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Notes from Shift4 Investor Day
Jevgenijs Kazanins
April 06, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Hey!
One of my main takeaways from Shift4 Investor Day is that the company has outgrown the restaurants and hospitality segments. Over the years, they experimented with serving customers from other segments, which culminated with the launch of the Shift4 “Unified Commerce” product.
“Unified Commerce” is a platform for serving global omnichannel merchants. Online acquiring, in-person acquiring, U.S., Europe, Latin America, you name it - “Unified Commerce” can help. The name “Unified Commerce” and the product slogan “One Platform. One Integration” should ring a bell to anyone who is familiar with the European merchant acquirer Adyen.
It is not fair to continue comparing Shift4 to Toast; Shift4 is going into head-to-head competition with Adyen and Stripe. The launch of “Unified Commerce” made this rivalry official. What’s puzzling, though, is that Shift4 used to be valued lower than Toast (based on earnings multiples) because Toast generates a large portion of its revenue from software, while Shift4 was seen primarily as a pure payments company.
But now, the market assigns Shift4 $FOUR ( ▼ 0.78% ) a lower multiple than Adyen $ADYEN ( 0.0% ) , another payments company, even though both are delivering similar growth. So what’s wrong this time? Let’s dive in!
Jevgenijs
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One of my main takeaways from Shift4 Investor Day, which took place in February, was that it is probably not fair anymore to compare Shift4 to Toast. Yes, they are still competitors, but Shift4 has outgrown restaurants and now serves many industries. Restaurants now contribute less than a third of the company’s payment volume.
Image source: Shift4 Investor Day 2025
“…at first glance, it may just appear we're doing a lot more volume in the categories that we already had. But when you unpack unified commerce, you can appreciate all the verticals that we now serve that we previously didn't at the time of our IPO.”
Over time, Shift4 began serving an increasing number of clients that didn’t fall into either the “Restaurants” or “Hospitality” categories. There were retailers, gaming companies, airlines, non-profits, etc. During the investor day, Shift4 announced the launch of Unified Commerce, the company’s new offering for global omnichannel merchants.
Image source: Shift4 Investor Day 2025
“Unified commerce. If it's a vague and nondescript name, that's kind of by design, it's because of a single integration for these customers' needs to allow them to sell everywhere in the world, physical, card-present, e-commerce, et cetera. It's every element of the commerce experience with a single integration, and we're basically enabling these customers all over the world.”
The name “Unified commerce” and the slogan “One platform. One integration” certainly ring a bell for anyone who’s heard of the European payments processor Adyen. Shift4 didn’t hide that they now consider themselves to be direct competitors of Adyen and Stripe. The product’s introduction video featured Shift4’s logo along Adyen and Stripe (see below).
Image source: Shift4 Investor Day 2025
