Adyen N.V. (ADYEN) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Audien's H1 2026 Earnings Call. My name is Maggie O'Donnell from Investor Relations, and I will be hosting today's call. With me today are Peter, our co-founder and co-CEO, and Hua, our incoming interim CFO. We're going to begin with playing the prepared remarks from Ingo and Hua. Then Peter will say a few words, and finally, we will open it up for Q&A with Peter and Hua. If you'd like to ask a question, please use the raised hand functionality at the bottom of your screen. With that, let's get started.

Hello, everyone. The beginning of 2026 was a strategically important half for our gen. As commerce rapidly evolves, we're enabling more of the world's largest merchants to capture greater value across the entire commerce journey. We grow faster than our market. This consistent outperformance is driven by two engines. First, we're winning new and diverse customers. And second, we're deepening relationships and expanding our share of wallet with existing ones. Both reflect our ability to continuously deliver new value for our customers. Our long-term relationships provide clear visibility into the durability of this growth. Merchants typically expand their share of wallet with Agen from under 20% in years 3 to 7 to more than 40% after year 12. Even after more than a decade, customers like Uber, Microsoft, Spotify, and Google continue to broaden their use of our platform. This sustained expansion gives us ultimate confidence in our resilience and ability to continue outperforming the market. The strong momentum reflected in our H1 performance comes from our unchanged mission, solving complexity for our merchants. And the complexity is only increasing as commerce rapidly evolves. Competition for consumer attention is fiercer than ever. Workflows are shifting rapidly to AI, and legacy infrastructure is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of modern digital commerce. Our long-term strategy is built for exactly this shift, which is why more customers are looking to us as a stronger partner. Our Northstar is to become the single trusted platform for the financial infrastructure on which global commerce runs. We started by building the world's most advanced payments processing stack. Now we're expanding that same engineering-first mindset to solve customer pain points before, at and after the transaction. Our payments engine remains our foundation and it continues to win share but we're no longer just a payments company. We are the complete financial operating system for for modern commerce, from payments to loyalty, bailing, and intelligent money movement. You can see this focus in the high-impact milestones we delivered this half. First, we completed the acquisitions of Talent One and Orb, moving us deeper into our customers technology stack and extending our platform well beyond payments. Talent One brings market-leading promotions and loyalty capabilities into our single platform. Combined with our unique online and in-person transaction data, it allows merchants to finally deliver truly omnichannel loyalty at scale. For years, retailers have struggled to connect digital and physical customer experiences. By bringing loyalty natively into our architecture, merchants can recognize shoppers across channels and deliver personalized incentives in real-time, deepening consumer engagement and making loyalty far more effective than standalone systems ever could. Orb addresses another growing customer challenge. As AI transforms how software is built and consumed, usage-based billing is becoming the default pricing model for many businesses. ORB gives merchants the tools to automate metering, pricing and billing, while our payment infrastructure completes the revenue lifecycle by connecting usage directly to settlement. Together, this gives businesses a single system to launch flexible pricing models globally and at scale. These acquisitions are an important part of our long-term strategy, serving as powerful drivers of our growth. They represent our fundamental long-term belief that, in a complex world, the company that facilitates revenue optimization will deliver the most value. It also reflects how we invest, selectively, with discipline, and where we see clear strategic logic. Second, we introduced AgenAgentic to solve a critical problem for our merchants. How to sell safely and efficiently in the emerging AI agent economy. Without a universal standard, merchants would need to build and maintain dozens of separate integrations just to keep their inventory, pricing, and payments in sync. This creates massive operational cost and risk. Our product suite solves this. It acts as the universal translator that allows merchants to connect ones to our platform and securely accept payments across all major agentic protocols. All while using the same unified fraud detection and compliance rules they trust today. Third, we officially launched Intelligent Money Movement. For large enterprise merchants, complexity doesn't end at the point of payment. It often begins there. We help businesses automate global money movement on a single unified platform. Because this occurs natively on our own technical and banking infrastructure, capital flows dynamically without the frictional delays of traditional banking rails. It allows us to move money completely end-to-end, unlocking unprecedented speed and treasury efficiency so global businesses can simplify their most complex operations. Taken together, these capabilities make Agen a more strategic partner to our customers and strengthen our long-term growth opportunity. The success of this strategy is directly reflected in our financial results this half. We delivered a strong half of 2026, with net revenue up 21% on a constant currency basis, driven by this ongoing platform expansion. Our skill is already immense. We are processing billions of transactions for thousands of global merchants. In the first half alone, we processed 804 billion euro in volume. To reiterate, we are winning in the market because we are building the complete financial operating system for modern commerce. As we look to the second half of 2026 and beyond, we will continue to execute with the same speed, discipline, and engineering-first mindset that has brought us here. And we hold ourselves to the same standard with you, our shareholders. Setting clear commitments and delivering against them, consistently. To speak more to our operational execution and financial performance, I'll now hand things over to our interim CFO, Hua Cao. Hua, over to you.

Hello, everyone. I'm Hua Cao, Adyen's incoming interim CFO. For the past year, I've worked alongside the management board as the SVP of Group Finance, and I'm thrilled to step into this role at such a strategically important time for Adyen. marked by our recent acquisitions of Talon One and Orb, the launch of Intelligent Money Movement and Adiantic, and so much more. My focus is on empowering our incredible team to serve our customers and continuing our history of financial discipline while keeping our dialogue with our investors transparent and constructive. Now let's turn to our financials, beginning with our top line results. Net revenue was 1.3 billion euros in the first half, up 19% year-over-year, or 21% on a constant currency basis, with continued strong growth in line with our communicated guidance. The best way to understand ADN's net revenue growth is through our building blocks. First, expanding share of wallet with existing customers. Second, ramping up previous year cohorts. Third, third, winning new merchants, and fourth, scaling our financial products. We drove roughly two-thirds of our growth by deepening relationships with our existing merchants, specifically those onboarded before 2025. As Ingo highlighted, compounding revenue from established merchant cohorts is a valuable driver of our business. When our merchants expand, we grow with them. In addition, as we help them solve more challenges across products and geographies, we increase our share of their wallet. These levers, combined with volume-based tiered pricing, incentivize our merchants to consolidate more of their business onto our platform as they scale. The remainder of our growth came from the ramp of our 2025 cohort, new customer wins in 2026, and the expansion of our financial products offering. These levers lay the foundation for the future as more recent wins scale and drive our continued growth for years to come. To support this expanding business, we added 249 net new joiners in the first half, bringing our total FDEs to 5,020 at the end of June. Our disciplined and targeted approach to hiring focused primarily on technical and go-to-market roles to drive our product roadmap and commercial momentum. With this focus, we remain well on track for our full-year goal of 550 to 650 net new hires. This measured pace of investment directly supported our strong profitability. EBITDA reached 642 million euros for the first half, up 18% year-over-year for an EBITDA margin of 49%. Excluding one-time transaction costs, EBITDA margin landed at 50%, in line with H1 2025 and our previously communicated expectations. CAPEX was 64 million euros, or 5% of net revenue in the first half. The majority of our CapEx is related to data centers. Our core infrastructure operates on our own private cloud, which creates a commercial advantage and allows us to deliver operational efficiency as we scale. Now, I'd like to say a few words on our approach to capital allocation. We are in a high growth phase, and sustained efficient growth is our single highest priority. Everything we've done and everything we will do demonstrates this commitment. investment. We put our capital to work where it drives the greatest long-term value. In the first half of 2026, our strong balance sheet allowed us to invest in our team to drive innovation, strengthen our platform infrastructure to support global scale, and execute targeted M&A to accelerate our roadmap and reach, as you saw with Talon One and Orb. Looking ahead, we remain fully focused on capturing the massive opportunity in front Moving on to our outlook for the rest of the year, for net revenues, we now expect full-year 2026 net revenue growth of 21% to 23% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This reflects a 1% point contribution from the acquisitions for the full year, or 2% points of contribution in the second half. Our growth outlook for the underlying organic business is unchanged, and we expect the growth rate in the second half to be similar to the first half, excluding the impact of Talon One and ORB. On EBITDA, we expect our underlying 2026 EBITDA margin to remain in line with 2025. Including the two acquisitions, we expect a 1% point dilution, leading full-year EBITDA margin to land approximately one percentage point lower than 2025. We remain on track to achieve our 2028 objective of an EBITDA margin above 55%. Finally, CapEx. Data center infrastructure that supports the growth of our platform accounts for the majority of our CapEx spend. We are proactively pulling investment from 2027 into H2 2026 to secure compute and and storage availability, and lock-in price amid an unprecedented demand environment. As a result, we now expect capex of approximately 7% of net revenue for the full year. Through this active management, we expect capex to return towards historical levels post-2026. In summary, we delivered a strong first half, with 21% constant currency revenue growth and 50% underlying EBITDA margins. We continue to deepen our relationships with our existing merchants like Toast and win new customers like OpenAI while expanding our platform through new product offerings and strategic acquisitions like Talon One and Orb. We enter the second half of 2026 with high confidence in our position and our ability to capture the massive opportunity ahead.

Thanks everybody for joining us today. I want to add a few words to what Ingo and Hua just said. When I started Altien 20 years ago, the mission was simple. Solve real complexity for our merchants. 20 years later, we are still doing exactly that. And we're really good at it. Back then, merchant pain points were mostly around checkout. Today, global enterprises face challenges across their total financial operations. So we evolved. We didn't just build a payment engine. we built a platform that powers modern commerce end-to-end, from customer loyalty to complex money movement. We went beyond payments. Recently, we marked an exciting milestone with two acquisitions. And what's most important is that our identity hasn't changed. We have always evolved with our merchants' needs. We build great technology, eliminate friction, and stay laser-focused on what our merchants need. The positive response from those mergers to this direction, including acquisitions, reinforces that we are the strategic partner they look for for solving their most complex challenges. This is key to our success, and H1 has been another very positive half, and I'm excited for what's to come. Looking forward to answering your questions, and I'll hand it over to you, Maggie.

Thank you, Peter. We're going to move on to Q&A now. As a reminder, if you have a question, please use the raised hand functionality at the bottom of your screen. And when we call on you, please unmute your microphone before asking your question. So our first question comes from Andrew Schmidt at KeyBank. Andrew, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Thank you very much. Thank you for taking the question. Maybe just on the platform evolution, clearly a lot of significant progress for the last six to 12 months towards this new financial operating system model. Maybe talk a little bit about what catalyzed the change. And then we think about further areas of expansion, some examples of place you go, there's clearly a lot of opportunity. And then just one additional one if I could squeeze in. As the platform expands, you have more opportunities to go after new clients and existing client expansion with the new capabilities. Maybe just talk about how the visibility of the business evolves as well. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Andrew. I think, Peter, you can take both of those questions.

All right. If you look at our platform evolution, we started 20 years ago with being very good at processing payments online. And then each so many years, we have added a lot of functionality. So if you look at that journey, which I see as a continuum, it brought us to where we are today. And in that expansion and looking at what our merchants need, you see that AI puts new challenges on them, which is for SaaS platform, metered billing, which is for merchants, how do I really cement my relationship with shoppers? So that brings loyalty top on the agenda. So that are our latest additions to the platform. Intelligence money movement, we've been working on that for longer. So I look at it as a continuum. What is new is that we did through acquisitions, but there's nothing new in the sense that we always evolve with our merchants.

And the second question on visibility into future areas of growth with customers.

As I talk about how we are very close to our merchants, how we partner with our merchants, we are in close contact. Our existing merchants continue to grow with us. New merchants are at the beginning of the journey. So that means that we don't have a roadmap for the next five years. It's that we stay agile and that we will develop everything what they need to take complexity around the payment away from them.

In the near term, I'll also add, just for Talon and Orb, both of those have been extremely well-received by our customer base. And Peter, I know his phone's been ringing off the hook with some of the use cases we talked about, as well as new ones that maybe we didn't even consider while we were going down that path. So there's a lot of opportunity even in the near term with these new capabilities.

Great. Thank you so much for your questions, Andrew. The next question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein. Harshita, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Hi, good morning. Can you maybe talk about your revenue growth targets? I know the organic constant currency number is essentially the same. The second quarter was very strong. Looking into the second half, you have new client wins ramping up. You have benefit from strong 2025 cohorts. So how should we think about the likelihood of you coming in at different points of the range and also any commons in Q3 versus Q4Q. And then, Peter, it's very early days, but as you just closed the Talent One and Orb acquisitions, maybe talk about what you're hearing from customers with respect to demand for loyalty, usage-based billing, and also how is the integration going from a cultural point of view?

Thanks, Arshita. So on the second half, as you said, our first half was a strong one. We landed right in the middle of the guide for the year at 21%. As we stated before, we do expect performance to be similar. We continue to grow with our existing customers and add new wins along the way. And those dynamics we expect to continue as we go forward. The thing I will call out, the only real change, as you mentioned, is for the impact of the acquisitions. and those you will see impacting the second half as we push forward.

The customer demand for those services. So I've been speaking to merchants this week. What's top of mind for them is how do I make sure that in an age of AI I don't see a disintermediation? So loyalty is top of mind for them. I actually happened to also speak to a couple of merchants who were already on Talent One and Adyen and who are really thrilled that now the services will be used together. AI on data is very strong, but the data is very important to have. And now with Orb, with Talent One and with Adyen, the data sets is just more sophisticated, so there's more we can do. And that's what they really appreciate. Orp, if you look at AI native, that is billing. And you see that that opens up a market for us where we can lend very mature companies. If you look at a company like OpenAI working for us, that is just for payments. So that is for payments of their consumers. But together with Orp, that also opens up the avenue to pick up more AI native companies earlier in their journey.

And the point on the integration, of how the integration is going so far.

So I don't underestimate integrations. I've been part of, I've sold the company to WorldPay. It was a very successful integration, but there were also lessons learned. And when we looked at the integration, we bought companies which are culturally aligned and which are in geographies close to our offices. Then still, what I think makes this integration easier is that this is an integration done for growth. So there are exciting integrations also for the companies. It's not about cost-cutting. It's about making those products work together. That's what we're currently doing. We're actually slightly ahead of plan there. And there's a lot of excitement around it.

Thank you for your questions, Harsita. The next question comes from Hannes Leitner from Jefferies. Hannes, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Yes, thanks for letting me on. I got also a couple of questions. maybe the first one is just like a high level you talked about or you dropped a lot of outstanding merchant wins and very fast ramp ups maybe you can talk about like kind of like how is the playing field changing has this revisiting of contracts and expansion of contracts that time shortened and you are clearly now able to scale much more so a philosophical question to you peter And then maybe just like one other thing is I remember very well you mentioned when you launched embedded finance product a couple of years or when you announced it, one of the items was that you will use your balance sheet. It hasn't really come through that you have scaled loans and financing. Yes, we understand that some of that hasn't really hit the, let's say, the threshold that you unleashed the rail guards. Maybe you can talk about that, what data points you expect to see and how does this tie in to wins like the last platform win with the expansion with Toast, for example. Is there the customer to target there in the long term?

Thanks, Hannes. Peter, why don't you take the question on the landscape and then touch on embedded financial products and Joachim can end that question.

I think if you look at the landscape, there's no other company that can do everything that Altian can do. And for large merchants, it's logical to move to us, and I think that that position for us only gets stronger. So that's something what we see and continuously see. If I move on to the question which, for example, you mentioned, Toast, without talking about the services to an individual merchant, I can give some voiceover. What you see there, that is a merchant which has already been working for us for a longer time and is now ramping up and giving us more share of market. That is a pattern that we typically see.

And on embedded financial products in general, how is that going?

Embedded financial products, they add about 1% contribution to this year. It's an important service for us because in the choice for a platform to work with us, they want to know that they can also do those services with us. They don't always take them from the beginning. And the reason why we let's talk about it this time is because there's so much to talk about it. So there's a wealth of information to share.

Okay, great. The next question comes from Adam Frisch at Evercore. Adam, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Okay, thanks and good morning. Two questions for you. How does the pipeline look in terms of new merchant wins coming online and how does that bode for near-term growth rates? And then the second question is, with regard to the cash on your balance sheet, great call out on the shareholder letter that there's a little under 5 billion euro extra merchant liabilities, et cetera. How much of that is needed for reserves for banking licenses and how much is available to deploy in areas like M&A or if you do a buyback and stuff like that?

Peter, do you want to start?

Yeah, if you look at what is happening in our pipeline, Altian is sort of a boring machine. We are constantly signing up new merchants, bringing them to life, getting some share of wallet. And over time, you see that we grow. And that growth process takes on for years and years and years. And that engine is just running like it always was. So there's no deviation from earlier years.

And on the point about the actual cash, the reality is we don't just need it for regulatory reserves. We also have operational buffers. We keep a fair amount of cash on our balance sheet for credit ratings purposes. And ultimately, it also helps us fuel our growth. So it won't give an exact number, but I think the reality is the number that you see on the financials, the available cash or the excess cash is a small fraction of that amount.

I mean, if I'd like, if I can add something to that, the reality is so that it's a fraction of a number that I've seen flying around. And if I look at the business, there is so much room for growth that we have a focus on building that growth. And that's the way how we create value. So I'm way more interested in that. And we need to have some room. And you see that we use that room this year. And we have always been, we've never been dogmatic about that. It just happened to fall this year. But we want to have an open mind in the future and think about what's the best way to grow this business continuously at a high rate.

Great. Thank you for your questions, Adam. The next question comes from Darren Peller from Wolf. Darren, please go ahead and ask your question.

Thanks. Let me just start off one with a macro question. And then I just want to ask a quick margin question. But on the macro side, if you could just discuss what you're seeing in EMEA, year to date, spending patterns, especially amidst the Middle East conflict, and then travel trends as well. And if you can give any color on what you're seeing, you know, even quarter to date through mid-August, that'd be really helpful. And then just on the margin side, maybe just reiterate what gives you the conviction in reaching the 55% plus EBITDA margins by 28. Just what are the key levers to get there? Thanks again, guys.

Peter, do you want to take both of those?

All right. If you see what's happening in spending patterns, for us, we have less detail than you would think because we grow about three times what the market grows. So that means that all our numbers are also a little bit changed because we get more share of wallet. And currently we can absorb in our number the trends. If you look at why would we say 55, it just, that number is, I describe the business. If you grow the top line, then you know that you will get to a higher EBITDA. So that's why we grow to that number. And rather than a target, it's an outcome.

Okay, great. Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. Please go ahead and ask your question.

Thank you. I guess, Peter, maybe you could talk a little bit about the open AI win. Obviously, it's a meaningful win. Some of your competitors have had some success in AI a little bit more than ADIAN. I'm curious what the sales cycle was and what might be the nature of that relationship and then what the pipeline looks like for more in this space. And then secondly, just Hua, if you don't mind expanding a little bit on the CapEx commentary as we look to next year, I know you said it should normalize, but do you anticipate any additional pressure from some of the higher costs or can we even see a CapEx level that's lower next year as a result of this pull forward? Thank you.

All right. I think it's good to point out on the OpenAI relationship that we work with them as an LLM as we do with all the parties. So that is to help our merchants. This is something else. This is to provide payments to them. And I don't talk that much about individual customers. What you see, it's a trend that the largest companies like to partner with Atien. And I think that's a trend that you consistently see and it is there to continue.

Yeah, so to be super clear, it is a Gentic partner and also a customer. There's two parts to this relationship. And then Hua, on CapEx?

Yeah, so on CapEx, what you saw in our increased guidance for this year is a deliberate decision. So we are pulling forward the spend. We're not going to provide an outlook right now for 2027. We'll do that at the beginning of next year. But obviously, we're actively managing this, and we'll take opportunities. What you saw ultimately was we saw the opportunity to secure supply at a good price, and we took it, and you'll see us actively manage CapEx in the future.

To add to that, it's not the first time we're doing that. We did it during COVID as well in 2022, where we thought smart buying is the way to deal with the market dynamics. And also then you saw that after that, CapEx returned to historical levels.

Okay, great. Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from Pavan Daswani from Citi. Pavan, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Thanks, Maggie. Hi, Peter, and welcome. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe firstly on intelligent money movement, could you touch on any learnings from early customer deployments? And stepping back, was the strategic ambition primarily solving a merchant treasury and liquidity problem, or was it expanding Adyen's role beyond payment acceptance and into kind of broader money infrastructure? And then secondly, a higher level one. Historically, Audien has always been seen as a payments company, but with embedded finance, intelligent money movement, and now acquisitions such as Orb and Talent One, you're increasingly moving to multiple layers of the commerce stack. Maybe looking out five years from now, should we still think of Audien primarily as a payments company or a broader commerce infrastructure platform?

Great questions. Thank you. Do you want to actually start with a second question and then go to IMM after?

Let's look philosophically at what Adyen does. What we do is we do the transaction and we do everything around it which is adjacent. We serve the merchant. So that is who we are selling to. And then all the complexity around the payment is for us quite a large area. Because of our banking licenses in multiple geographies, because of how we are regulated, we can take a lot out of their hands. For example, if we see that money will come in, we can already provide that liquidity, but that is something for which you need a banking license. So more philosophically, do you see other services coming up? Yes, everything that is around the transaction, but it will always be close to the transaction. I don't see unrelated services coming into scope very quickly.

And then on IMM, any early learnings from rolling this out with our customers?

There's an enormous need for it, and we have so much data around it that we are very well positioned. So these are further avenues for growth for the future, and we have so many of them that I'm quite excited about the position we're in.

Great. Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from Justin Forsyth from UBS. Justin, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Hey, good afternoon. Peter, welcome back to the hot seat. And, wow, welcome as well. Thanks, Maggie. A couple questions from my end. First, I wanted to hone in a little bit on Orb and the metered billing opportunity. Maybe you can talk about how it helps your go-to-market motion with SaaS platforms and AI companies and how important it is to buy rather than partner billing platforms, as you had done in the past. Further, how important is it to have an established brand and go-to-market, such as Orb, to sell to native AI companies versus billing it from scratch? And Peter, if I'm not mistaken, this is something maybe you've considered doing internally, building a billing function. Why did you decide to not at that point in time? And why yes now to owning it? And then, a financial question for you, maybe asked in a slightly different way, which is, I think we said around the 1Q that 1Q would be the slowest growth of the year. Is that something that we can reconfirm on an organic XFX basis? And I guess that comment is mostly directed at the 3Q, but in general.

I think we might have accidentally muted you, Justin. I'm so sorry, but we can answer the first couple of questions. Do you want to take the one on ORB first, Peter?

How does Orup help us? You see that SaaS platforms become metered billing. And so that's an opportunity for us to help them there. It helps us with native AI companies. You see that there is so much pressure on them that all the resource goes to developing their product. So to combine billing and payments there is quite a logical step. So this opens up a part of the market for us which is less logical to buy elements independently from each other. What we have done when we considered how to go about with billing, don't forget that Adyen, of course, as a billing, we build billing because we bill our own merchants. So that was one avenue we looked at. Are we going to expand our own billing service to something? We were already partnering and we also looked at acquiring. We also considered you could also say let's not build this service. I don't think that that was the best option. And whereas we usually land on building it ourselves, it just happened that this time we felt that it was better to use a resource somewhere else and it was better to deploy our capital here to acquire it, shorter time to market and more focus on our other products. On the other hand, I don't underestimate integrations, but the products fit very, very well together. They're in San Francisco in our office. So there are a lot of things going for it, why we decided to go differently this time.

And Hua, on the quarter?

So Justin, we don't manage the business on a quarter-to-quarter. We've provided a full-year guide. And frankly, the business can be a little bit lumpy. What we said, and I'll reiterate, is that we do expect the second half to be similar to the first half in terms of growth on an underlying basis. and we will see the impact of Talon 1 at ORB as well.

Thanks for your questions, Justin. And you can email us that last question that we cut off. Sorry about that. The next question comes from Raina Kumar from Opco. Raina, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Competitive pricing, like has pricing intensified over the last six months?

Sorry, you were cut off at the beginning. I'm not sure what's going on. If you don't mind repeating that, that would be very helpful.

Could you comment on competitive pricing? Has it intensified over the last six months? Thank you.

Peter, do you want to take that one?

Yeah, happy to take that question. I think that we have seen competition all over all the time, sometimes a bit more in one region than the other. But if you look at our data, you don't see it back in our data. Our existing merchants give us more and more volume and therefore come to lower tiers. and it's the only explanation behind the take rate development. So it's for us basically business as usual.

Okay, great. Thank you for your question. The next question comes from Fahid Konmar from Redburn or Rothschild Co. Fahid, please go ahead and ask your question.

Cheers, Maggie. Cheers, Maggie, and thanks for taking the question both. My question was actually about just following up the last question on EMEA and the U.S. digital net revenue growth. I mean, if I look at EMEA, the net revenue growth has slowed down. We were doing 26 a year and a bit ago, and now we're doing 15, I think. And obviously, in the U.S., we've had very, very strong growth. How much of, just to get a sense of what's happening there, is it the same merchants maybe shifting some volume from Europe to the U.S.? Is digital net revenues, or is the U.S. revenues growing because you're winning share there and perhaps losing some share of wallet in Europe? Is there something else that we don't understand? Also, thinking about that EMEA kind of growth trend, where do you think that stabilizes? So any update on that would be great.

So I'll try to take the first question. In terms of the regional mix, I think you did identify something, which is the fact that we work with global merchants. Some of them are based in EMEA, and they do shift, and they sell into other markets. Similarly, U.S. markets, U.S.-based merchants will sell into other markets. And that's true for, frankly, all of our global merchants because we manage our customers more on a customer basis as opposed to a territory-wide basis. I do think U.S. strength also does reflect the fact that we have been investing in the U.S. specifically. You saw that over the last few years, and so those investments are coming to bear fruit today. As far as EMEA, we see it, we don't really look at it from a stabilization perspective because it is a huge growth opportunity for us. We've been performing very well. And as I said, we work with Europe-based merchants and we sell around the world.

Great. The next question comes from Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo. Jason, please go ahead and ask your question.

Thank you, guys. Yes, I wanted to go deeper into some of the wallet share gains. I feel like that was a big theme in the shareholder letter, and it's the single biggest building block, obviously, in your medium-term guidance. So I'm wondering if these share gains have been increasingly concentrated in a certain region, or are they more balanced across geographies, and are there any pockets of the business where you actually think that your share gains are accelerating, maybe due to dynamic identification or other drivers? And then just my follow-up is on Audion, Agentic, and just what his merchant receptiveness looked like so far and any material amount of revenue yet. Thanks.

Aud, you want to take that first one? Give me a second.

So on the wallet share gains, I think the reality is that we have a very diversified base of customers. We mentioned that the top 300 make up 60% of revenue, and we're seeing wallet share gains across all of them. So I wouldn't point to any specific region because we see strength. Obviously, some are more mature than others, but over time, we do have broad-based growth, and we expect that to continue. And then, Peter, on the add-in agentic.

So, on the agentic, we launched a number of things to help merchants to publish on the LLMs, which is in a way similar to payment methods. We've always been very good to connecting the merchants to multiple payment methods and taking complexity out. Now we have the possibility to help merchants with publishing on multiple agentic protocols and take the complexity out. And then after the transaction, bring it back into their environment so that all their existing functionality works. We went live with a number of merchants, as you saw in the shareholder letter. I'll point out Cezanne, a predominantly online French fashion brand that was very early with us doing that. then there's a lot of talk about machine to machine we're also heavily investing in that but don't forget that we serve as large merchants and they also need a little bit guidance of us from what's there what's real and what we provide now so therefore in the latter we provide what we what we do now but we're also ready for what will be happening a little bit later down the road All right, great.

Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Sandeep from JP Morgan. Sandeep, please go ahead and ask your question.

Yeah, hi. Thanks for letting me on. My first question is regarding your two acquisitions, Talon1 and Orb. Historically, when Adyen releases new products, you have three to five customers that you trial the product with for quite a long time, after which you roll it out to the entire customer base. Is this the sort of strategy that you're adopting with these acquisitions regarding your existing customer base where you will try to cross sell those products into? Or is there some different kind of strategy being adopted here? And associated with that, do you have some lead customers who are going to be using that? Secondly, my second question is regarding some of your older new products, such as issuing, where we are on issuing at this point, and how that is contributing to your revenue at this point. Thank you.

Peter, do you want to take the first one on go-to-market for the acquisitions? And then, Juan, maybe you can comment on financial products.

So, when we announced the acquisition, there were more questions coming out of the woodworks than we anticipated. that why that is because merchants are actively thinking about what is my strategy in in when I be faced with more agentic and it's top of mind for them how do I make sure that I have the whole infrastructure in place to get as much traffic as I can directly so how do I pull my merchant in we've been speaking about merchants doing both online and in store they've been using their resource somewhere else then connecting that and the insights it's all about the data having all the data together of loyalty of payments of billing and on that you can develop such such strong products that that's what excites our merchants i've been speaking to merchants which wanted to get it and didn't have it but also the last two merchants that i spoke to happen to be merchants, which we're already using both Talent One and Adyen. So we don't need to be tiptoeing around. This is a proven combination that works. But what we're doing is we're deepening the integration to make it more powerful. It's a growth acquisition. It's not an acquisition for cost cutting in those companies.

And Hwa, on the issuing and financial products contribution?

Yeah, what I can say about issuing is we continue to see strong traction there. We're not going to break out specifics. But financial products, as we stated, we continue to expect it to add about a point of growth this year. And it remains really important for all of our customer segments.

Perfect. Thank you so much. The next question comes from Brian Bergen at TD Cowan. Brian, please go ahead and ask your question.

Hi, thank you. My first question is on customer penetration. So appreciate the disclosure on the customer share wallet as far as merchants often increasing from less than 20% in years three to seven to more than 40 after 12 years. Can you frame where the kind of current customer base sits along that maturity curve, as far as the rough mix of processing volume that comes from customers that have already reached the 40% plus share versus those that are in the earlier phases of penetration? And then my follow-up question is on AI investment and usage. So understanding the increased capex for data infra here is being pulled forward. But from an OPEX standpoint, can you comment on how AI is impacting your cost structure and just speak to how AI usage may be contributing to your 55% plus EBITDA margin target by 2028?

Why don't we start on that second question, if you don't mind.

Peter, do you want to take that one? um yeah the the the operational uh cost the opex one it is because we were uh we saw an opportunity to to lock in um to lock in cost and supply um but it's not related to that our data uses is suddenly different or our storage uses is suddenly different than it used to be in the past it's the same same typical compute and storage that we have which grows with the business but as it grows with the business remember we are on private cloud so we have our own data centers at least we are in co-locations but we are very happy with that choice it's extremely efficient more efficient than than what our competitors run on and we see that that it resonates with merchants there are merchants who prefer to be on a company which is independent A little, yeah, just a little more color on OPEX specifically.

It is baked, like we are investing in AI tools, I think that might be another angle to the question. And so that is baked into our overall guidance that we've already put forward. I think on the customer penetration point, I guess I'll start and then Peter, you can jump in. We have a really diversified base of customers. We have many merchants who have been with us for a long time, and we continue to add new cohorts along the way. So we are seeing concentration decline overall, and we do see significant room for expansion across the customer base with existing customers and new customers.

Perfect. Thank you for your questions. The next question comes from Fred Boulan at Bank of America. Fred, please go ahead and ask your question.

Hey, thanks a lot for taking the question. Sorry, one second. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. So two, please, for two follow-ups. One is on the prior question on opportunities ahead. Where do you see the most exciting opportunities and how do you define areas where you can remove complexity for your merchants, as you discussed earlier? And then second, if you can come back on your capital allocation framework, as you stated, you have over a four billion net cash available post-M&A, but only a fraction is really available. On a multi-year view, absent significant M&A, could we see cash returns featuring in the mix? Or it's a bit early to think about that.

Peter, why don't you take both of those?

So what I'm excited about is we have large merchants and we have a sophisticated account management team, which has deep relationship with those merchants to get a credit card number to visa that is not the most challenging thing you could do in the payments industry it's everything around it so what i'm really excited about is that we have the relationships with those merchants which we develop over time that we could that they share with us what is needed and that we can use that as a basis to further develop our strategy that's also what you see what we have done this year with our acquisitions. So that is what gives me the assurance that we're in a really good position. Capital allocation, let me give you the philosophical answer because I think that's what you are asking. Currently, because it's a fraction of the number which has been flying around, it's just not so material and I think the company should focus on growth and only growth. but in theory if this company would be a company that accumulates a lot of cash then of course we we should not be dogmatic about anything and then it could be on the agenda but now consistent growth as we have delivered like the last three half year reports always 21 percent that's the sort of boring numbers which which we should bring forward great thank you the next question comes from Andrew Bach from BMO.

Andrew, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Hey, thanks for taking the question. I just want to take a step back and ask about the competitive landscape and what kind of differentiates today relative to recent history. Now, historically, authorization rates and ease of integration were the common talking points, but when you speak to merchants and prospective clients today, what are the primary aspects of the offering that would compel a decision to use Adyen or somebody else? And with that lens, And should we expect more regular tuck-ins like we've seen so far this year to address any potential competitive gaps?

Do you want to take both of those, Peter?

Yeah, I wish for the first one there was the golden bullet. It's different per mergers. For platforms, it can be mass onboarding and doing mass compliance, being able to onboard millions of sellers. Or it can be the fact that we do both online and have terminals. It can be our geographical spread. It can be moving away from legacy to single providers, so just making things simpler. So it's really the breadth of our service that makes us win. Of course, auth rates is something which I think was really the card that we played in around 2011, and it will always be important. but we moved a little bit beyond that in the industry and now other things are top of mind. Currently, what's top of mind this for merchants is how are you going to help us through the agentic threat for them?

And in terms of M&A, should they expect more acquisitions going forward? And is M&A how we beat the competition?

No, because we have constantly developed new products. So if you just hear me talking about the trends, most of those products, think financial service, intelligent, money movement, all those things we developed in-house. It's just that we always have, for the core, we are always looking at building it ourselves. And for adjacent, we always have looked internally and externally, what is strategic to build yourself and what can you acquire? And it just happened that it never happened and that we always landed on internal. And now, coincidentally, it happened twice in age one, but there is in the future, we still have an open mind to doing it. And it could be that we land internal and it could be differently, but we don't have a plan there to be an acquisition machine from now on.

Okay, great. The next question comes from Ramzi Alassal from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Ramzi, please go ahead and ask your question. hi thank you very much um some of your competitors very broadly defined have built out branded consumer checkout wallets i guess for a smoother checkout experience i'm thinking of like a stripe link or a shop pay i know your long-term orientation has been to focus more relentlessly on the on the merchant stack but could a consumer dimension to your strategy kind of emerge at some point thank you yeah that's a great question currently we are focusing pure on the merchant and are not doing that and it's appreciated by our merchants because if you look which part of the market we operate it's typically the large merchants which consider their shoppers, their domain

and for example in the past if you look at why we won eBay it's because eBay wanted to work with a partner that is only on the merchant side and that is not signing up each consumer or seller also themselves. So you have different choices in this market, and that is great. This choice works well for us.

Great. Thank you for your question. The next question comes from Hus Gala from MCH. Please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Hi, Peter. Hi, Hua. Thank you for taking my questions. Following up on the wallet share ramp curve, I was curious, could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing those ramps look like across the pillars, maybe deltas across those. And then as we think about Talon 1 and Orb, how should we think about potentially that changing the wallet share ramps as you pulled in those acquisitions? Lastly, just tying it all together, I mean, the revenue model is shifting more and more towards the pre and post-auth over time. It'll become a greater portion of the value offer, right? But as we think of, for instance, the pre-authorization transaction, is this going to be more comprised of a platform subscription fee, a rev share on incremental conversion? Just help us think about that.

While you want to take that first one, Peter, the second one?

Yeah. So share of wallet ramp tends to be similar actually across pillars, but platforms are typically, they do take a little bit longer to ramp just given their own go-to-market motions. and the fact that, as Peter mentioned, sometimes they have many, many sub-merchants as we go forward.

Great. Peter?

On the second one, we look at adding value for merchants and we price for that. And we are... So that means that, look, we have large deals and those deals have sophisticated pricing and that can be priced over different elements. And that's what we do.

All right. The next question comes from Craig Moorer from FD Partners. Craig, please go ahead and ask your question.

Yeah, thank you. I wanted to return to the OpenAI discussion for a moment. I just think it's important to understand whether you won their usage-based billing versus just their plain vanilla credit card payments. So whether you won their enterprise business or more their general subscription business. so we understand if this is still an opportunity to go after with orb and secondly platforms platform take rate was somewhat weaker than we had been expecting so any context there would be helpful thanks peter do you want to take that first one and while the second one on open ai it's it's their payment so it's the payments which their clients pay to them and no forward looking statements on that yeah and on the platform take rates i think that the way to

think about it is platforms tend to be larger customers and as we mentioned um our customers work on um that we gain share of wall with them we grow with them and we incentivize them to bring even more volume to our platform through volume uh through the the tiered pricing model so that's it's a natural result of platform scaling with us great thank you we have time for one last question.

And it's going to be with Nushin from Deutsche Bank. Nushin, please go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.

Hi, thanks for squeezing me in. I just have also a follow-up on OpenAI. And I appreciate you can discuss customer specifics. But when you are thinking about the bigger opportunities ahead and how you can expand your partnership and thinking about Orb, I'm just wondering, do you believe, you know, the platform is already capable of supporting businesses operating at OpenAI as a scale? Or is there still meaningful investment required before it can address the most demanding enterprise use cases? So I'm specifically asking about Orb and if it needs more investment in there. And when it comes to Adyen, Agentech, is this also a part of OpenAI relationship or what you're thinking about in the future?

So what I think is that if the largest companies are very sophisticated in who they partner with and that they partner for payments with us, it's a trend that we have seen over the years and which is continuing. And that's how I also look at that relationship. The reason to work with Orb is that we can onboard AI native companies. so that is that is that is separate from that what you see is that the ai native companies grow very fast and that billing sits in their infrastructure so where we take that you'll see that in the future did i answer all questions just a little bit on agentic are we working on agentic yes no you have to look at agentic as in as comparable to payment methods that we can route the transaction to the different payment methods that's needed this is with agentic companies if you have something on stock you want to be able to publish it on agentic and then you want to be able to publish it on multiple agentic protocols and you can you could theoretically as a merchant connect to all those different protocols because remember there's no standardization so you could you could implement to all those different protocols or you could work with one supplier Adyen and then also to get the transaction back to you, you would have to implement all of that or you could again work with Adyen and that's what we do with Gentic. What is important for us and philosophically we want merchant choice and we want to be agnostic and that's what we do now and that's also what you see back when we talk about later, we'll talk about machine to machine. You'll see the same elements always coming back because that's philosophically close to us.

Great. With that, we are out of time. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Have a great day.