer," he says. "They give us complete flexibility around how we execute our plans.” 

This is also something that Anthony is looking towards Primer’s AI Companion to support with. "With payments, there's so much data," he says. "To constantly be scouring it, that's tailor-made for AI. If I could review the last 30 days of declines and get clear recommendations off the back of it, that makes life so much easier.” 

Applying the right tool in the right market at the right time 

In addition to its routing strategies, Dabble is using a range of other tools provided by Primer that have contributed to that overall authorization increase. 

As Dabble has grown into new markets, one challenge has become increasingly complex: authentication. 

Every market has different expectations, different issuer behaviour, and different regulatory requirements. A single approach to 3D Secure (3DS) wouldn't just be suboptimal,  it would actively hurt performance in some markets and leave Dabble exposed in others.

Primer gave Dabble the flexibility to build a different strategy for each.

“In the US, most issuers don't support 3DS, so we don't use it,” explains Anthony. “In Australia, adoption is growing but customers don't expect it on every transaction, so we’ve built rules in Primer that apply it selectively, based on BIN, amount, or other signals that suggest it's warranted.”

In the United Kingdom, where Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is effectively mandated for card transactions, Dabble pushes almost everything through 3DS and leans heavily on exemptions to keep the experience as smooth as possible.

Network tokenization is another tool Dabble has adopted. 

In a similar vein to 3DS, Primer allows Anthony to approach the rollout strategically, increasing volume gradually rather than switching everything on at once, observing the impact at each stage before committing further. 

"Network tokens aren't the guaranteed plus-x% approval rate they're sometimes made out to be. There are cases where they haven't performed better. So being able to configure volume and observe impacts before committing, that's really helped us."

Dabble is also using Primer Fallbacks to automatically retry certain failed payments through another processor. It was already seeing good results, but since working with Primer to refine what decline types trigger a fallback, that number has grown. Dabble now recovers 23% of all payments retried using Fallbacks. 

"This is a meaningful amount of revenue we're recovering with little to no effort," he says.

‍A partnership that's grown with the business

“Primer, the platform, has evolved considerably over three years,” says Anthony. “So has Primer, the partner.”

When Dabble first came on board, he explains there was limited customer success presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Time zone differences made communication slow. Things that needed to move quickly sometimes didn't. 

"The earlier days were a bit trickier, especially when we're trying to get things moving," he recalls. “But that’s changed. We now have a customer success manager based out of Singapore, and the difference it's made to the relationship is tangible.” 

The conversations have evolved too and are now less about onboarding and setup, and more about what's coming next in payments and how Dabble can stay ahead of it. 

"Primer gives us a broad view,  not just of the platform itself, but of payments in general and new technologies coming in," he says. “That expertise is sometimes as valuable as the technology itself.”

Preparing for the next innings

Three years in, Dabble is playing a different game to the one it started. And the next inning is about more of the same, done better.

“In payments, there are always improvements to be made,” he says. “And in Primer, we have a partner that will enable us to keep improving and ensure payments are driving the business forward.”

If you want to hear more from Anthony, read the latest edition of Payments Pioneers.

Ready to make payments a growth lever? Get in touch.