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Adyen’s platform play
Adyen nailed the enterprise. Now it wants to conquer SMBs.
Jevgenijs Kazanins
April 20, 2025
Hey!
Adyen represents what a Fintech challenger was meant to be: built on a modern tech stack, growing rapidly, and winning market share from the incumbents. It’s the founders’ second act, and after selling their first company, they knew exactly how to build a next-generation payments processor from scratch.
I believe it is fair to say that Adyen has figured out how to win over enterprise clients, and it is only a matter of time before it overtakes the biggest incumbents. However, while enterprise clients represent the majority of payment volume, they represent the minority of revenue for merchant acquirers.
Adyen does not have the organizational capacity to serve small businesses. Instead, they aim to become a partner of choice for “platforms” serving SMBs. Think marketplaces like eBay and Etsy, and POS software providers like Toast and Lightspeed. The bet is that small businesses won’t buy financial services directly; those services will be embedded in the software they rely on to run their business.
If this bet plays out, and Adyen manages to capitalize on this opportunity, it has a long runway ahead! Let’s dive in!
Jevgenijs
p.s. if you have feedback, just reply to this email or ping me on X/Twitter
Adyen $ADYEY ( ▲ 1.73% ) is a next-generation merchant acquirer, but calling it that doesn’t quite do it justice. The company is scaling fast, broadening its product suite, and expanding globally. Adyen is the type of company that the Fintech revolution was supposed to deliver.
Image source: Adyen Investor Day 2023
“We set out building Adyen to someday power every payment. Today, our financial technology is on its way to becoming the infrastructure behind the world’s most seamless transactions – online, in person, and the experiences moving fluidly in-between. From our vantage, the runway ahead remains clear, and we will continue executing against it.”
Adyen means "start again" in Sranan Tongo, a language spoken in the former Dutch colony of Suriname. The founders of Adyen built and sold another payments company before, and Adyen was their attempt to "start again" and build a next-generation payments processor.
Adyen set itself apart by building a single, modern platform that handles the entire payment flow end-to-end. It’s the exact opposite of most incumbent processors, who grow through acquisitions and end up with fragmented, hard-to-integrate platforms. A trivial idea that remains novel today.
Image source: Adyen Capital Markets Day 2020
“Adyen has reimagined fragmented, multi-party ecosystems with a single solution for payments and financial management. Our technology allows customers to focus on their core business while we handle the increasingly complex payment landscape…To achieve this, we built our own platform entirely in-house, informed by the needs of modern enterprises and their customers.”
In their attempt to create a truly end-to-end platform, Adyen also became a bank and got direct access to card and non-card payment rails in the U.S., the UK, and the EU. For instance, Adyen is one of the few Fintech players with access to FedNow. With banking licenses and direct access to payment rails, Adyen has further reduced its reliance on third parties.
Image source: Adyen
“AfP’s competitive advantage begins with our in-built licenses. As one of the few non-traditional banks able to connect directly to FedNow – for which we qualified thanks to our banking license – we need only to rely on our own infrastructure and direct connections, eliminating third-party dependencies.”
Adyen’s approach has been working. Thus, the payment volume processed by the company grew almost 40x over the past 9 years, from $36 billion in 2015 to $1.39 trillion in 2024.
In the last few years, Adyen’s payment volumes have closely mirrored Stripe’s (Stripe processed “over $1 trillion” in 2023 and $1.4 trillion in 2024, according to the company’s annual letters).
“In 2024, we were pleased to surpass the 1 trillion EUR mark of global payments transactions processed, underscoring the scale and depth of insights that enable us to continually expand the intelligence of our platform by orders of magnitude each year.”
Adyen started as an online acquirer, but is quickly diversifying into in-store payments. Thus, in 2024, they processed $252 billion in “card-present” transactions (18% of the total volume). Adyen serves omnichannel merchants through its “Unified Commerce” offering, helping merchants accept payments online and in-store.
“Although the digital revolution is well underway, nearly 80% of payments still take place in person today. Adyen therefore continues to differentiate its product to best power immersive experiences across physical payment touchpoints.”
Adyen is a European (Dutch) company. Europe remains the company’s largest market, but it is rapidly expanding globally, including the United States. As a result, more than 40% of Adyen’s net revenue came from outside Europe in 2024, a figure that would be even higher if not for the continued strong growth in its home market.
“We continue strategically investing to expand our presence in highgrowth markets like the US, as well as nascent regions such as Brazil and India. In 2024, we attained our Online Payment Aggregator license in India, as well as announcing the opening of a technology hub in Bengaluru. These achievements place us in a prime position to accelerate payment innovation in the world’s fastest-growing e-commerce market.”
This growth also translated into stellar financial performance. Thus, the company’s net income increased from $37 million in 2015 to $1 billion in 2024. Since its IPO, Adyen’s stock (+207%) has outperformed both the Nasdaq Composite (+111%) and its peers, Visa (+156%) and Mastercard (+169%).
By the way, the founders of Adyen sold their first company to Worldpay, the exact type of incumbent they now compete with. And here’s the kicker: Worldpay is a patchwork of acquisitions, has changed hands multiple times, was underinvested while owned by FIS… and still processes $2.5 trillion in payments annually.
Image source: Global Payments
Another competitor is JPMorgan Payments, which seems to be the only incumbent that manages to (somewhat) compete with Adyen and Stripe. However, Adyen and Stripe are objectively winning. Thus, in 2015, JPMorgan processed 27 times more volume than Adyen. By 2024, that gap had narrowed to less than 2 times.
I believe it’s fair to say that Adyen has cracked the code on serving enterprise merchants, and it’s likely only a matter of time before it overtakes the incumbents in scale. Adyen will continue growing its share in online payments and will continue tapping into in-store commerce.
However, as UBS (previously Credit Suisse) often points out with their well-known pyramid - enterprise merchants drive the majority of payment volume, but contribute only a minority of revenue for merchant acquirers.
