Day two of our TMT conference. I think we had about 200 investors yesterday. Very good to see you. We're very pleased to start today with Adyen, Ethan Tandowsky, CFO, Maggie O'Donnell, setting investor relations. So pleasure to have you. Thank you very much for being here. We're going to start usual fireside format. I'm going to start with a couple of questions, and then we'll open up for Q&A. Feel free to step in with questions. I know you guys are a long-term company, long-term ambition, building for the future. However, I'm going to start with one short-term question so we can get it out of the way. End of last year, February, you guided for 2025 to see revenue growth slightly accelerate, I think, versus 2024 levels. We started a bit below that in the first quarter. There are some specific elements in there, but if you can explain to us a little bit how you see the rest of the year progressing in these specific elements, macro, e-com volume, etc., you want to call that.
Yeah, sure. Maybe before I get to a bit on the macro setup, I'll share a bit on the long term. You gave me a nice lead-in. When we think about our growth profile, or how we grow in any given year, our growth comes from a few buckets. The biggest is how we expand share of wallet with our existing customers. That's doing a higher proportion of their volumes this year than we did in the year before. That's the biggest part of our growth. The second biggest part of our growth is how our customers grow themselves. You can think about it as their organic growth, which is what we call our market volume growth. The third part, which is also really important, albeit it's the smallest part in any current year, is onboarding new customers.
These are really important because we basically employ a land and expand model. We add more customers and then grow them in future years. While that is the smallest part of our growth in any current year, it is a really important base to build growth on in future years. If you have seen where we have come over the last year or so, we have seen that the acceleration in our growth has come from expanding share of wallet gains with our existing customer, and that is what we expect to continue through this year. What we also expected, when we talked about it, is that our market volume growth, so the growth of our customers, would be at similar levels as last year. During the Q1 update, we shared that, of course, the macroeconomic environment is a bit more uncertain. We have a very diversified customer base.
We see customers across many, many markets, geographies around the world, and across many, many verticals. Of course, in any macroeconomic situation, whether it's positive or negative, you see different impacts in different parts of the customer base. That's what we continue to see as well. For instance, over the recent weeks, you see online retailers impacted by the ending of the de minimis exemption or higher tariffs start to have some impact on their market volume growth.
At the same time, we're quite diversified in our customer base, and where we can really focus on, where the execution exists, is in adding those new customers and, in the short term, expanding the share of wallet with our existing base, which we're very much focused on, where we see good traction with, where as customers may shift strategies, we can help them because we're set up very globally. We have a global single platform, and that's what we continue to focus on. I think a continuation of the work that we've been doing recent times.
Great. If we look at the different segments, I mean, platform, it's kind of the, I mean, you started a while ago with eBay, but we started to see a very strong acceleration of large customers you're taking on. Can you explain a little bit what's the differentiation between some of the more established players there with the ability to kind of win some, actually some platform that have been serviced by payment providers for years? How do you kind of win those guys?
Yeah, so I think you make a good point. We started with online marketplaces. That's how we got into this, what we call platform space. The difference between an online marketplace and a classic digital customer we would serve is that they also have a seller on the other side who needs to be KYC, who needs to be paid out. You mentioned eBay, GoFundMe. These were the type of marketplaces that got us into the space. What we've seen over recent years is that a lot of, especially vertical SaaS businesses, have looked to add revenue streams and increase stickiness with their customers. They want to embed payments first and then broader financial services. What that means is that you move from just a classic online setup to often a very unified commerce setup.
Think about restaurants or spas or salons or health fitness gyms. They all have a unified commerce component to it, or what we would call unified commerce component. They're often global, and there's a lot of complexity in onboarding, paying out to their customers around the world. I think that's been the key to our success in platforms is that they can leverage the strength of our platform as a large enterprise, bringing lots of volume. At the same time, we give them all the benefits of the unified commerce piece of the global reach, and we have the licenses and technology to bring them financial products over time, which is for most of these platforms on their roadmap, even if they haven't yet rolled out the financial products component of it.
What we've seen is that by Q1, we were up to 30 platforms processing over EUR 1 billion annually, up from the high teens the year before. We are really seeing traction in the number of customers we are able to on. This kind of trend of embedding payments by these vertical SaaS businesses continues to be really important for them. You saw it most in the U.S., North America at first. That has come a lot to Europe over recent years. It continues to be a really important part of the growth of so many of these players and where we think we can continue to win. If I would summarize, I think the differentiation comes from the fact that we serve them like an enterprise. We provide them all the unified commerce capabilities that an enterprise unified commerce company would look for.
We have the global reach. Really importantly, we have the licenses, especially the banking licenses in Europe, U.K., and U.S., to actually provide the financial products they will look for over time, and we can be a future-proof solution for them.
If you look at the embedded finance offering, is it something that you have a pretty broad offering, but is it already something that really starts to resonate? Do you see a lot of demand, or it's only, I mean, you need to see the platform implementing that, and that's why it's kind of taking time to start to get relevant?
It's for sure resonating. I would say almost every sales pitch with a new platform customer has an important discussion about financial products. By financial products, I mean things like capital. That's what we call short-term lending to their customers or bank accounts or issuing. These are all products that they plan for the future. As part of that pitch, they do not want to sign up with a partner that cannot take them into the next five years, let's say. It is a really important discussion today. What's interesting is that typically you are working with the same team to embed payments as you work to embed the broader financial products. You need to go in order. It is not that you run them kind of like next to each other because there are different teams working on it at the customer side. They are sequential.
I think the basis we're building on the payment side as it's growing 60% or so at the moment will give us that kind of distribution channel to get these financial products out. For many of our customers, I mean, it's not just a discussion. It's also even that they've contracted it. We've negotiated pricing. We know the path. It just takes a bit of time because it happens sequentially given the rollout of payments is usually done by the same team as the financial product side.
I think more broadly, can you maybe spend a moment on the competitive environment? There used to be some kind of pressure, especially in the U.S.. We still see some strong growth from Stripe checkout, some of the modern platforms. How would you characterize the competitive environment right now?
I would say broadly, it's a very competitive environment, and it always has been. There are so many players. It's a very, very fragmented market. I think multiple newer age companies will gain market share at the same time, given that fragmentation. The vast, vast majority of the volumes to win come from still the legacy players, the banks. That's where the biggest part of the volume is still today. I wouldn't say that the competitive environment has really shifted. You see different competitors in different pockets of your customer base. If it's digital, then you see some of the newer age players. If it's unified commerce, still, it's primarily with the banks where that volume is. On the platforms, there's much fewer competitors.
I think Stripe, for instance, is one that we see a lot on the platform side, less so on the pure enterprise digital side or unified commerce side. I think that continues to be in the position that it's always been. Some compete on cost. We continue to deliver on a value proposition, and that will remain our strategy.
If you look at the portfolio, I mean, what's an area where you see the biggest opportunity? I mean, digital, you've been there. That's kind of the core. It's still there quite nicely. Unified commerce is picking up. Online, I mean, online you've been there for a long time, but in-store is still, especially on the surface. What's the biggest opportunity you think?
Yeah, there's a few ways to cut it. You could do it geographically. You could do it by customer type. Maybe a few areas I'd highlight. One, I think we're still, you can count our market share on one hand in the U.S. That continues to be a really big focus for us. We think we can win there across all three of our pillars. It's not just a digital play, for instance, but we also see unified commerce gaining traction there. We see that platforms is probably furthest along, at least the idea of embedding payments and financial services by these platforms is probably furthest along in the U.S. I think across the pillars, we feel confident that the U.S. will remain an important market for us. I think the complexity is rising in that market, whether that's payment methods, customer experience, that unified commerce combination.
I think that remains a really important market for us. If you take it out a bit more like medium to long term, I think there are some really important markets in Asia, which we will also be, which we are actively going after. If you think about Japan and India, those are two markets where we're really just getting started. And we think over, I don't know, a handful of years, you get to some pretty sizable growth there. If I take it at a different angle, which is more through the pillar lens, indeed, you mentioned digital is the core. It's still the majority of our business today. We still think that there's plenty of room for us to grow in the years ahead in digital. Indeed, on the unified commerce side, I think 20% or so of our payments are in person today.
In the payment space, that's 80%-85%. There is almost an inverse correlation today to our current volumes, and there is a long runway there. Not only in the verticals we are seeing, but we see more and more that businesses with an in-person component are prioritizing the customer experience, and they see payments as a core part of how they prioritize that. It is often an important part of any digital transformation they go through. That means they are more likely to look for a differentiated partner like us. I already talked about platforms, but platforms, we had no exposure to the SMB market. You see that at least our expectation is that around three quarters of the SMB market ends up getting payments through a platform.
As that trend kind of plays out over the coming years, we think we're going to be a fundamental part of that. That is an important piece too.
Right. I mean, the other thing which I find very interesting is if you look at Europe, it's a really cool business, but it's still the fastest growing region. If we look at the geographical perspective, U.S., which you said you were kind of at the beginning, you've talked about Japan, I mean, you want Amazon there, India as being interesting markets. I mean, how do you rank the kind of opportunities outside of the kind of two core regions?
How do I look at Europe or how outside?
No, no, like outside of that, I mean, which kind of other markets you think are big long-term opportunities for you guys?
Outside of Europe and U.S.?
Yeah.
I think the two that we continue to see traction in or continue to have a focus on Latin America. I think Mexico and Brazil are interesting, but the biggest opportunities we see longer term, if you talk about now APAC or LATAM, we think are Japan and India. It's not only the size of those markets, right? They're big. Japan is third biggest market by GDP today. India will likely be third biggest in a few years. It's not just that they're big markets by themselves, right? China is the second biggest market. We don't have a domestic solution, although we do help Chinese customers sell internationally. It's also that we think we can have a differentiated solution in those markets, right? Take Japan. Japan is, in many ways, the payments infrastructure in Japan is still very far behind other parts of the world.
For instance, I always like this example, but still, if you send a chargeback, so if the shopper says that there's a fraudulent transaction, there needs to be an interaction between the issuing bank, so the one that issued them their card, and the acquirer, basically the one in our position. That messaging is done by fax today still. Yeah. There is a lot that needs to be optimized and improved from a technology perspective in Japan. I think there's, like, if you—I went there last year—if you go to a desk at a retailer, you see a list of payment methods, which is like 35 payment method options you have. There are so many ways to pay. There is still a huge use of cash in Japan.
There's a lot of modernization that we think we can help to bring to that market. Of course, given the scale of it and given the opportunity, we think it's an important one. That's probably more medium term or closer in realizing growth than India. India is probably a longer-term play. What we've done in India is we've gotten licenses, which is the biggest hurdle, and we've localized our data. Those are two requirements in India. You have to keep data of Indian customers, payments of Indian customers in that market. We've made the infrastructure investments there over the last years. We've got the licenses. Now it's really about building out the products to deliver value for our customers. We're going to start with international.
While we are already offering a unified commerce setup in Japan, we start just with digital in India to make sure that we stay focused. We'll help our international customers who have a big focus on India to succeed there. Of course, there's a lot happening in that market. You see UPI, so the central bank payment, a lot of relevance. The consumer base has come into the digital payments world over the last years, and we think we can help to drive value in that market with our, especially starting with our international base, and then see how that plays out with the domestic players over time. I would say those are the two markets that I would highlight.
Maybe one last one that maybe I'll just spend a minute on is I think Mexico is also very interesting because Mexico is also going through a digital kind of transformation in some ways. You've always had a local switch there. It's called PROSA. The big card networks are coming in. Visa and Mastercard are coming in as well. Now we have basically routing possibilities across both those local capabilities and the more international players. That helps us win important deals. I mean, for instance, we won Alsea, which is the franchisee of all Starbucks in Mexico, for instance. I think there's a lot happening also in that market that's interesting for us.
Okay, right. Maybe a word on innovation. So one of the ways you managed to historically with a premium pricing position when you entered the U.S. was to have a number of innovation or differentiation versus existing players, tokenization. Now you've introduced a number of innovation to really stay ahead of the game. But I guess everybody's kind of constantly chasing. Where do you see the kind of biggest differentiation from an innovation perspective? If I look at some of your competitors, they have a slightly broader reach of services, closer to software. I mean, I know you have like fraud and you have a lot of other services around co-payment, but where do you see the kind of innovation differentiation versus your competitors?
Yeah. Maybe let me make a few generic comments, and then I'll get into the details per pillar because I think the differentiation looks a bit different in each of our customer segments. I would say generically, what's important is our pace of innovation because there will always be others who will build what you've built over time. You need to stay ahead. We've always focused on, okay, can we keep up this pace of innovation? That's been a big focus of ours. One of the most important decisions that we've taken over the years is to keep a single global tech stack to drive that pace. That means if we build something new, we roll it out to all of our customers around the world. We don't need to build it on our in-person platform in the U.S. and then our e-commerce platform in Europe.
It is all we can roll it out in one way. I think that's the most important piece because that means we can keep the pace of innovation high and we can continue to deliver for our customers. The second thing is that we have many of the biggest customers in the world. There are also many of the most innovative players in the world. Therefore, they also help us understand the problems they are trying to solve, and we can come up with solutions. We try to stay very, very close to our customer base to understand the direction they're headed so that we also have a good idea of what types of things we want to build. Those are two important things. What I'm really excited about, and this is especially in the digital space, but this has broader relevance, is Agile Uplift.
It's recent. There are two parts of Uplift which are relevant. One is that you mentioned our fraud tooling. There are many components of a transaction. I think for a long time, we just talked about auth rates. So the percentage of transactions which are approved, but it's beyond that, right? Auth rates are important, but so are fraud levels. So is the cost of payments, right? In some markets, take the U.S., for instance, we are 5-10% of the cost. Most of the cost is sitting elsewhere in the chain. It's important. When do you authenticate? When do you send a biometric request to the shopper? When do you make them validate by text message or email? That we call full funnel conversion. We had previously kind of built up our infrastructure, our databases, that those pieces, they worked independently.
One thing that we've now done is we've made them work holistically together, that they make basically a joint decision on what's the best optimization for that specific transaction. Especially around the fraud side, we've also moved from leveraging only merchant-specific data to also platform-wide. We did about EUR 1.3 trillion in volumes last year. We basically benefit from all of that volume in making that decision. That's one piece. That's important in driving the conversion components and staying differentiated there. What's also really important in Uplift is that there's also an actual physical component to it. Physical, I don't know, but a customer experience component to it. That's what we call our customer area, basically the web portal on which you interact with Agile. We also now have a portal where you can see our recommendations.
We say, "Your business, based on your geographies, based on your verticals, based on your customer types of customers, we think we recommend, I don't know, three or four adjustments to your payment setup. Maybe it's send us a bit more data. We think that will drive down payments costs. Maybe that's add this local payment method. We think that will improve authorization and lower payments costs, for instance. Maybe it's turn on U.S. debit." Right? There is a range of recommendations that are in there. We give an expectation of what the outcome will be. We say, "We think that would raise auth rates by 30 basis points, let's say, and drop payments costs by 2%." We give an expectation, and then we let them test very easily. We can let them set the parameters.
Maybe they want to set 10% of their traffic on that optimization, and they want to leave 90% in the control. They can see in that user interface exactly the results of the testing on their live traffic. That means they do not need to just believe us. They can actually test it for themselves. They can see the outcome, and over time, they can ramp that up. While that is interesting for all of the innovation we bring today, what is also interesting is that it is a framework which anything that we roll out in the future, we can also bring through that framework, that recommendation engine, and we can automate almost that product adoption, go to market component, help our account managers deliver that value for our customers.
I think that in a generic sense will help us not only build the innovation because it's important to build it, but also get it into the hands of customers, help them understand the impact of it, and allow them to test and kind of bring it live. That I'm quite excited about. That has big impacts on our whole customer base, but I think especially in the digital side, that's probably most relevant. In terms of differentiation, again, I still think our global reach is quite differentiated on the digital side. That full funnel performance I mentioned at the start of the Uplift conversation. On unified commerce, it's multiple things, but we share three KPIs. We talk about number of customers who process multi-regions, multi-channels, so in store and online. It's the number of terminals that we transact.
If you look at any one of our customers in the unified commerce space, so really on the enterprise direct side, there is usually a combination of at least two of those things, not even three, right? Let's say you are a domestic U.S., so you do not have the multi-regional components, but you do have a large number of terminals and you have a unified commerce need, so you have an online and in-store component, then we are a nice fit. Let's say you are just a pure in-person retailer, but you are very global in nature, high number of terminals, then we are also a good fit, right? I think those are the dimensions in which we typically see our sweet spot. The reason that we are differentiated there is because we can combine the data across those regions, across contracts, the whole operational component across the regions, across the channels.
We can give them insights into their customer behavior, help them with marketing and loyalty. Of course, we have that global reach and we have that one integration, which helps. The last one is platforms. I think I went through the differentiation there, but that's, again, all the things I mentioned on the unified commerce side and on the digital side exist also in the platform space, but then you add the licensing onto it, which allow us to kind of bring all these products to market in a kind of end-to-end way. I think that's where we're differentiated. Maybe the last piece on the software components, the reason that we were very focused on payments is because we were working with enterprise. As you've seen, we've gone into platforms into much more like the SMB market indirectly.
That customer group needs more services than the enterprise. If you're working with a Google or a Nike or a Meta, they don't need capital. They have that sorted. That's a solved problem for them. For SMBs, it's not. That is one of the ways that we can help our platforms build stickiness, increase revenues. We can, of course, play an important role in that. I think as we've seen ourselves go into more of the SMB segment, it means that our product gets a bit wider. I expect that will continue, I expect.
Yeah. Thank you. Maybe a couple of financial questions. On the margin side, big step up last year, you had a bit of a pause from a hiring perspective after doubling the headcount between 2021 and 2023. What is the outlook going forward? Anything we should be aware of in terms of scaling up investments, type of roles you are hiring? When we look at what that means from an operating leverage perspective, I mean, what is the kind of perspective there?
Yeah. I think right now we're in this phase where we want to continue to invest in the team because, again, the opportunity for us, we see as a multi-year opportunity to grow at a faster rate than the market, to continue to gain market share in the areas that we're focused on. To do that, we want to continue to make strategic investments. At the same time, we have quite a lot of operating leverage in the model itself because when you add more volumes with customers, typically don't add much more cost. We want both of those things to be true, that we are making that operating leverage visible, but at the same time, still investing a large part of that growth back into the team so that we are building for the future as well.
We've been hiring mostly in tech roles and in commercial roles. Probably the least scalable component of that hiring is in account management because as we add more customers, we add more account managers. It's often a part of our differentiation that's less talked about. You saw I didn't even bring it up in the differentiation conversation, but it is an important we really get enterprise. We service them as an enterprise business that comes with high-touch account management model. That grows in line basically with the number of customers we grow. The other parts are more scalable, right? Sales is more scalable. They're continuously working on new deals as the next one closes. Technology, that's pretty disconnected from revenues, right?
When you add new people to the team, that typically takes some time for their new products to drive revenues, as we've seen, for instance, with the financial products piece. We are making big investments there. I would say the biggest part is in North America as we've expanded our tech teams out into hubs around the world. We are also investing a lot now in a tech hub in India as well. These are the types of strategic investments we want to make, but we also expect EBITDA margins to expand through these years as that's just a fundamental part of the business model we also want to continue to hold ourselves to and see visible.
Great. I'll ask the last question, and then very happy to take any questions. On the balance sheet, use of cash, you have a very strong balance sheet. There's been questions over the years on what's the strategy around that. If you can share with us a little bit the criteria you use to define what level of cash you need on the balance sheet, what's needed to support your ambitions on the embedded finance side of things. You use your balance sheet to actually do those loans. What's your thinking around that?
Yeah. Maybe let me start with a bit how the products, I expect the products we're rolling out to impact the balance sheet. I think the reason that we got into these additional products, into something like Capital, was not because we wanted to change the risk profile or saw that as an attractive means to drive further growth. It's that we felt we had the licenses and the technology, the customer base to bring differentiated products. I think that's what we'll focus on, right? We'll focus on bringing differentiated technology. We'll focus on leveraging our licenses to offer these products to our customers and make it a seamless experience for them. I don't have the ambition to fundamentally change the risk profile of the company. I think we need to double down on our strengths, and our strengths are, again, technology, compliance, the kind of innovation side.
It gives us a lot of flexibility today to be able to manage this ourselves, to do it completely end-to-end. As we scale it over time, I think it's likely that we'll find other parties who have business models aligned to that type of risk to be part. I would like that that's not touching our customers at all, so that they only work with us, but that we manage it on the back end to make sure that we're very much focused on the innovation technology licensing side and leave the other parts for other parties whose business models are built around that. That's one. I don't expect that to fundamentally change the balance sheet over time is my main point. In terms of use of cash, there's a couple of things.
If you look at it from a regulatory perspective, we have quite some room. We're not right on the lines of our regulatory requirements by any means. We have quite a bit of flexibility. I think the thing that we've looked at is how does that strength of the balance sheet drive growth, and we currently think that that is helping us to drive growth. It does that in a few ways, right? Discussions with regulators are shorter. Discussions with regulators are often held with the management team, the same team that spends time with customers, the same team that spends time with internal teams. If you can keep those interactions and conversations shorter, that means you have more time to build the business. That's one. Also, we have a credit rating which helps us get into financial products. That's two.
If you look at the overall shareholder returns, which is important, the biggest part by far is going to come from growth, right? Even if you look at where our cash position is compared to our market cap, right? We continue to believe that the flexibility that the strength of the balance sheet provides in helping us to drive that growth is the best use of the cash today. Of course, we need to continue to assess that as time goes on.
Thank you. Any questions?
Can I just ask on a follow-up to the question that Fred just asked? Just picking a number, if you did a $2 billion buyback a year, I mean, you obviously generate tons of cash. You have cash on the balance sheet. You're obviously growing. So your EBITDA just grows every year mechanically, 25-30%, whatever percent the number is. How would, in any way, shape or form that affect your ability to do the financial products you want to do or remotely complicate your conversation with rating agencies?
$2 billion would be a huge buyback for us.
Yeah.
That's bigger than our income. I think you're raising a good point because that's the type of scale where it starts to get interesting at this market cap. I think we would have fundamentally different conversations if we were buying back at that scale. I agree to your point that there's probably a level of buybacks we could do which wouldn't materially change the conversations with some parties. On the other hand, with rating agencies, at least our current discussion with S&P is that one of the reasons they gave us an industry-leading credit rating in the payment space was because we had a financial policy which was clear and conservative, and they rewarded that in the rating.
Why the rating is relevant is because we are currently at A-minus, and A-minus is like most treasury policies at the floor as A-minus of banks they would get services from. In our space, that is industry-leading. In the banking space, A-minus is table stakes. It is a completely different framework, a different assessment of risk. I think a sizable buyback would end up the size that would change shareholder returns in some way, would lead to different conversations with regulators, would lead to different conversations with rating agencies, and even with our customers who would have less confidence, I believe, in the trust they have in our business.
Can I ask on the platform side? I don't know. Maybe I didn't hear it right, but you sort of said you're going to do more services. You also said that Stripe plays aggressively there and has not much of a play in the other parts for your business. When you sort of line up versus best in class in platforms, how far off are you? They seem to have more services listening to them, more ambitions to be more broad in the offering quicker, and seem to offer a range of stuff you don't offer. Is that a disadvantage? If you're going to win in platforms against them, do you need to come with new things that we haven't heard about yet over time? How do we think about that?
I think over time, we have a lot of optionality, right? Because we have all the licenses, the tech is built in-house. I would suspect over time we're building out more products. The challenge for us is we need to stay focused. We need to make sure we deliver. If we haven't grown financial products to the size that we get to, I think our risk is getting too lacking focus and trying to do too much at once. We stay really focused on the things that we think drive the most value for our customers. There are some examples I can use, like billing, for example. That's something that we don't offer to our customer base, something that some of our competitors do. You mentioned Stripe that they offer. In some ways, it's a disadvantage because you don't offer that end-to-end solution.
In other ways, there's many partners we have on the billing side. That means if you work with a wide range of billing partners, we can help you because we have an integration. The other reason that you could argue we haven't gotten into billing is because most of our enterprise clients have built it themselves. The reason that it starts to become more interesting that we partner with other companies is because if you start to go to the SMB segment through platforms, then this becomes more interesting. I think it's much more that the customer group themselves has changed and their needs are different. That has meant that we got into a wider set of services. I think our focus is on the things that drive the most value for them.
In the areas where we're not going to focus on building it today, how do we get the right partners in place so that we can offer a strong, cohesive offering, which is truly differentiated in the market?
Can you just give us examples of the key partners that you think you integrate with now and what the gaps are maybe that you want to fill?
You're testing me a bit, but I think on the billing side, it's like Chargebee, Recurly, Zuora. Those are a few of the bigger billing platforms that we partner with. Basically, if you come with a billing solution, we have an integration likely that helps integrate those things already built for you. That can be helpful also as a distribution channel, right? Because if those partners, if their customers ask them for a payments partner, that can be also a way that we get a referral or a distribution into that customer base. I would say today, with large enterprise platforms, there's nothing that we haven't built that's really blocking us. Maybe you could say specific markets. Platform side, we've been very focused on core markets. That's Europe, U.K., Canada, U.S., and Australia.
If you have an offering in some other markets, you may need to work with other partners for those markets. I do not believe that there is a big product today that is blocking us from winning platform deals.
I know you're very pure in the way we build it inside. We build it inside. When you've done an integration with one of these partners and the products work together, what stops you thinking about a bolt-on? Because it's kind of already integrated. What's the difference?
Between if you bought one of those three, so the small companies, I presume I haven't heard of them, but the billing partners example, they're already integrated with the product.
It's an option.
It's an option, of course. I think for these other services, you can always look at whether you would want to bring that in-house and completely own it. On the other hand, when we looked at the space, we said, actually, it's in our favor that we're relatively agnostic on that side. You can bring your billing partner, but that's not a limitation to working with us. In different parts of the model, we think that there's benefits to being agnostic, and there's benefits to bringing it in-house. So far for billing, we found that it's more useful for us to stay agnostic, work with a range of partners, and not leave that as a requirement to work with Adyen. Does it work as well as if we would build it in-house? Probably not.
It's probably not exactly as well as if we would build it in-house. So there's some limitations also because you need your partners to build into you, make everything available on your platform. It would be easier if we had it completely built in-house, but we've chosen a strategic direction on that side where we think agnostic is more helpful.
Cool. Thank you. We have to leave it there, but thank you very much, Ethan, for.
Thanks.
Thank you.