Adyen N.V./ADR (ADYYF) September 2026 Conference Transcript

Great. Good morning, everyone.

I got promoted. Thank you for joining us.

We are delighted to have Adyen join us again at the conference. Representing the company is Hua Cao, interim CFO. Hua, thanks for joining us today. That's great. I think I promoted. Yeah, there's a bit of a typo there. Maybe to kick off, could we please start with an overview of your current state of your business? I know you recently reported a few weeks ago the first half results.

What are the key highlights in your view? Sure. So I think a couple things that I would point to. One is operationally. So we had a strong first half. We grew 21% on a constant currency basis right in the middle of our guidance range. That growth was driven mainly by expansion with existing customers as well as the ramping of our recent cohorts and landing new customers. as well as early momentum in financial products, which added about a point of that growth as well. I think overall what we saw was broad-based strength across regions, across pillars, and so we feel very good about what happened in the first half. It's actually the third quarter or the third half in a row that we grew 21%. It actually demonstrated a lot of the consistency that we see in the business itself. And then strategically, in addition to the performance, we launched several new innovations. So we launched Adyen Agentic, which will help us and help our merchants as this new world kind of comes to bear. Also very early days, but we think being in the middle of that and helping customers solve those sorts of complexity is a really important thing. And we also launched Intelligent Money Movement, which is more geared towards enterprise customers, where we help them manage essentially, like, liquidity and treasury at scale on a cross-border basis. And then, as everybody knows, we announced our first two acquisitions, so Talon.1 and Orb. Talon One in the loyalty space, which we believe will help us to really accelerate the combination of in-store and online payments and solving problems for merchants in that space. So really kind of unified commerce, that sort of value proposition. We're really excited about it. I actually just spent a few days in Berlin with the team, getting to know them a little bit better as well. And then Orb, as you'll know, it's really a consumption billing platform, which we think also is a really exciting space for us as we solve merchant problems. And we also, it opens up new opportunities for us as AI natives and also software companies are all moving towards this consumption-based approach. So all told, a really consequential half for Adyen, and we're really excited about the future.

That's great. So how should we think about the cadence of the growth now into the second half? I know you kind of reiterated your guidance. We've got M&A coming into the revenue build. And so how should you think about second half and into 2027? And what are kind of all the different moving parts as we kind of phase the growth?

So in, I guess it's September now, so in August, we actually adjusted our guide. So we went from 20% to 22% constant currency growth to 21% to 23%. That one point was basically the contribution of Talon One and ORB on top of the underlying business itself. So that's really the change because initially when we announced the deals, we expected them to close actually a little bit later. And the fact that we were able to close them on July 1st meant that we get a full half year of their contribution. So that's that extra point. And so for the second half, that means we'll actually get two points of growth. That said, the underlying business itself, we expected to perform pretty much in line with the first half, so about 21%. We did about 21% consecrancy growth in the first half, and we expected something similar to play out in the second half.

Got it. So maybe just now sort of taking a step back on the building blocks of your growth. You highlighted earlier that expanding wallet share is kind of really the biggest component outside of the market growth. of your growth algorithm. Can we talk about the land and expand opportunity in a bit more detail? But then also, obviously, you've been ramping new customers as well and launching new products. So how should we think of that sort of framework?

So the biggest part of our growth, about two-thirds of our growth, is driven by customers that have been on our platform for more than two years. So that comes with, they tend to be growing businesses. and the market overall, if you look at it, is kind of like a high single-digit grower. And then we expand share with them. So that can mean a bunch of different things. It can mean adding new products. It can mean expanding into new geographies. Those are the primary examples. And so when you put those two pieces together, that drives the majority of our growth. As our customers get bigger, what happens, which we've talked about in the past, is we essentially have tiered pricing models. So the biggest customers essentially get discounts. That's how we incentivize them to keep more business with us on our platform. And so the overall growth from a volume perspective gets slightly offset from a pricing perspective and the revenue. But overall, we feel very good about it. We continue to grow with our biggest customers and also to grow kind of the earlier cohorts. We have many customers who have been with us for almost the life of the company. The second piece, we talk about the ramping of the more recent cohorts. So last year, I think we mentioned that we had our biggest new customer cohort ever in 2025. And those customers tend to essentially double or triple very quickly in the first year or two that they're on our platform. And so that drives another several points of growth for us. It's the next biggest chunk. and you can still think about them as existing customers but just newer customers. And then the brand-new customers, which we land in 2026, their contribution tends to be pretty small because they're ramping, they take some time to onboard and then grow. So we'll probably get about a point of growth from the brand-new customers that we land in 2026. And then financial products, as I mentioned, we expect to get about a point of growth from there as well.

Go ahead. And it seems like there's still a significant amount of headroom when we think of, you know, across your three pillars in terms of maybe walk us through. I know platforms is still a relatively new opportunity, but even the two other biggest pieces of the business have a fair degree of headroom.

I think the way we think about it is the market itself, as we said, it's growing, you know, high single digits. We are, our share is probably less than that, right? We're probably about 5%, 6% share. And the biggest players in the market are maybe 12%, 13%. So there's actually a ton of room for us to grow across the business. And we tend to work with really complicated, complex, multinational companies, whether they're going from one market to another or managing their in-store and their online. And so those sorts of business are continuing to see momentum, them and we grow with them so that that's how we think about the headroom if we go to pillars try to break it down so digital that tends to be the the biggest online players we we saw actually we're seeing a lot of strength with um traditional kind of media companies as well as subscription one area to call out which is interesting i don't know if people have seen there are these companies that shoot out you know like five minute dramas and like serialize them those are like little pockets, and they come from India and Japan, that's an example of pockets that just kind of blow up, and we help them scale around the world. In UC or Unified Commerce, that's really where we take the digital kind of online world and the in-store world and try to blend them together. And so we've had a ton of success in food and beverage and hospitality as well as high-end luxury goods. And part of the reason why we actually purchased Talent One is because we feel like that will actually accelerate that opportunity even more as you unlock really the bridge between those two experiences and, like, really help our merchants understand their customers better and ultimately drive their behavior as we move forward. And then platforms, as you mentioned, it's the smallest piece of the business today, but it is growing very fast, and we expect it to grow to drive a lot of our growth. Platforms is really our way of addressing, call it the SMB space. So we don't have giant sales forces running around trying to talk to mom and pop shops. We work through the platform businesses to really acquire those customers. And then what we do is we really simplify the business for them. They don't have to worry about all the complexity, the regulatory issues, et cetera, in order to drive whatever their customer needs. And platforms also, one thing just to flag is, for us, part of the reason why we have introduced financial products is because platforms and their customers need a variety of services. And financial products, we think and we see, gives us an inroad into the platforms. Whether the platforms adopt the financial products or start offering those right away or not, they love the idea that we have this kind of one-stop shop for them as we go forward.

We'll come back to the pillars in a second. But just touching on the geos, I saw North America was particularly strong in the first half. You know, there's been discussions about price competition in the market, but even Europe was pretty steady growing kind of in the mid-teams. So can you touch a bit about what's driving that strength in North America in particular and what you're seeing in Europe?

Yeah, I think so North America specifically, I think many of you who've followed us for a little while, we have made a lot of investments in North America. It's the biggest market in the world, and we treat it accordingly from an importance perspective. What we see in North America and what you see in the result is actually a few things. One is, obviously, our large customer base within North America selling into North America. You also see major multinationals, whether it's from Europe or Asia, selling into North America. And our solutions work for all of those customers. And so that's really what you're seeing. and many existing customers growing. And if you – I don't think we really show this, but if you look at the overlay of the opportunity, like UC is a big piece of it. And then platforms are also a big piece of our North America success as we go forward, plus digital. So it's strong, broad-based performance, and we're going to continue to invest in that space from a go-to-market and a product perspective. So that's North America. I think the question about competition in general, I'll talk about it a little bit from North America's perspective, as well as Europe specifically, is we've always seen competition. There's always new players coming into the market. We tend to be taking share from incumbents in general, and then we compete with some of the newer players that you all are quite aware of. What I can say is, in general, we win more than our fair share, as you see us outgrowing the market. The point about pricing pressure is there's always pricing components, but really what we see more is the impact of this tiered pricing, these volume discounts, more than really having to fight on a price basis. Like we have made a concerted decision to not engage in price wars. So in the past, certain folks have gone kind of rock bottom. And what we found is even when we've actually maybe some customers go try that, they oftentimes come back to us because whatever that solution was was just a very point solution around one particular problem. And the fact that we can offer a really unified offering and solution for all sorts of complexity makes us a compelling choice for those customers.

Got it, got it. So maybe coming back to products and some of the innovation, you've launched a bunch of products like Intelligent Payment Routing, you mentioned, Uplift a few years ago, and then you talked about at Adina Gentic, maybe can you talk through the tech roadmap, maybe some of these newer products like Adina Gentic, and, you know, what are the kind of conversations around what kind of things that pain points you're solving for customers?

Yeah, so our technology roadmap and the way we approach things is all driven by the customer problem. We spend a ton of time with our customers. We have a really strong account management team that knows the ins and outs from a technical perspective We understand what their challenges are. And so we see kind of where they, like what challenges they're facing. And at the same time, because we see such a breadth of situations, they often ask us, okay, what do you think about certain things? And so all of our innovation is meant to solve problems. So all of those examples. So Adyen Agentic is, you know, for a period of time, it was like the biggest thing. Everyone was trying to figure out what it even means. And I think even today, those protocols, those definitions are being defined. So what we're doing there is we're playing with them and we're working with our merchants to figure out what's the best solution for them. I think the big principle that we see from that perspective is that merchants don't want to be disintermediated from their customer. Like if you have an agent that's running through and literally just doing the shopping for you and not picking, that is the thing that merchants really care about, right? Because they want to own that relationship. And so what we're trying to do is create solutions that help them maintain that relationship while also enabling these new purchasing flows. So it's a really exciting space, but it's also very early days, right? The volumes flowing through Argentic are pretty tiny today, and we don't expect them to be enormous for a while. But it's important for us to be front and center with our customers. I think Talon One is actually a really good example, too, where we had developed and provided lots of information to our customers from the in-store into the blend of the online. But that was a challenge that was – it hadn't fully been cracked. And so what we saw with Talon One and Loyalty was this engine that can help us bridge those things together and really solve this – solve a conundrum for our customers, which is like, how do they really understand the full customer journey as opposed to just online or just in-store, which is what it tends to be. And so we are developing, you know, obviously, Telling One has a great product on its own. We have strong payments and other offerings. But when we bring those together, we feel like that will actually be an unlock for quite a few merchants who are struggling in this space or trying to figure out where to go there. And then billing also is a thing where our customers customers, obviously, they need billing. What we see is the world is moving towards not just a billing world, but a consumption-based world. And so adding capabilities to our toolkit to help solve customer problems, that's another example. And then money movement as well. We can solve bits of, like, last-mile challenges for our customers, and those are the sorts of things that we try to invest in.

So on the recent results, you announced OpenAI as a customer for whom you are processing subscriptions. Maybe tell us a little bit more about this announcement.

Yeah, I mean, we generally don't go tons into individual customers, but we think OpenAI, one, obviously, is a very exciting customer for us. We are processing payments for them. And I think the best way to think about them is they are an example of a customer or an enterprise that has reached a certain level of scale and complexity, which really is kind of the sweet spot for Adyen as we move forward. Like, if you have a very simple application, we're maybe not the best thing for you. But if you're going across borders, if you're dealing with bunches of different payment methods and workflows, Adyen is an amazing solution for that.

Got it. So maybe just going back to some of the pillars, I mean, you know, digital is often seen as a commoditized business, price competition in pockets. it's, how does ADN differentiate in digital? I know that you talked about this point of complexity and, you know, whether it's, you know, authorization rates, whether it's payment methods, whether it's geographical scale. How do you differentiate and kind of keep growing in that segment? Because I know you're more of a premium provider.

Yeah, it really is this helping them handle complexity. It's really understanding their problems. In a lot of ways, the idea is when you work with ADN, then it should work for you. And when we work with, an example is we work, for example, like India is a really big priority for us. We work with many non-Indian merchants trying to get into the India space. Because we've invested and we've spent the time there and we understand they're global businesses, we can match that with our local knowledge. Those are the sorts of examples, just being so customer-focused and customer-first as we move forward. And the ability to really have best-in-class performance remains really important. But what we think about is, like, we solve today's problems, but we also work with them towards the future. And what Peter – I've spent a lot of time with Peter recently, obviously. And I think the way he articulates it is that you're not just buying the service that you get today from us. You get the future, and you get a subscription to the innovation in the payment space, and you get a partner who you can count on to deal with these problems so you can focus on the things that you want to focus on. And I think that's a really important thing across all of our customer bases, whether it's an open AI or someone else who, you know, their priority, like, yes, they need payments. They need to process, you know, they need to collect their money and those sorts of things. But they want to dedicate their resources towards their core businesses. And they're oftentimes willing to pay a slight premium for us to handle all the rest for them.

Got it. So maybe moving on to unified commerce, which, you know, I think is one of your biggest, single biggest differentiators. is now a sizable part of the revenue mix and growing pretty consistently in the kind of high 20s. You've talked a lot about moving into kind of adjacent new vertical. Historically, it was luxury and maybe apparel, but now you're going into everyday purchasing as well. Can you talk a bit about how big that opportunity is because you have a lot of legacy players serving the POS market, But you're trying to still bring something a bit different, which is not just a traditional point of sale. So maybe let's talk a bit about the opportunities.

Yeah, I think, so to your point, like we started off with a really powerful offering in luxury where folks just wanted things to work, right, but also bridging the in-store and the online. The everyday retail opportunity, food and beverage, hospitality, all those opportunities are enormous, and they're very untapped for us. And then there's other areas, if you think, that are very simple applications, which historically have not been probably our sweet spot, right? If you just are literally like a local grocery store and you don't really have to worry about bridging online, those sorts of things, that was an area that we haven't focused on so much. But we do believe that, one, we are really one of the only players that can bring you online and in-store. And then on top of it, the talent one offering with loyalty, we think will be a big differentiator where it's not just the payment, but it's actually the ability, again, to drive promotion and understand your customer and ultimately, over the longer term, drive purchasing decisions. So it's almost like optimizing revenue, not just handling the transaction itself. all of those things we think are we know are valuable to our merchants because we hear about it as I said we we do things to answer their their challenges that they articulate to us and so we think that that that will be really important and I think one one kind of anecdote that that's worth noting is the the inbound kind of inquiries from our customer base existing especially is is kind of off the charts like we are getting calls from all sorts of people trying to understand what it means for them, how they can use it around the world. So not just like in the U.S. or Europe, where Talent One has a bigger base, but kind of everywhere.

Got it. So maybe touching back on platforms, I know you touched on it earlier, but it's sort of still at a fairly embryonic stage. Yeah. The number of customers who are doing a billion or more is steadily increasing. I think we're now up to like 37 customers versus 32. how should we think of sizing this opportunity? And I think I wanted to touch also on some customer announcements that's been out there. So I think you announced you're expanding with Toast in North America. I think it was already an existing international customer. Shopify in Europe, you're also now kind of going country by country. So how should we think of that sort of pathway of growth within platforms, first with just the core financial payment processes? but then there seems to be other upsell opportunities as well.

So we think the opportunity is enormous. As we said, our business has generally historically been focused on the enterprise, and this is our channel to reach basically everyone else. And so if you think about what that means, if you look at the variety of our platform customers, it's kind of every sort of end use case, right? So Toast obviously is a great example of Shopify. There are things like beauty services, food chains. There's all sorts. And to us, that kind of means like the potential is not limitless, but it's pretty enormous. And we are, as you said, just scratching the surface as we move forward. I think the one way to think about it from a trajectory perspective is it's a more complicated deployment sometimes, right? Because you're dealing with not just onboarding one large enterprise customer. You're dealing with onboarding all of their thousands, tens of thousands of end merchants along the way. And so what that means is the ramp time is a little bit longer for platforms. And so it's important for us to solve the problems for them today, to your point about payments. But also we have a number of platforms that are using the full suite of the embedded financial products. And we have others that are just kind of picking and choosing today. We think that financial products over time should be a very material part of the business, also very nascent, and platforms will be a big part of that. So, again, it kind of goes back to, excuse me, this idea that we are one of, if not the only, one of the very few players that can actually deliver this solution that serves not just kind of the platform customer, but also all of their end customers. And it's a pretty complicated flow, if you think about it, from a compliance AML perspective. And us having the licenses and all those things are true differentiators with our customers because then they don't have to worry about it.

Yeah. Maybe just on that financial suite of products, could you walk us through the capabilities on the suite that you have?

Yeah. The biggest pieces are around issuing and capital, as well as FX services. So issuing is essentially cards. If you want to issue cards, kind of payment cards. So an example would be if you were a platform that services beauty salons, right, and your end customer or your sub-merchant needs to hand out corporate cards for themselves. We can do that. Another example is like Navon. Navon is a large customer of ours, and if anybody uses Navon, they produce these virtual cards, and we provide that for them, which, again, simplifies things for the platform itself and allows their end customers to do what they need to do. like when I book travel I use the Navon virtual card then capital is essentially small business lending we are essentially allowing the sub merchant to access capital that we provide and we enable for our customer base so that again if that same merchant wants to expand their shop or buy more inventory, we provide that service. And then FX is, as multinationals deal with FX all the time, we obviously deal with FX a lot. And so that's a product that is helpful for not just platforms, but also for enterprise customers. As you move onto the IMM side of things, intelligent money movement, really what we're providing is liquidity, visibility, and then FX services so that customers can sometimes get access to capital a little bit earlier or at least know where their capital is coming from or where the cash is flowing, and then they can be more proactive rather than waiting around. It's a lot about visibility and access.

So maybe just turning to some of the bottom line, you obviously have been growing the team, continue to kind of grow the team. How should we think of the kind of the pace of investments going forward? I know you had a heavy investment phase a few years back. I think, is this now kind of the right normalized trajectory? And obviously there's people, but is there anything outside of people that we should be thinking about?

Yeah, I'll try to answer it in a few ways. So directly on the people front, we feel good about adding about 550 to 650 people. We picked up hiring actually in the second quarter, and the pace feels about right. Those hires are mainly almost all, but there's a few others, but really around commercial, making sure we have people who can service our customers, can sell the product, and then technology. So really investing not necessarily just in more engineers, but specialized skill sets to solve the problems that our customers have as we move forward. So that sort of investment will continue, and, you know, for the rest of the year, we feel okay about where that's going to land. If you think taking it a click out, we are also investing in tools and capabilities internally. We don't have the crazy, you know, AI spend that you've heard about in other places, but we are actively investing in tools and productivity tools and those sorts of things in the business itself. And then obviously, like, from an inorganic perspective, the Orb and Talent One acquisitions were pretty large. And those, if this is your question, Mo, it's more, those were focused, again, on solving customer problems. So we kind of think about it as a continuum. All of it is, like, how do we service the customer better? How do we solve the merchant challenge? And that's really what drives our thinking about it. I think if you think on an organic or inorganic basis, that's going to be the driver. Payments is our core. And then one thing we've explicitly said is that we would never buy a payments company because that complexity we feel is not worth it, the added complexity, when we can solve that. We feel like we can win customers with our platform. But if there are adjacent services like billing, like loyalty, or other things that add to the customer experience, that's the thing we will always look at. And we always actually have looked at it. Like, I've only been at the company for a year, but even predating me, there were always conversations. But they had never chosen to actually acquire something. It just so happens that at this point, earlier this year, we made a slightly different decision. We think about it in the continuum of investing for the customer and to grow the business.

And on those acquisitions, Adyen has gone from having never done an acquisition in its history to have done a couple in a quick succession. Can you maybe touch briefly on the kind of integration plan, but also when do you expect to kind of unlock the synergies?

So as we said, we do expect a contribution right away, right? These are going concern businesses, but they're also in investment phase. They're both companies that we purchased not necessarily to, like, unlock efficiency, right? It's really to unlock growth and capture a new market opportunity. And so we expect a contribution basically right away. And that's what you saw, actually, when we adjusted the guidance, for example. I think for the future, we continue to expect those businesses to grow at pace and to be meaningful contributors to our growth algorithm as we go forward. Obviously, the most important thing, then, is to make sure that they have the resources in order to continue their momentum and then also that we're able to build these joint value propositions that really unlock the power of 1 plus 1 equals 3, right? That's what we're working on today. I think from an integration perspective, I think we're happy. Obviously, we just closed about, what is it, like two months ago. But what we're seeing is a couple of things. One, as I mentioned, from a go-to-market perspective, customers are really engaged, and they're very curious, and they want to know what is going to happen and what our value prop will be. So we are actively talking to folks. We have pilots discussions going on today. And then the really powerful thing, actually, that makes me feel good about the integration itself is as we've, you know, as we've unlocked and kind of become one company instead of three, what we see is actually this real hunger to be part of the same thing. And the power of the ad-yen go-to-market engine with kind of the ingenuity, I guess, or the new thinking and the new product thinking from Telen1 and Orb, the exposure to different customer bases, all of these things make us very, very confident that these things will be successful. Obviously, it takes time to build things out. But some examples are actually Orr moved into our office. Like they had an expiring lease. So rather than try to find something new, we actually just moved them in. So now their engineering teams are working side by side with ours in San Francisco today. And they're really, you know, even that infusion of like new perspective has been really powerful. And then on the go-to-market side, we have teams working hand in hand trying to figure out how do we unlock the current solutions and then also develop these new ones as we go forward. So everything is, I think, we feel good about where everything stands, and we'll see more in the future.

Cool. Maybe final question. Anthropic announced kind of, I think, in the last few days that they're looking to kind of move into payments. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think so the way I read that is it's interesting, but it's also not a shock. Actually, almost all, I won't say all, many, many large enterprises have payments teams. They still work with us. They still work with many other PSPs. So I think it makes sense for them. We'll have to understand a little bit more about what's going on. But at the end of the day, a company like Anthropic or like an OpenAI or a Microsoft or Google, they have large payments teams to understand how to optimize what's going on. But what we provide is something that they don't necessarily want to worry about, which is the regulatory structure, the bank licenses, the data, the payment rails, all those sorts of things. And so I think it's actually pretty interesting, but it's also kind of something that just happens in the industry. Got it. Maybe we have a few seconds left.

Thoughts on capital allocation? Cash is building nicely.

Yeah, I think so. So what we've said, the way we think about capital allocation ultimately is like, how do we drive growth ultimately? And how do we how do we sustain a high rate of growth? How do we invest in growth for the future? So we'll we always start with organic. If there are opportunities for inorganic, we think about them. And then when we think about the cash itself, there's obviously a big headline number. The majority of that money is actually our customers' cash. It's literally cash that happens to be sitting on our balance sheet at the end of a given reporting period. And then the remainder of cash, there's cash that we need to hold in order to support the customer operations as we go forward. and then the rest is what you might deem potentially excess cash, that's a much smaller number. And, again, the way we think about deploying that is against these sorts of growth opportunities today.

Well, I thank you for the insights. Thanks, everyone, for joining us.