Adyen: Stock Story

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Tell us about the company…

Beatrice Faleri: You tap your phone, hear that familiar beep, and just like that, your shopping's paid for. Feels easy, right? 

But what's really happening is a whole world of complex tech kicking into gear. In just milliseconds, your payment request has gone through a maze of codes, security checks, and system handshakes.

Dutch entrepreneur Pieter van der Does took one look at this messy, fragmented system and thought, there has to be a better way. His solution? Adyen: a single, unified platform, providing fewer fees, higher approval rates, and happier shoppers.

What makes this stock special?

Adyen is the only full-stack, vertically integrated digital payment company in the world. Think of it as a motorway. While rivals are a patchwork of slip roads and roundabouts, Adyen laid one smooth stretch of tarmac. That technical clarity avoids bumps in the road, like payment authorisation wrongly failing.

The company earns the same flat markup on every transaction, so the only way it makes more money is if its customers sell more products. That alignment is why more than four-fifths of Adyen's growth come from existing customers. 

Its founders still own a double-digit stake and reinvest roughly half of gross profits back into product every year. The result? Since listing in 2018, the company has increased its net revenues by roughly 26 per cent and margins have reached over 50 per cent.

What could the future hold?

Adyen's runway is long. Non-cash payments grow around 10 per cent annually worldwide, yet Adyen captures under 1 per cent of that volume. So even a small uptick in share could translate into outsized revenue gains. 

Its unified commerce, which brings together online and offline payments, is only just taking hold. Global brands like Nike, H&M and Burberry already rely on Adyen. Rolling out that same capability to tens of thousands of mid-sized retailers could multiply revenues without any extra complexity on Adyen’s side.

The explosion of local payment rails from Brazil's PIX, India's UPI, China's Myriad wallets, played directly to a platform that can switch on as many payment methods as merchants need with one line of code. 

Adyen is also layering new services on top of processing, from issuing virtual cards to providing short-term loans and even handling treasury. 

Each extra service deepens its grip and lifts revenue per customer. The mission is to drastically simplify payments, and Agen is only getting started.

Risk factors

This communication was produced and approved in November 2025 and has not been updated subsequently. It represents views held at the time and may not reflect current thinking.

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