Ingo Uytdehaage, Adyen | All-In Summit 2024

Adyen sees Stripe less as its principal enemy than banks and legacy payment processors, where co-CEO Ingo Uytdehaage says most new volume is actually won. Adyen’s single global platform is designed to lower merchants’ payment costs while improving authorization rates, attacking incumbents on both economics and performance.

Adyen is deliberately moving beyond payment processing toward owning more of the financial infrastructure itself. In the U.S. it has direct infrastructure access and a banking license, reducing dependence on commercial banks while positioning the company to provide broader financial products through software platforms.

Adyen has no intention of sacrificing its unusually high profitability simply to become the cheapest processor. Uytdehaage argues that merchants willingly pay premium prices for measurable value and that aggressive price-cutting would destroy economics; the company will instead reinvest selectively when credible growth opportunities appear.

The U.S. has become more than one-third of Adyen’s revenue after the company learned that serving America remotely from Amsterdam was insufficient. It now employs more than 800 people there, and Uytdehaage says traction improved materially once product and engineering teams were placed close to U.S. customers.

Adyen seriously considered a U.S. listing in 2018 but concluded Europe could deliver equal or better economics. Roughly 60–65% of its investors at listing were American, while scarcity as a major European technology stock helped Adyen command a premium rather than the valuation penalty management had feared.

Entering India required roughly six years of infrastructure and regulatory work rather than a conventional market launch. Adyen rebuilt its data architecture around localization rules, established Indian data centers and obtained licenses, leaving it among very few international providers able to serve both domestic and cross-border needs there.

Adyen already has commercially meaningful AI in production: its U.S. debit-routing system can cut merchant costs by more than 20%. The system dynamically chooses payment rails while balancing authorization performance, has been deployed with customers including eBay and Microsoft, and reflects Adyen’s preference for proven production applications over speculative AI spending.

Adyen sees stablecoins as potentially useful for cross-border payments and reducing dependence on aging systems such as SWIFT, but not as necessary for ordinary domestic payments in developed markets. Uytdehaage said Adyen would more likely integrate with stablecoin providers than issue its own coin.