All right. Welcome, everybody, and good to see you here in Amsterdam. It is two years ago that we did our last Capital Markets Day, and I think it's safe to say that the world changed quite a bit. AI, I think it changed how business operates, how people operate, and unfortunately for us, also how fraudsters operate. Also, what is new is regulations. We are a highly regulated company, and regulations change all over the world. We are being expected to react on that with resilience. Global Commerce keeps going, but consumers and merchants expect instant innovation from us. That sounds like a daunting environment to work in, but I think it underlines exactly how we have been building at Adyen. Because what we have done is we always worked on a foundation on which you can build further.
If you have the foundations right, then I think you're in a good place to deal in this environment. I think it feels like an advantage. That advantage that we have exploited now over the years, that is what I think brings Adyen now well positioned to be one of the largest FinTechs in the world. With that, I want to hand it to Ingo.
Yeah, so today we're going to talk about durable foundations. That first layer that we built started basically when we started the company. It's the single tech stack. That is very important to the success of our company. Because with that single tech stack, we can route all transactions through the same intelligence, but also if new trends arise, we can adopt them quickly and globally. In 2017, we added that new foundational layer, which was global Banking Infrastructure, we have full control over our value chain. Of course, that comes with responsibilities at the one hand, but also with opportunities. It's one of the reasons why we can build capital without any involvement of third parties. Today we're adding that third layer, that third foundational layer to our company. That's Dynamic Identification.
The reason why Dynamic Identification is so important is because the industry is at a breaking point. What Peter said around what is happening with AI, we need to have an answer to this. AI is increasing or results in increased fraud levels. The only way to solve this is if we can answer this with dynamic footprints. That is what we are going to talk about today. It will set us up for a new decade of growth. That growth will come from higher conversion for our customers, lower fraud rates, so better defense against AI-driven fraud, faster onboarding, and ultimately, and I think that is what it is all about today, build that new level of trust in Global Commerce. That is what we want to talk about today. Of course, we are going to start with that first foundational layer.
I'm very happy to welcome Tom on stage, who's going to talk about our single tech stack. Thank you.
Thanks, Ingo. Thanks, Pieter. It's great to be here today talking to you all. You've heard about the three layers: global Banking Infrastructure, and Dynamic Identification. I'm here today to talk about the bottommost layer of the stack, the Single Platform. From the start, our guiding principle has been crystal clear. If something is critical to the way that our business operates, we want to own that. We want to own that in-house. We want to build that ourselves. One tech stack, one platform, one code base. We highly value this vertical control. It's not about vertical control for appearance's sake. We truly believe that this is critical to the way that we build our platform. This gives us the control, the flexibility, and the speed to operate without relying on third parties.
Because whenever you add third parties to the mix, you distance yourself from the problem. It creates these brittle handoffs and increasing complexity. It's a typical trade-off, right, between cost and speed, or between control and speed, I should say. When we think about how we've built our platform, we think about some key principles. I already mentioned that guiding principle. We want to own what differentiates us. For those end-to-end flows, we want to have full ownership of those. While we want full ownership of those things that differentiate us, we don't need to own everything. We want to be making pragmatic decisions at the edges. This gives us optionality in terms of the solutions we're able to build for our customers. We only scale what works. We use evidence and data to drive that decision-making.
These are the three key principles that our platform is built upon. These principles, they might sound rigid. They might sound like they're like closing us off, but they're not. They're about keeping us open. They're about making sure we're able to make those deliberate choices to drive the right outcomes for our customers. This gives us the best of both worlds: consistency and flexibility. It means that we don't need to make this trade-off between speed, control, and flexibility. We can have it all. This foundation doesn't matter if it's not there to help our customers. We exist to help our customers grow, to help their businesses grow. Let's think about what this looks like in practice. I talked about these principles, but how does it come across in our day-to-day work in order to help our customers?
You can see this little thing animating on the screen. What it's essentially saying is that we're constantly trying to optimize between fraud, conversion, and cost. If you think about a payment that's flowing through the system, a payment goes through multiple steps. Maybe there's a risk check, maybe there's authentication, maybe there's routing, maybe there's tokenization. Each one of these steps historically has been optimized discreetly and independently. That's great up until a point. What if a downstream decision affects an upstream decision? Or an upstream decision could be better if you had information about a downstream decision. That's what Adyen Uplift brings. You're going to hear more about that from Carlo later on this afternoon. We're able with Uplift to optimize across that entire payment journey. We're able to optimize across all of those different steps.
This means improved auth rates, lower costs, and also lower fraud. We are able to balance this trade-off. As we are building these things in, the system is continually learning. It is learning itself, and we are learning, and we are adding more. We are adding new signals, new models, new relationships to make the system overall get better. This is the power of the Single Platform. we are able to do this because we are operating within that Single Platform. everything is built in-house on this single tech stack. Everything that we do compounds. Every change we make for one customer impacts all customers. Every change for one geography impacts all geographies. Our approach to AI follows these same sets of principles. We use several types of AI at Adyen. We use classical models, so decision trees, for example, when we have clear structured data.
These types of models are really good for fast decision-making at scale, and they work really well when that data is clear and structured. We also make use of graph-based models. When relationships matter, the graph-based models bring out those relationships. They let us see things that the traditional or classical machine learning models do not let us see. These are really good when you have relationships, right? Between a merchant and a shopper, between a shopper and their payment instrument. When those relationships matter, we use graph-based models. We also use reinforcement learning. This is really important when you have steps or actions that you need to take that depend on the outcome of a previous action. We also make use of reinforcement learning for this dynamic decision-making. Think about retries or exemption requests, things like that.
When we're shipping these machine learning models, I touched on this a little bit before. Every improvement must meet the baseline and be better than that baseline before it ships to production. We're looking across several key metrics when we're thinking about performance of these models: conversion, fraud, latency, cost per transaction. The ability to take these evidence-based decisions and producing what's quantifiably better outcomes for our customers is what makes the AI that we build credible. When we think about AI, we're staying curious. Almost not yet. We're staying curious. We're continuing to learn. We're staying open and adaptable because we need to deliver outcomes for our customers at scale. As you can see, Generative AI is no different. When we think about Generative AI, we're following the same set of principles. It must be useful first and safe always.
When we think about how do we adopt GenAI and how are we using it today, we use a combination of closed-source models and open-weight models. We tune those weightings in-house, and we train those models on our own infrastructure. Because Generative AI is still prone to hallucinations, for any key or critical operational flows, we keep a human in the loop because we need to be able to review those decisions before we're releasing them. The early results of our use of GenAI are tangible. We're seeing our merchant support, so our support agents are able to operate more quickly. We're able to route tickets more effectively, and we're able to simplify those summaries that lets us act far more quickly and produce quicker outcomes for customers. We're also seeing internal efficiency improvements.
Because we're able to search more quickly, produce better results, and to summarize information, our internal productivity is improving. We're also able to reduce our operating costs through measurable use of automation. We're not just using GenAI everywhere. We're not using GenAI for GenAI's sake. We're only using it if it improves. I talked about those baselines and those metrics. When we're thinking about GenAI, we're only bringing it in when it makes an improvement. If a simpler model works, we will use the simpler model. Again, our customers do not care about whether we're using GenAI or not. They care about outcomes. What tangible outcomes are we delivering for them? We're already seeing improvements from the use of GenAI internally, both in terms of internal productivity, but also in terms of customer experience and customer support.
The real strength of the platform when you bring these all together is around adaptability. It's the ability to incorporate new things into the platform, new capabilities, without building new tech stacks. The foundation is the key to this. You'll hear this word foundation a lot today. The foundation is the key to everything we do. We've built the platform in a modular way. What that means is that we can compose it together in an extensible way, a little bit like LEGO building blocks, right? You've got a pile of bricks. You can put them together in different ways to meet new demands. As our customers' needs change, as the industry changes, we're able to put the platform together in different ways to drive outcomes for our customers. This foundation is what allows us to continue to solve the toughest problems for the world's most demanding customers.
We believe that when the foundation is strong, that we can build anything. This is how we keep ahead of merchants' change and how we continue to grow the platform over time with every transaction that runs through it, with every payout that we do, or with every virtual card that we issue. That same adaptability is what prepares us for the next wave of commerce. You're probably waiting to hear about Agentic Commerce today, and we've got a lot to talk about there. The platform is what prepares us for this. We have the building blocks in place today to be ready: tokenization, authentication. These are systems that we have in production at scale today. Last month, hopefully you've all seen it, we released a thing on the website that talks about our merchant-first approach to Agentic Commerce.
This is a way of making sure that merchants are at the forefront of this next wave of commerce. It talks about four key principles. The first one, we should always be acting on behalf of a customer. We need verifiable cryptographic intent. We also want to maintain merchant control of their payment setups, of their tokenization strategies, things like that. We want to be able to recognize shoppers across every channel. Think about things like loyalty programs. How is a shopper that's coming to a merchant able to make use of the loyalty that they've built with that particular merchant? The last key thing is about ownership. We believe merchants should own the Agentic Commerce relationship, the customer relationship, and also the data. We believe that merchants should own this and not the AI interface.
Now, taken together, these principles make sure that Agentic Commerce is an additive channel for our merchants, and it's not a dilutive one. It is also not disintermediating them, which is a common problem and something that we're hearing a lot from our customers. You might ask, who are we working with? We're working with everyone that you'd expect. Trevor's going to share more about this in a minute, and I won't steal his thunder, but you can assume that we're working with all the key players in the industry. While Agentic Commerce is new and there's a lot of excitement, I spent a lot of time in SF. You drive down the 101, you see the billboards. There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of talk. There's also a lot of concern.
Our merchant-first Agentic Commerce framework makes sure that we're able to leverage the strong foundation that we've built to continue to put merchants first. When we think about our Single Platform, when we think about that vertical control or that full-stack nature of it, it's not just a set of kind of principles in a vacuum. It's actually a compounding engine. It's one that compounds performance: single code base, single data model, single tech stack, single experimentation loop. It also allows us to bring a lower cost of change that helps our customers. It gives us lower integration tax. We're not integrating complicated third parties. We're not losing data and handovers across the wire. We're able to continue to keep that cost of change low as we're building new things on top of the platform. It also sets us up for the future. We're ready.
The modular nature of the platform helps us be ready for whatever comes next, whether it's Agentic Commerce or other forms. We're ready. The platform keeps us there. The platform taken together is, excuse me, it turns learning into leverage financially, operationally, and strategically. That's it for me. I'm going to hand over to Mariëtte. Mariëtte's going to talk to you about how our licenses build on top of the Single Platform to make global Banking Infrastructure. thank you.
Hello everyone. Thank you for being here today. We just had Tom explain us the first layer of our foundation, our Single Platform, and that gives us the technology base to innovate at scale. Technology in itself is not enough. If you want to service large enterprises, large platforms, you need to have the right licenses and the right infrastructure behind it. That brings me to the second layer of our foundation, our Banking Infrastructure. That is where Adyen took a very different turn than many of its competitors, many other FinTechs. In the next 10- 15 minutes, I would like to explain to you why. We are entering an age of infrastructure. The age where having full control over your infrastructure no longer is a nice to have.
It is critical in the long-term success of a company because it's the only way how you can ensure predictability, resilience against third-party risk, speed and optimization, and uniform product growth. I'll touch upon each of these items, but before we do, let's just first pause and see what happens when you don't control the foundation. In a typical FinTech setup, the infrastructure is built on middlemen. It's a whole patchwork of partner banks. With every handover, there is a risk, there is complexity, and there is delay. We all have seen the consequences of that: businesses being locked out of certain verticals because the partner bank changes risk appetite, platforms not being able to pay their users because accounts were frozen without any warning, entire institutions collapsing overnight, causing a ripple effect to everybody else in the chain. The lessons are clear.
When you rely on third-party risk or third-party banks, you inherit their risk. When something goes wrong, it's not only the name of the partner bank in the headline, it's everybody else within that patchwork that gets affected as well. It's also their name, their brand, and their reputation that is at stake. With Adyen, we took a very different path. We secured our first acquiring license in 2012, our first banking license in 2017, and we continue to build steadily ever since. Today we have banking license, full-stack banking license in Europe, the U.K., and in the U.S. That means no middlemen, no dependencies on third-party banks. We control the infrastructure end-to-end. By doing that, we not only remove the friction I was referring to earlier, we also add really clear advantages to our customers. I want to highlight three of them.
The first and I think most important advantage is predictability. Most of the FinTechs live by the mercy of their partner bank risk appetite. When that changes, services oftentimes get disrupted, and there is very little that the FinTech can do. We are not facing that because we have our own licenses. We can set our own risk appetite. We operate our own control framework. Most importantly, we build our own relationships with our regulators, all in a way that perfectly aligns with our technology. For us, that means flexibility. We can set our course independently from others. For our customers, that means predictability. They are not faced with a sudden change in risk appetite. They are not changed with a misalignment between policies and procedures between different partner banks or waiting for a permission of a partner bank somewhere down the chain when you want to launch a new product.
We control our own. It is that predictability that our customers like because predictability builds trust. It means that our customers can plan and scale their business on top of our infrastructure, knowing that the rails will still be there today, tomorrow, and 10 years from now. The second advantage I would like to call out is speed and optimization. Because we own the infrastructure, we can allow, we can enable faster money movement and better intelligence. Take the U.S. as an example. Our licenses allow us to maintain a master account at the Federal Reserve and to connect directly into the Fed payment systems and private networks. Because of that, we can control every step of the transaction on our own rails, from authorization to acquiring to settlements to global payouts, all quickly, efficiently, and at the lowest cost. The results are simple but powerful.
It's true instant payouts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Funds do not get stuck in transit with some partner bank. Money moves when our customers want it to move. Not only do our customers like the speed and control that we can offer them, they also like the intelligence behind it. Because we have been able to combine our Single Platform with our Banking Infrastructure and our Global Data capabilities, we can capture data, clean structured data right at its source rather than that we need to collect it from all partner banks. It is because of that that we can offer our customers products like Adyen Uplift. We have Ingo and Carlo tell you more about it this afternoon. Finally, the third advantage that I would like to call out is uniform product growth.
Our licenses allow us to move beyond payments and offer our customers, both platform and enterprise customers, financial services and products like issuing, bank accounts, capital. Again, we can offer these services without the involvement of any middleman, any partner bank. We are the actual issuer. We are the actual letter of record. We are the actual deposit taker. We control these features and the conditions on which we can offer them. Again, we can do this without middlemen, but the advantage is we can also do it on one Single Platform. That means that our customers and their users can access our suite with one single integration, but also with one onboarding flow, thereby avoiding a duplication of KYC and other compliance checks. The benefits for our customers are clear. They can grow without complexity. They can simply tap into new revenue streams.
They can build loyalty, strengthen the relationship they have with their users, all with one single integration. We have Thom and Catherine telling you the latest on banking, on financial products this afternoon. Before I hand you off to the next speaker, let me leave you with this. The whole FinTech promise of speed and innovation falls apart when the foundation is not solid. When that foundation is a whole patchwork of partner banks, there are significant risks that cannot be ignored. Adyen's decision to secure its own banking licenses and our ability to integrate them with our Single Platform truly sets us apart from others because it allows our customers to protect themselves and build resilience against third-party risk. It allows our customers to really control the flow of their funds, and it gives them a foundation to build for future innovation.
Believe me when I say that building a Banking Infrastructure is not something that we've done overnight. It required years and years of deliberate investments, and they continue still until today because banking licenses are not light permissions. They require constant certification and validation on some of the largest regulators in the world. They speak to our ability to offer these services in a very secure and a very controlled way. We operate at the highest professional level, and we are willing to make those investments given the philosophy that's always been clear to Adyen. We stay close to our customers. We try to truly understand what matters to them. We gain their trust, and we build long-term sustainable solutions. Thanks for listening. I now hand it off to Ingo, who's going to tell you about the third layer of our foundation. Thank you.
It has been very clear that these two foundational layers have always set us apart. To take friction out of Commerce, it helps to serve our customers and their customers with full control and trust over the value chain. That makes it very special. The world is changing. Like we said, the combination of AI, increased fraud levels, regulatory complexity, it requires a new approach. That new approach is why we introduced this third layer, Dynamic Identification. Dynamic Identification is going to bridge the technology with regulation. It will set us up for the next decade how we define trust in Global Commerce. I think that is crucial. We are the company that is helping to define that trust in the industry.
It could be not more urgent right now because the industry is basically broken in the way how they deal with this risk. If you look at how we typically deal with all kinds of paperwork around static checks, how we use bank statements, passports, etc., just to ask the question, are you really, will you say you are? We want to answer that question differently. That is what we are going to talk about today. Before we do that, I want to give a couple of facts. The first fact is that if you look at onboarding, on average in the industry, it takes about 11 days before a new merchant goes live. We are better than that, but we also have room to improve. Another data point is that about 95% of the AML alerts are false positives.
We basically built an engine as the industry where 95% of the alerts are not efficient, not effective. That is a real problem. Another problem is that up to 10% of all transactions are being declined by fraud systems for legitimate shoppers. I think that is also a real fundamental problem that we see in this industry. On top of that, in 2024, cyber-enabled fraud increased by 33%. That is, of course, major if you think about this. It is not really surprising because with AI, you can fabricate a passport, a bank statement, or even a whole company in a couple of minutes. I think that is the reason why we need to do it differently. So far, the industry response has been different. The industry response has been we build a new lock or we add some AI to the lock.
That is not really the problem. What we need is a new door. We are going to talk about how we have built that new door over the past years. How do we create that new door? I think that is the crucial question that we ask ourselves and that we want to show you today how we have done that. The main thing is that we need to stop thinking about identification through static risk signals. We need to add a new dimension. That new dimension is behavior. There we are uniquely positioned because behavior is very hard to fake by AI.
We have the data points on our platform to see what people are actually doing, how they are buying a coffee in the morning, how they're taking a taxi to get here, how they are buying a pair of sneakers online, how they're accepting payments somewhere else. These patterns are in our system, and they are not easy to fabricate by AI. That is how we are using Dynamic Identification. We can build that basically from trillions of interactions on our platform. It is really difficult to forge this. That is why we are so uniquely positioned, also because every second new signals come into our platform. What is the key point here? It is not a product. It is really a foundational layer that we have built and where multiple products that we have benefit from. It is built on three strategic assets that we have.
The first one is our unique Global Data set containing billions of transactions online, offline, from the most respected customers that we have globally. Secondly, it is built around the asset of AI-based strategic decisioning. That means that it is not just yes or no. No, we try to give confidence levels on if a person really says what they say they are and use that as a starting point for a decision. The third factor is how we use regulatory infrastructure. In regulatory infrastructure, the key thing is, and that is also what Mariëtte talked about, that we have the trust with regulators, but we are also in a position to redefine how we build certain things. We are not dependent on third parties to do this.
It allows us to remove friction out of the system, strengthen compliance, and basically create a new mode for us as a company. It allows us to build a new infrastructure for trusted commerce. I think that is the key point of today, build that new trust. Of course, on top of that, with all the billions of tokens that we have, we can add new things to this. For instance, how we can add passkeys to it, how we can add new e-government ideas to it. That is how we further improve this proposition. What makes our proposition complete or really different here? Our approach is continuous and contextual. These are very important words, continuous and contextual. We keep learning, and we always take into account what is around us. That is really different compared to the old model.
The old model was always about, is it validated or not? Is it approved or is it declined? These were all binary outcomes. That is really different here. We built a really contextual picture of personal data and transactions, of biometrics that we have on our platform, or the government IDs that I just talked about. The result is that for the trusted entities, we can do lighter checks. The moment the risk increases, we can add additional scrutiny to what we have. Let me give three examples of how we apply this in practice. Like I said, Dynamic Identification is a foundational layer. It is not a product, but we use it to improve our products. The first product that I want to highlight is Uplift. We are going to talk about Uplift more this afternoon.
Uplift, the first step in Uplift is how we use it to give a more contextual risk assessment on transactions. This is different compared to the traditional outsourced risk systems that our merchants use, where if you're traveling and you're in another country and you pay something with a high value, these are all kind of red flags for a risk system to say no. Why Uplift is different is because we have this context and you get a transaction passed through. That leads to 42% less false positives. It leads to up to 6% more conversion. That's, of course, key metrics for our merchants. We can do more with this. It's also very good to spot patterns to stop policy abuse. Policy abuse for our merchants is typically a margin problem.
For instance, if you think about refund fraud or free trial fraud or abuse, these are patterns that we can flag and can solve or work with with our merchants to stop it. We will tell about this more this afternoon. The second product where we're using Dynamic Identification is merchant onboarding and risk. Typically, it has always relied on real paperwork, like physical paperwork. It is not really telling you if this is what you need. With Dynamic Identification, we have seen a business before. I think that is crucial in how we can do this in a better way going forward. Let me give you an example.
If a new merchant starts with us and the first shoppers that come in, and we have seen those shoppers before that they are well-established shoppers on our platform, we do not have to take additional steps. It is probably a legitimate business, and you do not need to take additional steps. If a new merchant has a bank account or a card that has been used on our platform before, we need less manual work to verify these accounts. These are examples of how we can do it better. If there are new risk signals that come in that change this risk profile, we can immediately act on it and ask for additional information. We can take this further. For instance, it can also help us to predict bankruptcies better. With a product like Capital, that is, of course, crucial.
That's the next step in this area. The third example of a product is compliance. We already talked about a high number of false alerts with AML. This is very inefficient. We need to solve that. Also here, we are uniquely positioned. We can really redefine how compliance works. I'm very proud that we are in that position. What we have done over the recent year is we have developed AI agents that basically process these alerts and do this better than humans can. Of course, that's only possible if you have context. This is exactly where Dynamic Identification helps again. Dynamic Identification helps to bring context to the agents so that they can solve these types of alerts in minutes instead of the 30 minutes that a typical human takes to do this.
We will show you in a demo how this works later this afternoon. This really sets a new standard for integrity and compliance. I think that is what we're up to as a company. We want to set the benchmark going forward and go from basically slow manual work to real-time automated decision-making. That is what is needed in this industry. These are three examples of how Dynamic Identification is a new foundational layer of our platform. It creates the context that is needed to build trust. Trust is needed in this industry. It is the key thing going forward to shape ourselves as a company. To make it more specific, what exactly does it mean for the different groups around us? If you look at merchants, of course, it results in higher conversion, faster onboarding, less fraud.
For the ecosystem, it is the best defense against AI-driven fraud. For ourselves, of course, it results in happier customers, but also lower cost of compliance, but also a more scalable compliance environment. Let's wrap this up. The truth is that the industry approach is broken. The industry tries to add AI to a broken lock. They're trying to repaint a door, but we need to build a new door. With Dynamic Identification, we have built this new door. We are building a foundation for risk management for the future, for new compliance procedures for the future, and more importantly, for trust in Global Commerce. that is the key what we want to show today. After the break, Carlo will take you in more detail through the different products that we have, what we currently have, but also going forward, what is on our roadmap. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Isaac. I'm part of the investor relations team here at Adyen. Thank you all for being here, both in person and also to those watching via the webcast online. I hope the first few sessions of today were as insightful to you as they have been to me. We're now heading into our first coffee break of the day. That's going to be a short one. It's approximately 20 minutes. Make yourselves comfortable. There's coffee in a few different areas here of the theater. If you are here in person, so unfortunately not to those online, but if you're here in person and you downloaded the Adyen Events app, you might have just received a notification or you will in the next few minutes.
That notification has a link to our online web shop, and you can, via that link, select what Adyen merchandise you'd like to take home at the end of today's event. You can place your order using the username that you registered with your card back when you checked in at our office, and you will be able to pick up your orders at the end of the day back at our headquarters after the end of the event. Again, if you haven't downloaded the app, that's not a problem. We have some QR codes spread around the common areas here, so just scan those and you will be redirected to the web shop as well. Again, quick coffee break, about 20 minutes. For those of you back home, there will be a counter on your screen so you know exactly when to tune back in.
See you guys in a bit.
Hello everyone, welcome back, and welcome once more to Amsterdam. I'm really excited you're all here, and I'm very excited to share all the cool stuff we're building today. Now, before the break, Ingo explained the why. Now, let me show you the how, how Dynamic Identification today shows up in our products and how it creates measurable value. At the end of the day, every financial operation, whether that's a payment, a payout, a mortgage, issuing a loan, onboarding of a merchant, it always comes down to one thing: balancing risk and friction. Get this balance right, merchants grow. Get it wrong, and you either lose good customers or you open the door to financial crime. Now, the way to get this balance right is pretty simple.
You need better information about who you're dealing with, and this is exactly what Dynamic Identification gives us. This is exactly what this unique data set we've been building up over the last couple of years is providing us with, and it's powering the products I'm about to show you. Now, we built Adyen Uplift, not as a standalone fraud tool, but as our AI-powered engine, finding this perfect balance between conversion, risk, and cost for every single payment. Now, the principle is very simple: decisions around authentication, fraud risk, token application, fees, routing, they should not be taken in isolation. Now, the numbers on this slide, they are for illustration purposes, but they show what can go wrong with a payment.
All the boxes on this screen, they represent steps as part of the payment conversion funnel, and that payment conversion funnel is much more than that off-rate that the whole industry obsesses about. Merchants need to make a lot of choices for each step, and this is our thesis. Approaching these boxes in isolation results in what we call conversion leakage, conversion leakage across the entire payment conversion funnel. Instead, you've guessed it, all of these choices, they belong to one unified decision, and this is the thing: Dynamic Identification, that's the foundation for that decision. Auto and Uplift consist of five modules, each solving a particular problem within the payment funnel. The design is modular; our customers can choose to use some of them for their payments or all of them across their funnel.
Now, Dynamic Identification is the foundational layer that helps these modules perform better, either by individually powering them or by creating synergies between modules, and this allows what we call risk-based optimizations in payments. Think about your own day so far: you booked a flight to get here, you might have ordered a coffee in the morning, you took a rideshare. Each touchpoint right here, it is a trust decision for us, and it helps us establish a pattern to predict whether the next action of a given shopper makes sense. With Dynamic Identification, we fight fraud with precision, reducing false positives with 42% versus legacy tools, and more importantly, addressing this conversion leakage across the entire conversion funnel. The impact is measurable. American Eagle Outfitters sees this nice 2.76% conversion uplift for their payments, and Comfort from Australia is solid 1% conversion uplift.
We have Just Eat Takeaway, our friendly neighbors here in Amsterdam, with a solid 1.07% conversion uplift, and I'm very excited for the customer interview that will happen right after my keynote with the Global Director of Products, where we will together double-click on how they leverage Auto and Uplift. Lush from across the pond in the U.K., a 1.25% conversion uplift and still climbing steadily. Now, we benchmark every merchant against a real transaction control group, and this allows us to isolate the incremental lift that only our platform can deliver. The impact is clear. The outcome is clear. Auto and Uplift doesn't just stop fraud; it grows conversion, lowers costs, and drives real revenue. I'm pretty excited; cool stuff happening, it keeps evolving. We're working and launching a new module called Personalize, and Personalize today is in pilot with some of our customers.
One of the biggest questions we hear from our merchants, also from you all, is how can we lower payment costs without hurting conversion? There are often cheaper payment methods available, but push shoppers too hard towards them, and you risk losing the sale. Dynamic Identification, it makes this trade-off intelligently. We understand who the shopper is, we know what their preferred payment methods are, and hence we can personalize this checkout experience, guide shoppers to lower-cost payment methods only when it makes sense to do so. The result, pretty clear: merchants lower costs without hurting conversion, and the data actually proves it. In some markets, we're seeing up to 3% in savings on the total cost of payment processing.
That's pretty substantial for a given market, and it's another example of how Dynamic Identification turns what used to be this guessing game into now a tangible decision we can take together with our customers. We are also expanding Protect. Protect is Auto and Uplift fighting fraud, and we're trying now to help or solve another pain for our customers, another pain beyond what we all know: traditional payment fraud. Here I'm referring to policy abuse. Malicious users, they exploit return policies, refund policies, free trials, promotions, loyalty programs, payment loopholes, and they're doing this in increasingly sophisticated ways and in a very structured manner. Now, individually, these cases can seem very minor: a free trial here, a refunded item there, but at scale, they compound fast, driving material losses and operational strain. This is no longer just a fraud line item for our customers; it's a margin problem.
The fundamental challenge is that our merchants, they struggle to see these patterns. Their fraud systems, traditional fraud systems, they simply were not designed for this, and most FinTechs, they cannot touch it. They do not have the breadth of identity signals, regulatory foundation, and end-to-end visibility to transactions, not just online transactions, but also in-person transactions, to truly reveal the patterns we are talking about, to show our customers insights like these. This is exactly where Dynamic Identification changes the equation. Cool insight. For example, a global retailer, we could help a global retailer realize that half of their refunds were only coming from 3% of their shoppers. Crazy. This visibility that we helped them get, it helped transform this problem from a wide operational accepted burden to a targeted profitability issue we could solve together with them. Another example: retailer abuse.
Merchants face both losses and brand risk, reputation risk, when their goods or services get resold on gray or black markets. This ranges from limited edition luxury products being bought in bulk to then be resold, all the way to digital services being acquired under promotional terms and then being resold at scale. Dynamic Identification, it allows us to connect the dots across merchants and platforms, revealing patterns that individual businesses simply cannot see. We can spot serial abusers, apply safeguards proactively, and shut down this behavior before costs spiral. Because we operate with full banking licenses, it is all clicking together inside this supervised ecosystem with the right compliance and data governance controls. Adyen is uniquely positioned to combat policy abuse responsibly at scale.
Let me say it once more: this is not just a fraud challenge for customers; it's a profitability challenge, and Dynamic Identification helps us solve this. Now, I hear you thinking we can apply all of this cool stuff beyond just payments processing, and we're actually now extending this logic to the merchant lifecycle, starting with the very first step: onboarding. Today, onboarding for any financial product is slow, repetitive, and frustrating. Merchants have to fill out long forms, upload IDs, connect bank accounts, submit paperwork that we've been referring to now a couple of times. It's clunky, expensive, and simply delays time to revenue. Meanwhile, compliance demands are rising, and AI makes it easy to fake documents, but also fake entire companies. These static checks simply do not hold up anymore. They add friction without delivering certainty. Fraudsters are laughing.
Dynamic Identification lets us rethink this model, and instead of trying to rely on fixed rules and blanket documentation requests, we make these risk-based adaptive decisions. An example: we can start with something as simple as an email address, and based on this email address, we can determine have we seen this business or its owners before on our platform based on legitimate activity. From there, verification adjusts dynamically. For example, we can pop up the right government ID check, less friction, simply because we already know a user's location based on their payments. We can skip annoying manual steps like asking for a copy of a bank statement. We've talked about this a couple of times now. There might be already activity on our platform proving ownership of that particular bank account. No need to ask. The result is a completely different experience.
Legitimate businesses onboard smoothly, manual reviews go down, and compliance becomes stronger, not slower. This year, we started putting this into practice, using our platform data to fill in missing information of legal entities we are onboarding and reviewing on our platform. By leveraging these existing insights we have as part of Dynamic Identification, we already have been able to reduce these manual reviews, all these annoying steps, by 6%, and this is only the beginning. This is significantly accelerating onboarding without compromising compliance. Now, once a business is up and running, the next step is access to working capital. Quick, fair access to credit remains a major pain point for merchants today. We've been talking about this for a while now. Traditional lenders, they require extensive paperwork and long reviews, and young businesses tend to face rejection or very expensive terms. Dynamic Identification changes this equation.
By using identity-informed data, we can assess credit worthiness more accurately and in real time. Instead of static forms, outdated risk scores, outdated credit scores, we're using data-driven decision-making here. It is not just the payment behavior of that business; that's a trick we all know. It is also bringing the actual customers of that business to the equation. Here is what it looks like in practice. Submerchants are 30% more likely to repay when the majority of their shoppers have had in-person payments across the Adyen platform. This is a pretty interesting insight. The shoppers of a given business say something about the risk and the quality of that business. Another example: submerchants that have a solid track record of consumer payments themselves on our platform, they are 15%-20% more likely to repay. It is a super obvious insight, but one that is uniquely available to us.
These behavioral signals, they give us the confidence to underwrite credit earlier and with greater precision, and the result is a reimagined capital offering. We can responsibly unlock growth funding sooner, working capital sooner, reduce friction, and help businesses grow exactly when they need it most. Tom and Catherine will later walk you through on how that all clicks together as part of our platform solution. Dynamic Identification is not about patching old processes. We have established this by now. It is about building that new door that Ingo has been referring to. Instead of trying to fix broken checks with more paperwork or applying some fancy AI sauce on something that is already broken, we use behavioral signals to manage risk more intelligently. For example, a submerchant is 4x more likely to be fraudulent if they did not have a consumer payment on our platform.
Today, we already eliminate 6% of manual reviews simply by intelligently linking legal entities together on our platform. These are not incremental improvements. They redefine how risk is managed, and the impact extends across the ecosystem, creating a virtuous circle. Merchants win with safer, faster growth. Consumers win with trusted, frictionless experiences, and the whole of commerce wins with a higher standard of integrity. This is a new standard for compliance, one that Adyen is uniquely positioned to set. With that new standard comes new business opportunity: a platform where trust and growth reinforce each other instead of competing. The part I'm most excited about is the ultimate application of Dynamic Identification, and here I'm referring to powering AI investigator agents.
Now, these AI agents, they are referring to our usage of LLMs, Large Language Models, to take over manual and repetitive workflows that have always been very difficult and very costly to automate. This is the thing: an AI agent is only as good as the context it is given. Our platform, our Dynamic Identification, provides the richest behavioral and transaction context in the world. This, to me, is the game changer. This is why I believe we can make this work at an enormous scale. This is not the theory. We are researching, building, testing, and deploying these capabilities today, and I would love to show you an example from our work. When our operations team has to go through these politically exposed person alerts, PEP alerts, to establish: is this Jack Smith the same Jack Smith as part of the U.S. government?
They have to disprove or prove this. Our human analysts, they have to traditionally spend hours manually verifying this alert. They have to check potential matches. They have to jump between data sources, check public records, confirm these identities, document every single step. It is slow, repetitive, and diverts time from higher impact investigations. We built this LLM-powered agent to automate this step, this whole process end-to-end. The agent instantly analyzes a subject's global footprint, verifies their profession, cross-checks adverse media, and produces this complete, structured, evidence-based assessment with consistent reasoning throughout. It is not that our agents, like our human agents, have to now sit and wait for all of this to be completed, but we wanted to show you the power of an agent at work and how this will change our organization, the way we think about financial crime and operations.
The results speak for themselves. This is already live in production, and as our teams are integrating this into their workflows, we are on track to achieve already more than 50% time savings. This is a significant first step towards our goal of automating 90% of investigations because this will allow our analysts to transform from manual reviewers into expert supervisors focused on the most complex and critical threats and not on that waste of 95% that Ingo was referring to before. Dynamic Identification is not a single product, and it is not a single team initiative either. From our engineers to our compliance team to our data privacy experts, our entire organization is committed to one thing: challenging legacy controls and replacing these static checks with identity-informed decisions. This powerful, like this company-wide commitment, creates a powerful compounding flywheel.
It starts with our Single Platform, this growing source of clean and structured data. From this data, we can build up the world's richest Dynamic Identification. This Dynamic Identification powers products like Auto and Uplift, frictionless onboarding for our Auto and for platforms proposition, faster access to working capital for our submerchants. These products attract and retain more world-class merchants, more world-class customers, more merchants, more transactions. With every transaction on our platform, our Dynamic Identification gets stronger. This is our moat. With every financial operation on our platform, it grows deeper, smarter, and more defensible. I'm now very excited to announce Yasmine, Global Product Director of Product at Just Eat Takeaway, and Gary, our Global Head of Account Management, to together unpack how Auto and Uplift is being used to leverage their payment operation and make a change and drive that conversion.
I'm also looking forward to meeting all of you at the end of the day to continue this conversation. Thank you very much.
We talked about our layers and Uplift, but what does that mean in practice? As a former customer myself, I'm particularly excited to share a story today with Just Eat Takeaway. Just Eat Takeaway is a global on-demand delivery platform focused on empowering everyday convenience. As a sense of scale, in 2024 alone, they processed over EUR 19 billion in transactions, and that's across 900 million distinct transactions, 750,000 partners, and 17 different countries. Just two weeks ago, I found myself in a bit of a bind. I had forgotten to order a get-well gift for one of my colleagues who lived in a different country.
Thanks to JET, all I had to do was do a couple of clicks on a website, wait a little bit less than an hour, this beautoful chocolate gift basket showed up at his front door, complete with Dubai chocolates, my personal favorite. Although, to be completely honest, I do not know how much of it he actually got to eat because he has four ruthless teenage kids, but at least the delivery got there. As part of the magic behind making that happen, we will be joined shortly by Yasmine. Yasmine is the Global Product Director of FinTech at Just Eat Takeaway. Thanks to her leadership and guidance, they have taken what was formerly a complicated patchwork of seven different platforms across their organization, combined it into one, and they have really seen real results out of the speed and capabilities that it can now provide. Please join me in welcoming Yasmine.
Thank you.
Yasmine, thank you for joining us. Definitely appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. Hi, everybody.
Our companies have been partners since 2009, and we really appreciate the renewed energy that you've brought since you joined your organization and the innovation you're bringing. I have to ask you, it's a complicated business. I'm sure you have so many stakeholders internally. When it comes to FinTech, how do you think about what success looks like, and how do you measure it?
Gary, as you mentioned, our vision is to empower everyday convenience, and we want to move from two to three orders per month to two to three orders per week. That is our ultimate goal. Your question towards FinTech, specifically my department, how do we contribute to that?
If I simplify it for you and put it in two main buckets, there is one thing that we really do is really diversifying our supply, right? Looking at new verticals, we are adding groceries, we are adding electronics, we are adding flour, chocolate, as you mentioned, right? Even pet food. We are really diversifying our supply. We have to understand if you change your product and service, that means that your whole checkout and payment experience from conversion, transactional costs, the refund, authorization, everything changed. There we play an important role and teaming up also with Adyen to change that and make sure that we are dynamic and flexible and can deal with that. The second part that is keeping me awake at night is, I would say, conversion.
Carlo mentioned it several times: conversion, conversion, conversion in combination with the right experience and order frequency. We all know in the industry, if you work in product and tech, if the customer is experiencing on the checkout or payment something really bad, like an error or you get blocked, 3DS, whatever, right? 78% of that customer is not going to come back within the same month. That is impacting my order frequency. If we look at our company, Northstar, is order growth. The two key metrics that influence this are active customers and order frequency. I am lucky that I play an important role in those metrics and moving that around, but it has its challenges, and that's what we are focusing on.
Got it. Order growth, definitely to Northstar, and there's a couple of component metrics, one of them being conversion, of course, and then the other being with the complexity of the SKU proliferation and how you do consumer behavior with that.
C orrect.
Okay. How do you work with Adyen and our team to help you improve on those areas?
With Adyen, we focus on the full journey. I mean, from checkout, payment, risk, authentication, and I am lucky to work with an amazing team, and I think they are here. I cannot see it because I have a lot of lights in my eyes, but I think Luke is here and Annali, and I worked with Luke for years now.
What I love is, you know, they are strategically so invested and they lead by, how do I say it, with clear vision and strategy, but they balance it with a bold thinking and grounded execution. What I mean with it, I know, for instance, Luke is using our app. They are so invested in our products. They want to understand what is going on, what our challenges are, and think along how we can solve that. That is one part. They also know I'm a product person. I can easily talk with tech and product for hours. If we have challenges, they will link us up with Carlo or with the right team to talk about the challenges. It's easier for us. It's really, you know, the grounded execution that I was talking about.
This is a damn good example, aligning with the right people and having that access, like it's really convenient. I really love that about working with Adyen.
Thank you. Much appreciated. I know, you know, Luke and Annali, I think they're up there and do a great job. Our ambition and our mandate as a team is to help you achieve your ambitions faster.
Yeah.
What about Uplift? We talked, you heard Carlo talk a little bit about Uplift. Can you share your experience with it?
I think when before we talked about Uplift, it was really important that we clarify our goal. As I mentioned, active customers and order frequency is something that is keeping me awake, right?
When we sat down with Luke and Carlo and the team, we said, okay, what can we do to move loyal shoppers to have a frictionless experience? And what do you have to offer, right? This is how the conversation started. We talked from a problem statement instead of talking about the product itself. When the team explained about Uplift and the potential, it was really obvious it is the right balance between, you know, payment and fraud and holistic overview and trying to find, as you saw in the animation, what is, how can we balance, you know, frictionless experience, conversion with cost, right? But also the fraud element. This is where we thought, okay, how can we do that? How can we implement it?
We now introduce for our loyal shoppers a way seamless experience compared to, for instance, bad actors that we doubt, like, okay, now we need to double-check that with biometric challenges or a different way of approaching stuff. We have seen amazing results.
It's great to hear. Absolutely. That is that tension we talked about earlier between conversion and risk that you hear.
Yeah.
I'm sure our audience here would probably love to hear how has that manifested itself in the metrics and the numbers. Fun. Okay. I was, we were talking about it. I checked in with my fraud expert. She's so passionate about it. I told her, like, can you give me a report out what happened in detail so that if I stand here, I can talk about it. I'm not a fraud expert.
She gave me a whole essay, and I was like, oh gosh, it was like 23 data points, a lot, and she was so passionate and so positive. I had to write it down because I know I will do it wrong. Look, Carlo already mentioned the 1.07% increase in conversion, but what was also interesting to see is that we saw our block rate dropped extremely with 83%. You do not see it on the slides, but it is important to highlight that. I think this is really important because of the conversion and experience that we have. Next to that, the false positive halved, that was also incredible to read back in the report out that I got from my team. Not only that, we see $8 million, for instance, extra in settlements without extra fraud.
It was really amazing results over and over again from the whole spectrum, and all resulted in the 1.07%. From a cost perspective, look, I cherish a lot the effort and time that people put in things. When we found out that our fraud teams, including product and tech, but also the experts in the business, needed 80% less time to manage, you know, the cases, the profile, that is big numbers. We are really happy with that. Of course, last year, two years ago, as you highlighted, we kickstarted the globalization of our platform, but we could not do it with the one platform that Tom was talking about and link it to our ecosystem, which allowed us to have a time to market with 86%. We improved our time to market with 86%. Really great numbers, extremely proud.
I know my fraud experts are proud, so thank you for that. I am looking forward to the next steps.
Thanks. That is an incredible set of statistics, not just what we are seeing on a slide, but that 50% false positives, those are all as 50% less insulted customers, right, that have been falsely flagged that want to get something that can now get it.
Exactly.
What is next for JET and Adyen together? I am personally so excited about Agentic Commerce. I think that is the future, and I do think you do need to do that in a balanced way, but at the same time, shape it together, what is right for the industry. I am excited about that, working with our gen and our partners and seeing how that will look like in the future.
Next to that, we are looking at a payout treasury system, how we can do some discovery on that and implement that in our ecosystem. My favorite is loyalty and wallet. That is coming. For the Dutch out here that are using our apps, loyalty is coming soon, our program. Keep an eye on our product.
Awesome. I think that's it for time for us today. Just to quickly recap for our guests, JET, obviously a very complicated, massive at-scale global platform, and we work together very closely to make sure we're solving real customer problems, right? That's what we're focusing on, energy, solving real customer problems, not the hypothetical. We have, thanks to the work of Yasmine and her team, along with the Adyen platform and Uplift, driven the real results you saw up here earlier today.
These are metrics that have real top-line and bottom-line impact. Beyond that, if you think about the wallet, the loyalty piece of it, there's so much more that we can do together because it's a complicated business and they have a lot of needs that we're helping solve together. Thank you, Yasmine.
Thank you for having me.
Broader partnership. We do have. Thank you, sir. Absolutely. We talked about building blocks a lot today. I wanted to share some additional building blocks for you.
Oh, I love it. I love LEGO. Oh, I love this. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you. Next, I'd like to welcome to the stage Thom and Catherine to talk about financial products. Cool. Thank you.
Hi everyone. My name is Thom Ruiter. I'm the VP of Product for Financial Products. Earlier today, we covered the foundations. Tom showed how our Single Platforms bring us speed and flexibility, and Mariëtte explained to us how our Banking Infrastructure gives us full control across products. Now we are going to show what these foundations make possible. Because financial products are how these same foundations translate into new capabilities for our customers, powered by our banking licenses in Europe, the U.S., and the U.K. These licenses are not just to strengthen our compliance. They enable us to move, hold, and manage funds end-to-end without third-party dependencies. This enables us to connect payments to bank accounts, payouts, card issuing, and capital in the best way possible. That enables us, our customers, and especially platforms, to embed these financial products into their ecosystems. Until so far, we have not given this area its own spotlight.
It's smaller than payments, but it's growing consistently across all of its components. Now let's zoom in. Next to payments, we have banking, issuing, and capital. Banking consists of bank accounts ranging from business accounts for small, medium businesses all the way up to FBO accounts for enterprise-sized platforms. It also is helping our customers to pay out their users on a global scale. It consists of liquidity management solutions to basically take away the friction between pay-in and payout. Here you can think of faster settlement, instant cash-outs, or smarter overdrafts. Card issuing is all about enabling our customers to pay out their user base by using the card networks or for them to issue cards to manage expenses more efficiently. Capital enables our SMB customers to grow their business fast without the complexity and the negative customer experience that banks typically offer.
These modular building blocks enable our customers to move money end-to-end by connecting payments, bank accounts, payouts, or card issuing. They also enable our platform customers to embed these financial products into their ecosystems and to become FinTechs. That is what we will spend on this section most of the time on. First, Catherine will talk about our embedded financial products and the growth we have seen to date. After that, I will sit down with Jason Downing from Epos Now, one of our earlier embedded finance adopters. Next up, and I am really excited that she joined us five months ago, our new SVP of Engineering for Financial Products, Catherine Ye.
Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. It is great to see you here. Thom just mentioned these different sets of product offerings that Adyen currently has beyond payments, such as issuing bank accounts, capital payouts, liquidity services, and so on and so forth. We think about designing and building them as modular legal blocks so that various pieces can be put together to form solutions that serve different business needs out there. Let's take an example to make this concrete. Please allow me to introduce a made-up platform called Peace of Mind. It is a vertical SaaS platform serving local hair salons, beauty stores, and so on. My friend Christine runs her shop, Sleeping Beauty, on this platform. Now, in order to get Sleeping Beauty off the ground running, the appointment booking management, as well as payment acquiring, are a must-have.
It is probably also a no-brainer nowadays to predict that Christine would want one single payment solution that can give her online payment as well as in-store at the same time. Now, let's say beyond that, what else can Peace of Mind do to help Christine to focus on growth but not logistics? What can Adyen do to help behind the scene? In the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through a few cool tools. In order to do that, we are going to start at the beginning of a funds flow. Imagine a shopper like myself. I walk into the store, I got some service, I make a $100 payment for the service that I just received.
It's very easy for the platform to configure using Adyen so that they can take $5 as a service fee from the platform and put that into the platform balance, whereas the remaining $95 goes into the store's own revenue balance. Now, let's say that I just got one of my favorite hairstyles, and in order to thank my stylist, I decided to add a $10 tip. I know people from the U.S. are very much used to 18%-20% of tips, and you must be thinking, that sounds too good to be true, right? I have to confess that I learned to tip the Dutch way after five months in this company. Okay, with that $10 coming in, this tip can go into a separate tips account and separate it from the platform as well as the shop's own revenue balance.
The set of segregated balances are backed by different business accounts behind the scene. Okay, with the business up and running, Christine now wants a card to run her business spending. This is where Adyen Issuing comes in. With an issuing-powered card, Christine can run her, can purchase hair products, cleaning supplies, maybe subscribe to a flower arrangement service, who knows what they want to spend the money on. At the end of the day, she will have all of her incoming revenue and outgoing spending running on one platform with one source of transactions, one source of truth for all of the transactions. She does not need to log into three different bank accounts, two different credit card accounts, running through stacks of receipts so that she can figure out, okay, what's my cash flow, how do I close my books, and file taxes.
Quickly, the month's end approaches. What does that mean? That means a number of bills is coming. In order to prepare for that, Christine checks her cash balance, and she realized that while the business is ramping up, the cash flow is not quite at the place to handle such a big amount of bills at the end of month. What does that mean? That means she needs and will be seeking for faster access to her incoming revenue. You know what? This is where Adyen CashOut can help. CashOut would allow business owners to get access and make use of their incoming payment funds near real-time and on demand. With all of these problems solved, we do help Christine to focus on her growth instead of logistics, right? What's next? Fast forward three years, Christine can focus on the growth of her business.
She built up a loyal customer base and probably is one of the highest-rated salons, hopefully, on the platform. The demand is growing, and now her shop seems too small to fit in the foot traffic that's coming in. She is going to think about expanding, right? In that moment, we all know that expanding takes upfront capital investment, and that's usually beyond the cash flow that SMBs typically run with. Now it is time to introduce Adyen Capital. It would provide business loans that can be repaid over the next several months by utilizing, for example, the Sleeping Beauty's incoming payment funds. Now that I walked you through a number of building blocks, as you've seen on the screen, and you probably start to see where I'm going with this.
The uniqueness of Adyen is our ability to offer such a wide range of building blocks and serve different needs of a business along their growth journey. To let the business choose what blocks they need, when they need it, and piece them into the overall funds flow while everything still works with the external financial ecosystem out there. That is the special power of Adyen. You may think this all sounds great, but is it real? Does it actually work? This is where it gets exciting. Issuing volume has seen an 8x year-over-year growth in 2025. Capital volume has doubled this year. The number of payouts that happens on our platform is on a steady 40% year-over-year growth, with tens of billions of EUR being transferred between Adyen and other banks on a monthly basis.
CashOut, I just mentioned, is a new product that we launched earlier this year. In less than nine months, it went from zero to hundreds of millions of euros annual run rate, annual volume run rate, just to be precise, while still in pilot phase. All of these are built on the Single Platform, utilizing our banking licenses and the Dynamic Identifications that you've all heard of. The same layers of foundations that give us resilience and control are also filling entirely new growth opportunities for our customers. All right, with that, we're going to welcome Thom back to the stage and the SVP of Product from Epos Now, Jason Downing. They are going to share a customer perspective. Now, this time it's not made up. A customer perspective of embedded finance. Thank you, everyone.
Jason, thanks for flying all the way to Amsterdam. Great to have you here.
Thanks for having me.
We're working together for five years, but can you explain to the audience what Epos Now is and what you do for your customers?
Epos Now is a business growth platform. We've got 80,000 merchants, mostly SMBs. They run corner shops, pubs, small venues, big venues. We're live in 10 markets, and we process billions of EUR every year.
With high growth numbers, that's really impressive. You make use of all the products that Catherine just explained. Can you tell us a little bit about the sequencing, how you started with payments, and how it took off from there?
Very kind of similar story to the one that was just replayed to you all. In the early days of the company, we shipped point-of-sale systems and the software elements, and we would kind of pass that revenue, the payment processing revenue, off to third parties. Five years ago, we brought in Adyen, and we consolidated everything. We started with payments, and then we started to layer the products over each other, starting with capital after payments to give merchants better cash flow, and then landing some of those funds in bank accounts, offering the cards so we could then see the end-to-end picture of the merchant. Now we have many, many merchants who will take payments with Adyen, and the funds land in one of the bank accounts, and then they'll spend with the card. We are really closing the loop and providing a single ecosystem.
You offer your customers a full integrated experience. How important is the integrated experience that we offer to you?
It's extremely important. Because the merchant is doing KYC once and it's a single platform, I can enable the merchant to then kind of access those incremental services when they're ready, when I want to kind of push them on to the next thing. Also, because Adyen has a single platform just like we do, I can fully do this at scale, and I can do this across multiple markets all in one go.
You now explained our platform, but how do you perceive our partnership? Because that's also important to us.
Just like Yasmine said, the partnership is wonderful. We have a really excellent account management team, and they open the rest of Adyen up to us. We get access to experts across forward, acquiring, issuing, and your teams really deeply understand our products.
They help us build together day- by-d ay, week-b y- week. Really, I do not think we would have got this far without you guys.
That is nice to hear. We always strive for that, but it is great if one of our customers can confirm this. Basically, our promise is to help you grow and grow your customers, grow the services towards your customers. You are in an extremely competitive market. You want to basically offer a differentiating product that creates stickiness and grows the revenues per user. Have we delivered on this promise in the last couple of years?
Yeah, yes, of course you have. I think the quality element that you have really delivered on, it is that depth of digital experience that the merchants expect. I think if you pick apart, let us say we pick apart the capital product, you are beating the incumbent that we have.
They're head- to- head, same page, but because the Adyen experience is better, the customer's already passed KYC, there's fewer clicks to get the loan, and the loan is paid out faster. You just get more depth of kind of nuance with the customer, and therefore the commercial result is better, both for you and for our platform.
Specifically on capital, we started the journey like two years ago. What did you make us select us basically while you already had a provider?
We wanted to build a marketplace for capital and kind of offer our customers the widest choice possible. We selected you guys because of scale, because the digital experience was good, and it's got better in those two years. When I launched two years, it was two years ago this November, I went live in three countries all in one go. No faffing around.
You gave me access to Australia, which I didn't have before. Since then, I've gone live in two extra countries, and hopefully Spain's going live in two weeks. There is pure scale there. The digital experience is excellent. The unit economics are good for us and good for you, and the price to the end customer is good. It's better than the incumbent is o ffering.
That sounds good, but you're in a very good position to compare. You can compare us to the other provider. Can you speak to some of our advantages, but also some improvement points?
A good question. The advantages are there, right? The digital experience is excellent. In terms of improvement, I want to see higher loan sizes, and I think those will land in a couple of weeks on our platform. Most of the merchants are also asking for better accessibility.
They really want kind of a revolver-type UX experience where they can see the funds and pull them down, and that gives them security. They might not need the money now, but they might need it in two weeks' time or three weeks' time. They really want that aspect and then just more layers of security and those kind of elements as well.
Thanks for the feedback. We can always take this into account, and that's, I think, something that shows our partnership. We're always listening to each other and see how we can improve. We now have an ongoing partnership for the last five years for many years ahead. What are you looking forward to the most in the coming years?
So many things. The Agentic Commerce stuff, which I think someone will talk about soon.
We'll expand into new markets, and you're kind of unlocking that for us. It's a single platform. We can go quite easily. On the embedded finance side of things, we launched CashOut, which I think was just spoken about in three markets. Two more markets going live before the end of the year, and just expanding that capital product and layering it into the rest of our products.
Thanks. I'm also really looking forward to the future. We're here at the end of the interview. I want to thank you a lot for coming over to Amsterdam and giving the crowd a perspective on how we work together and what Adyen does for you. Obviously, you also, because I know your son really loves LEGO, so you also will get a LEGO box. Now this is intentionally because you have to fly.
What we want to do is basically let a JET delivery person deliver it at your doorstep.
Oh, fabulous.
You'll get it when you're back home. Okay. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks so much.
I hope this gives a good perspective on how our customers experience our products and how they can grow not only their technology, but also the customer experience, the user base, and how they make their products better and we grow together. I think that's what we strive for. This was the end of the financial product section. We're now changing gears to Agentic Commerce, and Trevor will take you to the age of Agentic Commerce. Thank you.
All right. Earlier today, you heard how our Single Platform, Global Banking Infrastructure, and our Dynamic Identification gives us the foundation that compounds reliability and learning over time.
It's this foundation that allows us to look confidently at what's next, the age of Agentic Commerce. Now, this isn't a trend. This is the next phase, the next phase of the digital customer journey. Now, you're probably asking yourself, like, how soon will this come? That is the real question here. We believe 2026 will be the year of experimentation. It's going to be the year where agentic protocols get refined. It's going to be the year where merchants gain confidence in this new channel. It's going to be the year where we deepen our understanding of exactly how customers are going to leverage shopping with AI. Let's go to the next slide. All right, so this for next phase of commerce, I want to talk about three things. The first one is how this new AI-driven lifecycle is emerging and how the roles are being defined.
The second is our merchant ambitions. We have talked to a lot of our merchants and have been listening to them directly to understand what are they excited about, but also what are their concerns. The third is how Adyen's building the foundation for Agentic Commerce and how we're partnering with merchants and ecosystem players to make this happen. Now, if we look at the traditional lifecycle, there are four phases: discovery, selection, purchase, and post-purchase. AI is evolving rapidly. These new use cases are showing up every single day. Today, most of you are probably using AI for the discovery phase, but over time, AI is going to start to move into the selection and the purchase. When that happens, these four phases, they get consolidated. They get reduced into two, and at some point, even one.
Today, when I buy this gray cashmere sweater, I'm probably searching on 10 different websites to find that perfect sweater. Tomorrow, I'm going to type in a prompt: find me a gray cashmere sweater, less than $100, size medium, have it delivered here just in time Investor Day. the AI behind the scenes is searching, it's comparing, and at some point, it will make that autonomous transaction. This is not science fiction. These experiments are starting to happen today. In the next five years, it is expected that $2 trillion worth of commerce will be influenced, will be kicked off, will be actually managed by Agentic Commerce, $2 trillion. Where does it start? Where does it begin? Where is it going to apply? We believe in the beginning, it is going to be things like apparel. It is going to be groceries.
It's going to be marketplaces. It's going to be in these areas where AI can quickly review a lot of the same similar product across different types of merchants. It's going to be where automation can add real value into the space as well. There is one caveat. The caveat is around just how much that person who is initiating this transaction wants to control and to select what they're looking for. Me personally, I don't know much about cashmere. Cashmere is cashmere. I don't really care about brands for my cashmere sweater. You might feel differently. For my scenario, this is perfect. If you have more selection, more control, it's probably going to take a little bit longer. The next one is ticketing. You can imagine movie tickets, concert tickets. That one's kind of an easy one for Agentic Commerce.
Buy me these two tickets as soon as that movie comes out. I want to make sure I get seats not in the front 10 rows, but a little farther back, and I want them for Friday night. That is not that far away. Then we get into travel. I know a lot of you travel here to Amsterdam and probably spend a lot of time like myself on, okay, what flight I am going to take, and if you are coming from the U.S., hopefully the flight actually makes it. Of course, you have your hotels, you have transportation in between. There is a lot of complexity that happens here. In this case, AI is solving something slightly different than the other use cases. It is solving for complexity. We think that is also another great opportunity for Agentic Commerce.
Farther down the road, and probably quite a ways farther, is true real personalization, luxury goods, automotive, anything that requires, again, lots of selection. It'll get there, but it'll take a little time. In short, we believe Agentic Commerce will start attacking those industries first, less selection and control needed from the user. There's a lot to compare against. Automation adds real value. What we do expect is that over time, context really matters here. For example, the more you're using AI today, the more AI is learning about you. It's remembering what you did in the past. It's remembering what brands you like. It remembers what colors you like. It's going to remember what car you drive. As it learns more about you, those future scenarios actually get pulled in. They become more of a reality. My slide's blank.
All right, so if we take a look at the landscape up here, we're already today seeing a lot of new models emerge. They're all trying to solve the same thing: connect the AI with the shopper, with the merchant. There are four models that have actually really begun to start experimenting, and we're part of all of those. The first one, Global Card Networks. With the Global Card Networks, they're leveraging their network token capabilities that they built years ago. They're scalable, they're reliable, they're global, they're trusted. A lot of merchants use them today. There is a challenge with those. The challenge is, will everybody in the ecosystem adopt the scheme standards? What about local payment methods? Will they fall into the same card-centric world? The second, wallet providers. I think of these as the Apple Pays, the Google Pays.
Consumers, we all love them. They work. They're easy. They're simple. There's low friction. There's automatically robust authentication already built into them today. The challenge here is that merchants actually receive the least amount of context in data when a wallet transaction occurs. The third one, protocol-led innovators. Think of these as the AI agents themselves. They're developing some really powerful agentic protocols today. Their goal is to make that checkout and the AI experience just seamless, just work together, which is fantastic for the consumer. Scaling that also becomes a challenge because now every merchant, every payment service provider has to do bespoke integrations with these AI protocols to get them to work. Lastly, we're seeing a few merchants tackle this themselves. They're building their own agentic protocols.
That is a challenge too because that means they got to do that for every AI agent they work with. Today, there only may be a handful that really matter, but over time, there could be hundreds. There could be thousands, even though this creates really the best customer experience. When you take a look at these four different models, we see some real value. We see some real amazing experimentation that's going to happen that we're all going to learn together as an industry. We see some real challenges. The integration for merchants, it's complex. The lack of data for end shoppers and also the weakness on the interoperability of partners is an issue. We do not see success here on who owns the interface. We see success on who's able to operate and the trust and putting the merchant in control.
When we look at these different models, for us, when we see this new innovation, we go back to our roots and where we always start. We begin with the customer. We have talked with over 100 different customers. We talked to the C-suite folks. We talked to the people who actually run payments day- to- day. We talked with folks in retail, digital content, platforms, hospitality, travel. All of them said, "We're excited about the revenue opportunity. We're thrilled about the new channel, but we have concerns." We have several of them. We said, "Let's hear them. Tell us because we're building something for you." What they said, the number one thing every single merchant brought up was disremediation.
They said, "If we put the AI between us and the shopper, how do we ensure we maintain our brand, our loyalty, that relationship with the customer?" To that, we said, "Okay, we need to do a couple of things here. One is we need to make sure that that merchant gets all the data that they normally would get if the transaction actually occurred on its own system. We also got to make sure that that shopper is initiating the transaction, that the AI agent doesn't go rogue and starts buying things on behalf of them." The second thing we heard, lack of flexibility. That's a concern.
Merchants asked us, they said, "Look, I don't want my payment stack to be stuck and forced to go down a single path." With respect to that, we said, "All right, we need to make sure again that merchants get the data they need to run payments how they want, to be able to route transactions where they want, store tokens how they want, maintain their checkouts, subscription flows. That flexibility has to work. Freedom of choice must work in this space." Thirdly, fragmentation. The merchants came to us and they said, "We're worried about siloed islands and complexity." For that, we said, "You know what? We need to spend a lot of time and energy talking with different ecosystem players to make sure that we have standard protocols in the industry, open protocols in the industry, and simplify complexity for these merchants." And then fraud.
We talked a lot about fraud already. They said, "I'm worried about AI agent fraud or AI agents going to commit fraud." How do disputes work in this new world? For that, we're leveraging Protect. We're extending Protect for Agentic Commerce. That real-time AI evaluation of all the transactions that we do today will automatically just work in this new world. Regulation, the last piece. They came to us and they said, "Yeah, but does this work globally? There's a lot of different regulation around the world." It's true. We recognize that in Europe, for example, it's going to be a little more challenging with 3DS that's required, PSD2, PS3. We do believe the US will probably be one of the first to actually adopt it a little quicker.
Reality is we have a global compliance framework, a global set of processes, a global team that's already built to be able to handle this new type of channel. The takeaway here, customers, they're demanding infrastructure, the rails, the safeguards, and the standards. In this new ecosystem, we see Adyen as a universal translator for Agentic Commerce. We see it as the bridge for merchants to be able to manage and process any payment they want through any AI protocol, through any AI agent. One API, one platform, full control. This isn't just about payments. It's about data integrity. It's about trust. It's about identity. When you combine all these three things together, it's not about this one-off transaction. It's about loyalty with that customer.
While others are focusing on single components, authentication, discovery, we are focusing on the rails that pull all these components together in a seamless fashion for our merchants. We heard earlier about how our merchants are defining our principles and how we want to translate those now to our own rails and our own architectures, which is what I want to talk about next. Thom already talked about this, what our principles are, but I think it is really important that we talk about it again and restate these. The one thing that I want to call out that is super, super important is Adyen was built for this moment. Adyen was built for this moment. We have already built the tokenization, authentication, Protect, the Single Platform. we have built the foundation already. The principles that our merchants are asking for already fit within that. Let us go through them.
Number one, verifiable intent. This is all about creating a verified mandate. The point here is making sure that that customer, that shopper is the one who's really driving that transaction. We're authorizing them. We're authenticating them. We're ensuring they're the one that's giving the green light for the transaction. That is going to help prevent fraud and disputes down the road. The second, merchant control and flexibility. We're using a universal token. That token is what translates and brings over all the context, all the data to the merchant so they can manage their payments the way they want. They can continue to manage cards, wallets, process local payment methods, continue to manage their own checkout, subscription, card on file, but they have that flexibility just as they do today. They do not lose that. The third, universal recognition.
The days of cookies and logins, those are over in this new world. It's chat, it's voice. How do we make sure that that same user now, through these new mechanisms, still gets tracked through all these channels, this new channel, no matter what payment they're using? Again, we're going to leverage that universal token. Super important. The last thing is ownership. One of the key things about ownership is data ownership. For data, even though the AI agent's collecting it, the merchant has to own the data. They own the data with that customer. It's not only important for this transaction today that they're trying to conduct. We go back to those four phases earlier that I discussed, the post-purchase. How do you give a refund or exchange or handle that customer post that purchase?
You have to have the data that exists. All these principles in the past, initially, we looked at it and we said, "Well, this could be a high risk for our customers." Reality is we made it just an adaptive channel. That is what is really formed about these principles. The last thing I'd say is that everything we build here, it just works. There is no separate integration that merchants have to take and consume to get access to this foundation. It works today. The vision is already in motion. We are working with the largest ecosystem players today. We are ready. We are ready to test. We are ready to adapt to new standards. We can do that because we do not need any new major investments. We have already built the foundation. Here are a handful of the major players that we are collaborating with today.
OpenAI, we're collaborating with them on their Agentic Commerce protocol standards. For Visa and Mastercard, we're integrating into their agentic token standards. For Cloudflare, we're working with them on how to identify a good versus a bad agent. Now, this is important. I previously used to run a fraud team at a merchant. I thought bad bots were always bad. Bots are now going to be good in some cases. Getting this right is critical. I mean, Google, we're collaborating closely with them on the payment agent protocols and the onboarding processes. Each one of these collaborative efforts, it goes back to what Thom was saying earlier. It's about the adaptability as a design principle. This is key in what we do. We're not reinventing our platform. We're extending it.
If we look at how we process the transactions today, those same rails that we process today are the same rails that will process agentic transactions with the same compliance, the same reliability, and the same observability. It is all built in. Let me close with this. Every major shift in commerce over the years, whether it was mobile, whether it was going to unified commerce, it all led with uncertainty. Those that were the winners were the ones who invested in the foundation. They got it right, and they invested early. They focused on durability, interoperability, and putting the merchant first. Agentic Commerce is no different. It will follow that same major shift. The full potential depends on is it robust enough to be safe and compliant? Is it open enough to be interoperable across partners?
Is it neutral enough for merchants to be able to leverage it and manage it end-to-end? This is the space that Adyen is going to play in. For merchants, this means confidence to innovate without risking their brand. It means direct control over the data, over the payments, over the identity. It also means being able to scale globally as Agentic Commerce over time starts to mature and excel. They can scale with it. Our philosophy hasn't changed. We listen to our customers. We build what matters. We scale it, and we prove that it works. That is the next era of Agentic Commerce and why we're so confident that Adyen's platform will remain the most trusted foundation everywhere and however commerce evolves. Thank you.
Nice. Thank you, Trevor. We're now heading into our second coffee break of the day.
You guys are going to have about 25 minutes to stretch your legs, grab yourselves a drink, work on your notes if you want to. Please be back here for our third and final block of the day where Maggie will have a fireside chat with our CHRO, Brooke, followed by a financial update by Ethan, our CFO. See you guys in a bit.
This one, this one. This one's yours. Lovely. Hello, everybody. We hope you had a great break and got some coffee. My name is Maggie O'Donnell. For those I do not know, I am on the Investor Relations team here, and I am very excited to be joined by Brooke Nayden, our Chief HR Officer.
Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us here in Amsterdam.
You have heard today about the foundation, the layers of our foundation, and how all the pieces fit together.
Now we want to talk about the most important part: the people who bring our ambition to life. That is why Brooke is up here to have a conversation with me. We have coffee. I hope most of you have had a cup of coffee in the last 20 minutes. We are doing what we call a coffee chat. At Adyen, this is a really core part of our culture. You all got to go into the lobby. You saw employees sitting, having a very open, direct conversation, probably just in the middle of the lobby. That is very common here. The coffee chat is a core part of our culture. I want to start there. What is the coffee chat really, and why is it important to us?
Yeah, so I'm glad you all got to actually come to our office and see it alive a bit in the middle of the day, because our coffee chats aren't just about giving employees a caffeine addiction. That's a bit of a side effect, I hear. It's really that we want to create spaces in our office where our team can come together, debate, share customer stories, deep dive onto dilemmas. That's when our culture really comes to life, and it really shows you our way of working. More than just a cup of coffee, but really the discussions that go along with it.
Yeah, exactly. Part of why we wanted to do this session is that people and culture is a core part of our business model here.
If you've been following us or have been investing in us for a long time, you know that. We wanted to answer the really important questions that all of you typically ask us. I want to start with the most prominent question, because we are here in Amsterdam. Obviously, this is still our hub. This is where we were started. Some investors see this as a differentiator, something that really sets us apart. We're different from the other Silicon Valley companies. Others see it as something that might be a restraint on our ability to grow globally. What's the right question that they should be asking, and how do you think about our global growth?
Yeah, so I guess the question I imagine you all are asking, and you should ask, and it's the same question that we ask ourselves, is: does Adyen have the right global team to build our platform and support our customers around the world? It's a simple question, maybe a more complicated answer. Of course, we want to say yes. I want to give you a little bit more to show how we think about it and how we build over time. Behind me, you can see this image. Basically, the circles, the green circles, are really there to show the size of our customer base. This is from 2022. This is an approximated image of three years ago where our customer base is, and then the number is the number of people in the commercial team in that region that support those customers.
That's three years ago. Let me bring you up to present day, where you can see great that we've grown our customer base in each of these regions, but also that we've made key investments in these commercial teams. These have been intentional investments, and you can see that the percentage of headcount growth outside of Europe has been faster, because that's following the growth of our customers. If we think about our top 20 customers, just as an example, only five of those are headquartered in Europe. In our top 20 customers, they are working in 80 distinct countries at any given time. When we think about kind of the organism it takes to support our customers, that is a team spread around the world working together. That's the commercial side.
I think on the technical side and the teams that are building our platform, we see kind of two priorities. One, we've seen over time we want those teams to be closer to our customers as well. So we've built tech hubs in different parts of the world, changing from our previous strategy of mostly being here in Amsterdam. However, we also want those teams to be grouped tightly together so they can collaborate. So that's kind of how we've thought about investing in our team and where people are located.
Makes sense. All right, let's double-click for a minute on the commercial part of it. Two years ago at Investor Day, we were talking about a very large investment that we made in the Salesforce. Obviously, it's been going well. We talk about the new cohort, but I am curious how you see it.
How do you measure the success of the commercial team?
Yeah, so maybe to start off with, when we say commercial team, we also do not just mean sales. We have gotten amazing shout-outs to our account management org earlier today. When we say commercial team, we are really talking about our sales team, our account management team, our partnerships team, our marketing team. These are the teams that come together to form what we call the commercial engine, the engine behind Adyen. Maybe to call out a few things. On the sales side, we have been talking about that investment, that investment we have made over time, really focused in key markets like the U.S., but also more emerging areas for us like Japan and India. We have been very intentionally building those teams over the last few years. We are seeing the results. We see shorter sales cycles.
We see larger average deal sizes. In general, we see stronger merchant cohorts. These investments are not hundreds of people, but they are very intentional. We look for very specific talent in very specific places, and we get them going. On the Account Management side, we're always repeating that 80% of our revenue or more is coming from existing merchants. I think you all heard today from our customers, which was unplanned, but very well fits my narrative, that it's our account managers and the relationships that they form with their customers that really grow our business. They unlock the rest of Adyen and bring it to our customers. That is an investment that we'll continue to make. As our customer base grows, we'll continue to build that team around the world.
I think you all should expect that, because there is scalability through technology and as we build these teams. In general, we're an enterprise business, and those relationships are super important. We also won't be shy to build that team. If I was going to summarize all of this, sometimes it can become this numbers and adding numbers to a page. For us, it's not about just adding headcount or growing the team. It's about adding impact. We try to really measure that and hold ourselves to a very high standard.
Yeah. On impact, I think one thing that's really interesting is our approach to hiring for AI. One of the things that investors tend to do is follow our LinkedIn page very closely and judge or have an opinion on any role that's posted.
If we're hiring for a role in San Francisco, in AI specifically, they think that we are just getting started on it. It's the first time we've ever hired for AI. Obviously, that's not the case. How should we think about innovation and how we hire for tech roles?
I'm seeing some smiles in the audience. Thank you for keeping an eye on our job board. We're always hiring. Apply. No, but jokes aside, we've been building this team for the long-h term, right? Building a product that uses great technology and prioritizes scalability is nothing new for us. I mean, you saw it on stage today, right? None of this is stuff we've built in the last month or two. Tom talked about the core of our platform and that that core allows us to use technology and automate.
Carlo shared how AI powers products like Uplift. Trevor shared how we're looking at Agentic Commerce and what we're building along with that. I guess the message I would say is we haven't just discovered AI. We haven't just discovered incorporating new technology into our platform. At our core, the approach is pragmatic. We test things. We listen to our customers. We only implement something if we see that it adds real commercial value.
Yeah, absolutely. How do we think about AI, I guess, from an employee-based perspective? People are hoping for us to get more leverage by just using AI and not having to hire as many people in the future. How do we do that? [crosstalk] Yeah, replace us with robots. Exactly. How does AI play a role in our hiring plans?
Yeah, so maybe the starting point is that we've always had a very intentionally lean team. We spend a lot of time talking about investments that we have made. Overall, I think if you compare us to legacy players or other FinTechs, we have quite a small team really delivering a lot around the world. That is because automation has been at our core and this idea that every person should multiply their impact and that we use technology to scale ourselves. That has been true at Adyen since I joined eight years ago. That is not a new concept. Now we have many different types of AI tools that just make that easier and more accessible for more people and more teams. I love the example that Carlo shared, right?
It shows how AI is changing the style of work and actually showing that each employee can do significantly more. I think that's the way that we think about it from a people lens, is not where can we cut things and replace it with AI, but actually how can we move faster, do more, have more impact with each person that we have. I think we're only able to do that because we've had a lean team from the start, because we've never had highly repetitive work and large, large teams that could be automated, right? We were always automating along the way. That puts us in a really strong position today.
Great. I want to shout out our finance team. We actually are one of the, I think, the number one team using internal AI tools. Very cool.
I want to end where we actually started the day. Peter had mentioned that we are on the path to becoming one of the largest FinTech companies in the world. Clearly, from your answers, it seems like you think this is the team that is going to bring us there. What gives you the confidence that that's the case?
Yep. To end where we started, this people layer of our foundation, it's our culture. It's our culture that gives me confidence. It's not because our culture is just something that lives in our lobby, which you saw. It's because it's what shows up for our customers. I'm going to share a quick story. We had Epos Now here today. I actually met the COO, Richard, of Epos Now a few months ago at one of our events. Something he said to me really stuck with me.
He said, "Someone recently showed me this Adyen formula, your values. But it's funny. I had worked with your team for so long that I actually could have paraphrased almost every point just from working with your team." Obviously, as a people leader, this is exactly what you'd want to hear for your customers. To me, it shows something specific. It's that our culture is not distinct from how we show up for our customers or what we build. When I think about our ambition, this is how we reach it. It's through our people. It's through our customers. It's through our technology.
Perfect. Let's leave it there. We're going to bring up Ethan to close out the day. Thank you.
All right, everyone. Let me be maybe the last, maybe the second to last, but definitely with a lot of gratitude.
Let me thank you for coming to Amsterdam. I really appreciate it. Spending the time with us and investing your time to be here with us for a full day of presentations is really helpful in understanding our long-term story. That is exactly what I want to share with you all now. I want to talk you through the opportunity that we are going after. As mentioned a few times before, we are becoming one of the largest financial technology companies in the world. That is the ambition. That is the opportunity that we have as an organization. Before I talk about what that represents for the future, I thought it might be helpful to look back, look back at where we have come from and how we have built Adyen over the last decade. Back in 2015, we processed EUR 32 billion in payments volume.
Now, I wasn't there yet, but that must have felt like a lot of payments volume back then, I can imagine. Over the last decade, we've scaled it to over $1.3 trillion in payments volume. That's a 45% CAGR over the last decade. We've shown a proven ability to scale our platform and with our customers over these years. That $1.3 trillion is the basis for our future growth into the next decade as well. Let's talk about what this means in terms of the total market that we're going after. Here you can see 2015 again. You see the $32 billion of payments volume in that little green square in the bottom left of the screen. The bigger white area, that's the total payments market. Back then, that was EUR 18 trillion. A few years later, that market had grown to EUR 20 trillion.
We were EUR 159 billion. This is when we went public back in 2018. Today, the market has grown to a whopping EUR 34 trillion. We represent, again, that EUR 1.3 trillion green box you see in the left corner. What you see here is that over time, the market has grown. It has grown quickly. It has doubled. Adyen has grown much faster. We have 40x'd over those 10 years. That is significant gain in market share over those years. How do we then think about which part of that market is addressable for us? We think the vast majority of the EUR 34 trillion is truly addressable for Adyen. We have taken out China. We have taken out sanctioned countries. We are left with EUR 26 trillion of this market, which is addressable to us. It is addressable because we have added capabilities over the years. We have added in-person payments.
We've added a platforms offering, which helps us go after SMBs as well, together with our larger enterprise customers. That means that we represent today $1.3 trillion in an addressable market, which we size at $26 trillion. What does that mean going forward? First, that's just 5% of our current market opportunity. The market is expected to double in the next 10 years, again. While it's a very fragmented space, the largest players in our space, just in payments volume, do 3x the market share that we have today. This is the true long-term opportunity that we're going after to gain share in a fast-growing market. That is the opportunity we have in the years ahead. It's a very, very significant one. It's the one that gets me most excited. That's just payments, right?
Because we also spend a lot of time talking about embedded financial products today. It represents a significant additional opportunity for us at Adyen. Now, we've talked over the last few years about shifting reporting more towards net revenues from volumes. That made sense because of our pricing model, right? We have a tiered pricing model based on the enterprise merchants we go after. It also makes sense for us because we're going after more products. Some of those products don't always have volumes associated to them. We've sized the addressable market in financial products according to the revenue opportunity we see. Let me show what that looks like here. We've sized capital, issuing, and bank accounts, right? These are the three biggest opportunities we see. Yep. This will also be online after the presentation. It's great. Take your pictures.
It's EUR 127 billion of revenue opportunity, right? This is just the embedded financial products revenue opportunity. This is how we go to market with our platform customers to win, right? And it's a mutual incentive. This is the revenue opportunity for them too. We go together. It's how they monetize and how we monetize together. That's the mutual incentive that we think will drive our success in financial products. Not only is it EUR 127 billion today, but it's expected to grow 20% annually over the coming years. Again, another fast-growing market, another very sizable market, right? You can compare our current business. Last year, we did $2 billion in revenues compared to this EUR 127 billion, right? Two very sizable market opportunities, two fast-growing markets that we're playing in. That's what excites us. That's the true long-term opportunity at Adyen.
Now, I want to take that back and connect it to actually how we look at our growth over the next few years. To do that, I want to use the same framework that we talked about a couple of years ago. I want to talk about the building blocks of our net revenue growth. Let's look at how we built that up back in 2023 at our Investor Day. this is what we shared. We largely see these building blocks very similarly today as how we saw them back then. I want to run you all through how we think about each of them today. Let's start with market volume growth. The way to think about market volume growth is essentially it's the growth organically of our own customers. As they grow, we grow. That's what's represented here.
If you look at how market volume growth has developed over the past years and also into the future, you see that, yeah, there were some strange years during COVID. I think everybody can understand that. Besides that, we've seen it stabilize at a high single digits level. That's what's expected for the next few years. We think that market volume growth on its own, growing with our customers, will drive high single digits growth over the coming years. The second building block, and the largest one for us, is how we expand and gain share of wallet with our customers, our existing customers. I want to show you a few charts which help explain why we think we can continue to add significant share with our existing customer base. The first one I want to share is this chart here.
What you can see is that as you move to the right, you see customers who are longer on the Adyen platform. And the percentage that's shown, that's the percentage of volumes, the share of wallet that we have on average with these cohorts. The takeaway is that if you've been longer on the Adyen platform, you have a higher share of wallet with us. This is an average, right? There are customers who do 100% of their volumes with us. There are customers who do very little. On average, we see that our share of wallet increases the longer customers are on the platform. That comes back to everything we talked about today. That's because they get a better product because of the foundational layers we've talked about today. That's because they get better service because of the teams that we're building.
This is ultimately what we think can drive a significant part of our growth into the coming years. We also did not want to just share it from our perspective. We had a few great customer examples today, but we wanted to also give you a view on what our customers say. We shared this also two years ago. We wanted to give you an update that we still have industry-leading NPS scores, and they are continuing to go up. This is the representation our customers give back. This is the feedback they give back to us about how we are performing, both how our product is performing and how our teams are performing. This is what truly gives us confidence that we can gain share over the coming years. We both have the base to grow from, and our customers like to work with us, crucially.
The next building block we have is our tiered pricing impact. If you look at the two green bars on the left, that's how we grow volumes with our existing customers. We incentivize them to do that. We give them better pricing as they do more share of wallet. As their businesses grow faster with us over time, they get the benefit back. Here, we've sized that similarly to how we have a couple of years back, negative low to mid-single digits. We did that because we feel we're in a similar pricing and competitive dynamic to then. Our next building block is how we win with new customers. That's represented in these two building blocks.
Both new wins, think about that as the first year you're on the Adyen platform, and the ramp of previous year cohort, think about that as the second year you're on the Adyen platform, because we employ a land and expand model where we start small and grow over time. I want to share this chart with you, which shows how cohorts of new customers have developed over time. Again, some different buying behavior during COVID, but the general story is that over time, this trend has increased over time. The size of the new cohort has become bigger. We are able to add more and larger customers to the platform over time. You can especially see it in 2025 with the biggest cohort we've had yet. This is because of investments we've been making in our team, right? We talked about it in 2022 and 2023, especially.
We made bigger investments in the team. We're continuing to make strategic investments in the team, but also because those team members are longer with Adyen and they become more effective over time. This is what we see in the first year. If we then look into the second year, we see quite consistently that the second year, those customers contribute 2x-3x the growth that they do in the first year. They go from low single digits impact in year one to mid-single digits impact in year two. Everything I've shared so far is the same building blocks I shared back two years ago. What's new is that today we want to add in financial products as a new building block to our growth. We've talked a lot about financial products today.
We're really excited about the potential our customers see the benefit, and we think we're really at the point to start to see strong traction also financially. Issuing is the product which is furthest along. I want to show you how issuing volumes have developed over the last years. We took the longer but better long-term outcome approach for our customers, which was to build it ourselves, build it on our own licenses, and own it completely end-to-end integrated. While that took some time, we're starting to see that really pay off. We feel we're at an inflection point with our issuing volume, growing up to now $6 billion we expect for 2025. Capital and accounts are also products we're very excited about. They're earlier in their maturity phases, but we think we'll get to this point as well over time.
While we're really excited about this, we also know that this is additive to the payments business, which is again $1.3 trillion in payments volume. It's growing quickly itself too. We size this as approximately 1% of our growth over the next few years. Over time, we think that this number will go up, but we're very focused on driving this success with our customers and scaling these products in the way we've seen issuing take off. When you put these building blocks together, what you see is a framework, a framework for our growth, a framework built up of multiple business levers. Not that all always run together in tandem, but that are diversified and that will drive our growth over the coming years if we can continue to drive the value for our customers that we've talked about today.
We're confident in that, and that's why we've also shared our expectation that in any given year over the next few, we expect growth around 20%. Now, let me frame that in the sense of our guidance. I think most importantly, we think about our long-term opportunity. The long-term opportunity comes from the explanation I just gave about the addressable market. In relative terms, we still have so much opportunity to grow in our market, both because it's growing quickly and because we have a limited share compared to others in our space. There's lots of room to grow. We're also expanding to other products. All of this provides us a long-term growth runway we're very excited about. Over the next few years, we expect that these will continue to be the building blocks to our growth. These will be the levers to drive our growth in any given year.
Given that our growth is not linear, right? The individual size of these building blocks are dependent on, for instance, roadmaps or priorities of our customers. They are dependent on how fast our own customers grow in any given year. We want to give the visibility that we have, which we get around six to 12 months out. That is why we want to commit to giving our guidance on an annual basis. We set this guidance two weeks ago, and we will continue to leave this unchanged with an update expected in February as we refine that. That is the plan also going forward. We plan to give our visibility, the view we have on the next year's growth. Now, how are we going to invest in this? How are we going to drive this growth, this opportunity?
We plan to continue to make disciplined and deliberate investments to drive our growth. Where do we invest? We invest primarily in our team. Our team is about 75% of our operating costs, slightly up since 2022, but relatively stable over the last few years. This is how we can invest in driving growth in the business. I wanted to give you a few examples of what that actually looks like, where we actually invest in the team. The biggest areas are Tech and Commercial. In Tech, we invest in our engineering and product teams. They build solutions like EFP, right? Solutions we have been working on already for years, but that will continue to enhance and iterate on. Build out our Uplift suite, and they build out other products like our local payment offering in markets key to our success, like in India or in Japan.
We build out our Commercial teams. We've talked a bunch about account management today, which is great. We build out our Account Management teams as we add more customers. They help drive growth. They help support our customers. We're growing our sales teams to make sure that we continue to drive further growth in our new cohorts, given the sizable opportunity we have. We build functional and regulatory expertise, which supports that scale. Importantly, we're also making infrastructure and AI-enabled tooling investments to help our people do their best work, right? Make this a place where we can best utilize them and their capabilities. We've seen the benefits of this deliberate approach over the last few years. Since 2023, when we made more significant investments in the team, we've seen our vrevenue per FTE scale over the last few years quite significantly.
We're seeing both the operating leverage of our business model and the ability to invest in the organization grow together. We want to continue to do that, to make investments in the organization to drive the growth over future years. That is why going forward, we expect to increase our EBITDA margins to levels above 55% by 2028. It is again finding that balance of driving the right level of growth in the organization while still being deliberate and strategic about where to invest. To wrap up on the financial objective side, we've left our CapEx objective unchanged. We continue to expect to maintain a sustainable capital expenditure level of up to 5% of net revenues. Let's move to capital allocation. We've talked a lot about growth, and growth continues to be our main focus as an organization.
We're going to continue to take the same approach, which is focused on sustained investments in the organization. We think the strength of making those investments will bring the best shareholder returns, those shareholder returns being driven by the growth of our business over time. We also see that the strength of our balance sheet positions us really well in two ways. One, with our regulators. Think about that foundational banking layer that we talked about earlier, but also with an industry-leading credit rating, which helps support the growth of our financial products. Lastly, we want to remain flexible. We have such a large opportunity ahead of us. We want to remain flexible to capitalize on organic or inorganic opportunities as they arise. Let me leave you with three key takeaways from today.
The first and the most important for me is that we are on the path to be truly, truly becoming one of the biggest FinTech players in the world. That means significant growth from here, both in gaining share and in markets which are fast-growing themselves. This is the opportunity we are first and foremost going after. Second is that we have multiple levers which are driving our growth. Continues to be a focus on growing with our existing customers. We continue to focus on adding new ones, and we're adding more products that are starting to come through, financial products to be specific. The third is that we're going to continue to make intentional investments to drive growth. Those investments are going to be strategic. They're going to be direct where there's impact, as Brooke said.
We're going to continue to make those investments over time, over the next years, because we think we have a major opportunity for us in the years ahead. With that, thanks again for joining us, and I'll pass off to Maggie, who will get us ready for the Q&A section.
All right, everybody. We're going to take a few minutes to get all the chairs set up. We'll do first, a quick recap. We talked about the foundation today, the three different layers of our foundation, how they all fit together to help us set up for growth for the lon- term. These three layers of the foundation, they're actually key decisions that we've made as a company over time that are setting us up for whatever comes next. These aren't just things that we're picking out to name today.
They're really, truly, really key decisions that we've made over time. They all translate to growth over the long term, and we're going to continue to invest to help that happen. I am going to invite up all of the speakers from today to come and join me on stage. The way that we are going to do this is that Isaac and my colleague Paula are going to come around with microphones. I will point out who, if you have a question, raise your hand. Josh has a question already. We're ready. They will come over to you, hand you the microphone. If you're comfortable having your face on screen, stand up. Also, please announce your name and your firm if you are open to doing that. I will take the question and direct it to the right person on stage.
Got Mo and Josh, very eager, very eager with their questions. I see you both. You can take your hands down. Do we have enough chairs? [crosstalk] I'm going to take this one. All right. Where do we have Paula? Do you mind handing one over to Josh over here? Oh. Isaac's going to bring it over to Josh.
Thank you. My name is Josh from Autonomous Research. Thank you for the presentation. Two questions. Ethan, you use the word inorganic. I've covered Adyen for a long time. I've never heard Adyen talk about inorganic opportunities. Is that a change? Is Adyen open to buying things? The second question is about Agentic Commerce. Is the law set up to deal with this? Do we need new case law? I'm just thinking of examples when you have a bad purchase.
I tell the agent to book a romantic weekend for my wife and I in Paris, and it books a weekend in Paris, Texas. I'm not happy about that. Who's on the hook for that? Is that going to be settled?
Let's start with Ethan on the first part . There was a Netflix movie about this recently, I think. Trevor, do you want to take the second part of it after Ethan? Okay, go ahead. Do you want to start with the first part on the M&A?
I understand where the question comes from. I think for us, the strategy is still the same. This is not a change in strategy. I think what we saw very clearly is that taking control and owning things yourself is the best path forward. That continues to be the best path forward.
That's also why we haven't done anything in an inorganic way. At the same time, it would be naive to say that we shouldn't look at what's available in the market, especially as you broaden your product suite. We just haven't seen anything that made sense for us. It is not an active part of our strategy. The active part of the strategy is build organically, grow the business, build it in-house. We want to remain flexible for both organic and inorganic means going forward. That is not anything new. That has always been the case for us.
Yeah, I think from my standpoint, we're early days. We're early days in trying to understand exactly how the dispute process is going to work. I think the expectation is that the merchant for e-commerce today, the merchant is typically held for the liability unless some sort of authentication might occur.
This is why we're investing in authentication and authorization and making sure that we actually pass the merchant all the information they need to help protect themselves, and why we're also looking to protect, to be that stand-in to help prevent fraud, just as we do today for the existing transaction. We see this really as another channel that comes in, no different than it is today. That's also why merchants are concerned about here, right? They want to make sure that there is the same evidence. I could imagine a world maybe where the card networks will reevaluate the compelling evidence rules, for example. There might be some changes that come out of that over time. Ultimately, it should flow relatively the same as today's.
It also shows just how important it is for us to help our merchants protect every single transaction as we do today.
Great. Thanks for your question, Josh. Mo, go ahead.
Great. Thank you. It's Mo from Goldman Sachs. Thank you for the presentations today. Really helpful. First one is really on the kind of growth algorithm. You talked a lot about this sort of framework. Can we perhaps flip it the other way around and look at the kind of pillars and how you kind of think about that growth evolution and how the business mix changes kind of by pillar? Connected to that, this sort of when we look at volume sort of take rates, you're starting to roll out a monetization, particularly with Uplift on new products. How do you expect that sort of disconnect between volume and sort of net revenue to evolve?
Then the second was again on Agentic Commerce, maybe for Trevor. You talked about the ecosystem and everyone you work with. Could you give us maybe some case studies with some of the merchants that you're working with already on Agentic AI? And who else in the ecosystem that you think from a tech partner standpoint is still missing to add? Thank you.
Ethan, do you want to take the first two?
Sure. In terms of the pillars, I think what you've seen over the last few years is that platforms has been our fastest growing. Also, if you look into our newer cohorts, you see that a bigger proportion of those cohorts is moving towards platforms. That's a major opportunity for us for multiple reasons. One, because it's a multiple region opportunity, right? A lot of these platforms are looking for offerings which cover multiple geographies.
They're also looking often for a unified commerce solution, right? Also an in-store component next to the digital one. There's an opportunity for embedded financial products, which is significant, similar to the example that Catherine shared earlier today. I would say that's the biggest shift in mix over the past years. What I would expect to continue is that given where the new cohorts and where our pipeline is at, platforms would continue to be fast growing. In terms of what that means, maybe from a monetization perspective, what we typically see is that the size of the customer is the biggest determinant, right? It's much less tied to the pillar as it is tied to the size of the customer. If you think about our monetization strategy going forward, it continues to have a tiered pricing component to it, right?
That's what I shared in that third building block earlier. The way to think about Uplift specifically is that there are components of it which are monetized. Think about our Protect module, which is our fraud tooling. That's monetized separately and honestly always has been. What is different over time is that Uplift should drive more volume to the platform. It should help us gain more share of wallet with our existing customers. It should help us win new customers. There are components of it that we would monetize, but we didn't call it out separately as a separate building block because that's less significant to the opportunity. The opportunity is providing the best performance to our customers and helping them grow on our platform.
Great. On the customer one, Trevor, you want to?
Yeah. I think it's really fascinating. I talk with customers almost every day, right? We have this full spectrum. There are some customers who are just dabbling. They're interested. They're curious. They're looking for us to help consult them on what they should be worried about, what should they be thinking about. They're not the fast movers here, right? They're kind of waiting. They want to kind of see what happens. You have the other side, which is definitely quite a few merchants who want to go first and who want to pilot this and don't want to miss it, and they want to be the first ones out. Those we're seeing are definitely more in like the travel, the OTAs, the apparel, and even the ticketing a little bit, I would say, as well.
With them, we're spending a lot of energy with them and also the AI agents on working through, okay, what does this experience look like? What does their customer experience look like? How do we protect them? How can they leverage our Authentication or Protect? We're still early in the experimentation and working through what those scenarios look like. We're definitely seeing quite a few of them wanting to move fast. I think a simple question is, which players are still not fully involved? I think we have more work to do with the issuers as an industry. There's been a lot of really great discussions so far between the merchants, the AI companies, and ourselves. We're starting now to talk to the issuers because at the end of the day, they could start blocking these transactions as well, right?
That's what's really important is every player in this ecosystem has to want to make this work at the end of the day to be successful. I think we have a little work there to do as an industry, but we're getting there. Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We've got Justin in the back. Isaac, go ahead.
Thank you very much. This is Justin Forsythe from UBS speaking. Thank you for all the presentations today. Really great. First, I want to start off with a qualitative question and then a quantitative one around the guidance, Ethan. You're not getting away too easy. First on embedded finance, though, great chat with Epos Now there. I caught that drop about the loan size increase point. If you just wouldn't mind elaborating on that a little bit more.
Maybe what the parameters in place today are, any restrictions on the amount or the size of loans that you're issuing, and how you expect that to change if that's a more broad platform change that's upcoming. Maybe just more broadly, how you think about the growth rate and the sizing of capital. I caught the 2x growth rate in 2025 off of a low base. How do you think about that scaling forward? Maybe you could also comment on issuing volume, clearly growing much, much, much faster. Where do we see that going from a volume perspective in the next few years? On the guidance side, Ethan, the building blocks, and sorry to hold you to the exact number, I think the midpoint I'm calculating is around 23% based on the numbers on the slide.
I think the 20% is maybe if you imply that -6% at the high end of the pricing tiers, maybe you just walk us through the dynamics with the guidance there and the time period we can, or the framework, sorry, and how long we should consider that valid for.
Great. Thanks. Thom, do you want to take the first couple?
Yeah. Specifically on capital and the loan sizes, this is for us, this is a pure risk appetite process. If we start with the product, we want to ensure that the product is good. And therefore, if you look at loans, the loan sizes that we offer to our customers basically increase over time if you feel more confident that we can grow these loan sizes. Of course, a higher loan size will also result in more capital volume. It's not an objective per se.
The reasoning behind increasing the loan sizes, that is because there is clear customer demand and we follow the demand of our customers. I think if you specifically look at the volumes, specifically what Ethan said before, capital, or let's start with issuing, issuing is a bit further ahead in its growth trajectory. Over time, we expect that capital and banking will also follow similar paths. These products are in a more nascent state compared to issuing.
Let me talk to the guidance piece. I think I'd like to take this a bit more holistically, right? I think if we think about our ambition, we think very long term. That's how we make decisions for the business, right? We think long term because the opportunity should be sustained over a long period of time.
We want to be in business with our customers in 10 years, not just in the next six months. Our decision-making framework is very much long-term oriented. That is why hopefully also sharing a bit on the addressable market that we are going after and expanding that into other products helps to explain the kind of long-term opportunity that we are truly going after, that we are trying to build together with our customers. We said, okay, what is the right way to give formal guidance to the market? We felt it was most helpful to give the visibility transparently as we get it. Around this time each year, we go through a process where we understand the roadmaps, the priorities of our customers. They are usually building out their priorities now, right, for next year. We understand how we can grow alongside them, right?
Which markets they want to grow into, maybe how they're thinking about shifting payments volumes, maybe adding another sales channel on their mind or another product. That's the type of visibility we then have for that six to 12 month time frame. That's why we want to get into this model of sharing each February what our view is for the next year. This year, we're already kind of in that model because we set a three-year time horizon two years ago. We're getting up against that model. We'll further refine that in February. We also wanted to give today a bit of a view on what we should also expect over multiple years. That's why we tried to create this framework, right?
A framework both of what will drive our growth, so what are the actual levers themselves, give an update on that from two years ago, add in financial products, and then relatively size them. The idea is not to come back to these levers every year and say how they've shifted. We want to do that through our annual view of guidance and then give people context of what we're seeing in the market because we're very confident about the opportunity beyond that. That's ultimately why we've set up our guidance now going forward in this way. That's on the revenue side, of course, and we can get into others if there are questions.
Isaac, we have another question right up here.
Thank you. Hi. Thanks for the presentation. Umar Mirza from Point Sixteen Capital. In the case of enterprise merchants, we typically choose multiple payment providers.
Where we end up not being the primary, so Adyen not the primary payment provider. Can you typically say why they choose another provider to be the primary provider and what holds us back from becoming primary providers for the enterprise merchants?
Could I give this one to Gary?
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, most of the merchants we work with care about some combination of revenue, cost, and fraud, right? And they're trading off between multiple of them. There could be other reasons why they have external factors that help the decision-making. They could be locked into a long-term contract for some reason that takes time to expire. It could be that they have geographies that they want specific capabilities. Like we don't do, for example, point of sale in Vietnam, for example, right? So they could use a different processor there.
It depends on the needs a little bit. Ultimately, that's what we're trying to do, make sure we understand what their needs are and help them optimize against that to win share of wallet.
Great. We got one with Adam over here.
Thanks. It's Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Also appreciate the presentations today. Thank you. I've got two, please. First of all, you've announced a lot of innovation today. We've talked about Agentic Commerce. We've also seen in the market that some of the legacy players in the payment space in particular have had to revise guidance. They're raising money to sort their platforms out. Do you see, and you've done an amazing job taking share over the last decade, is there a tipping point where just competing on price, doing a good enough job on legacy platforms isn't enough?
We see a much more accelerated pace of shift in the market because what you have outlined today starts to matter more and more and they just cannot deliver that service to their merchants. Maybe secondly, when we talk about the embedded financial products, I am thinking particularly about the bank accounts and the lending side. Could you just talk a little bit about the distribution, about how you train the salespeople? Is it the platforms that are doing that selling into the end merchants and persuading them? How much can you help them? Because that feels like it is going to be quite a different sale to payments where you have obviously built up this incredible reputation and franchise. Thank you.
Thanks, Adam. Ingo, would you like to take the first question?
Sure. Help me.
It is about the legacy players.
Yeah, so legacy players, sorry. I think if you look at what we have done over the last decade, it is making sure that we build the right product for our merchants. Of course, legacy players have more difficulty in catching up with us. I think what we talked about today with Dynamic Identification, we bring basically a new foundational layer where it is super hard to compete with us if you are a legacy player. I think that is also why we are very confident that we can continue to grow over the next years. That is also why we try to be helpful in setting up how we think that growth pattern will look like. I think it will be hard for those legacy players if you think about the market share that they still have with our ambition to become one of the largest players in this field.
It's certainly the volume that we need to win from them to be successful. I think that's how I would look at it. Yeah.
Great. Then Gary, on the EFP and helping our sales and account managers set up to sell, how do we do that?
The way we work with a lot of our platforms, even if you put aside EFP, even just payments, some of them are taking this journey into embedded payments for the first time. They may have a sales force that sold as vertical SaaS software that worked on a monthly subscription basis, but all of a sudden they have this brand new revenue stream and all this complexity.
Certainly our hope with our platform, what we're working towards is, A, we simplify it as much as possible for them to actually even add this capability, but B, we have a whole host of educational materials that we work with them to train them and their sales team on how do you actually sell payments. We have whole microsites and everything else set up around this because it's not an easy lift. You're often dealing with some series D startup that's like, what is interchange? That's what we do on a payment side. On embedded finance, it's the exact same thing.
We need to educate them such that they can then quickly go to market and even tell them, look, these are some pitfalls we've seen of other customers that you should look out for as you start thinking about capital, as you start thinking about issuing. Here's use cases. Give them what we know about your business, about where you may want to go to market. And that's how we see acceleration of this momentum.
Great. We've got Hannes here with a question. I'm not ignoring you in the back. I'll get to you. I'm sorry.
Hannes Leitner from Jefferies. Also, thanks for the presentation. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the verticals. Like for example, in your TEM analysis, you only cut out sanctioned in China.
When we think about, for example, grocery chains, that has been one of the customers which have been rather more outpriced. When we think about the incremental cost of the Adyen platform, it should in theory be coming down. When do you expect those customers being eligible or addressable? Maybe at a similar pace, I think a couple of years ago, there was a conscious decision to not focus on the global expansion of all products. You just mentioned in-store experience in Vietnam. How should we think about pushing further into new markets in new countries and including that, the local payment methods? I guess booking on Agentic Commerce, a trip to Thailand, using the local card or the local hotel and settle, it will be even more important to have a global network. Thank you.
Ethan, do you want to take the first one on the TAM?
Yeah. Let's take grocery as an example, the one that you shared. We have examples of grocery chains who work with us today. They work with us today because they saw the strategic importance of payments. While that's not the vast majority of grocers, it's true, they're mostly focused on cost. There are ones who are starting to set their industry in a certain direction, which has customer experience really matters. You have seen that unified commerce has mattered a lot more coming out of COVID, right? Delivery, order in advance, pick up in- store. There are a lot of versions of the buying experience which look different than they did five or 10 years ago. For us, it's a question of where do we focus on now?
Where are the areas of focus today and how do we then advance over time? If you again look back at the last decade, what you've seen is that markets and verticals that we would have never thought were in scope have come in scope, right? I mean, let's take the U.S., which is a very significant part of our business now. We started in the U.S. to help U.S. companies go abroad. Now we have a very strong U.S. offering. Our U.S. debit offering is world class, right? I think over time, what we've seen is that the TAM has trended in the direction where a better experience in payments is what you optimize for. I would expect that more and more verticals are going down that path over time. That's why we've included the width of verticals.
Great. Then Ingo, do you want to take the second part?
Yeah, sure. If you think about the sizable market, of course, there are parts of that market that we currently cannot address or do not address. Terminals in Vietnam is a good example. If you look on the short term, like what we currently already can address, countries like Japan and India, there is a lot of room to grow. I think that is where the opportunity lies on the short- term. On the longer- term, we will always apply the same logic as we have done in building the company, making sure that we basically follow the need of our merchants. When it becomes relevant to have, for instance, a better point of sale offering in Vietnam, we will implement it. Building a company is always about priorities.
I think if you look at where we're currently investing with a lot of focus, for instance, on the U.S., on Japan, on India, the addressable market is not our challenge.
Great. Paula, we have a question back there from Jamie in the last row.
Hi, thanks. It's Jamie from Susquehanna. Two questions. I know it's early, but do you have any observations about the potential pricing on agentic? For example, is there a separate interchange for agentic? And then the second one is just more philosophical for Ethan. You've authored a lot of changes in the IRO practice over the years. I'll give some examples, but you went from semi-annual to quarterly. Thank you for that. You now have segment-level disclosures.
I'm just wondering, how do you balance the IRO message in the context of a company that is very deliberate that you want to build for the long- term? Thank you.
Trevor, do you want to take the first one?
Yeah, I'll take the first one. Yeah, I think it's still really early, right? I mean, I think at this point in time, as an industry, we're working through what is the technological solution here and how to actually create this new channel, how to make sure it works across every single constituent. There's kind of two things in the financial model to work through. Like, yeah, will there be a separate interchange table? Probably. Are we sure what that is yet? No. That's also just for cards, right? The second thing is how are AI agents and companies going to monetize this, right?
You can imagine that there'll be something there as well. I think it's early. Those types of discussions, frankly, haven't really been had too much just yet. It's about just getting the technology, experimenting, seeing how it's going to work, see what the real value is. As an industry, it'll be priced according to that.
On the second question, it's a really good question. I think mentally, as a company, we haven't shifted our focus at all, right? We're very focused on long-term results. We're very focused on making decisions which benefit our customers over many years, even if that's maybe a longer-term solution, right? Like what we've built out with EFP, building it ourselves, building it on our own license. That's with the long-term in mind. Organizationally, we're very much focused on the long-term. That hasn't shifted.
I think you're fair in saying you've seen our reporting change over time. We've always had the goal of being transparent and helping where we can best give a view on how to understand our business. Two years ago, that was indeed adding a quarterly reporting. We've tried to add more disclosure as it was relevant, also matching our own organization, right? As we grew our organization into pillars, we also wanted to share that externally. That was the way we were viewing ourselves as well. It's trying to match our kind of internal view with still connecting to the long-term, right? Today, I spent quite a bit of time on the TAM. I did that not because necessarily it's always the limiting—it is not a limiting factor, that's clear—but even more so to try to voice the long-term opportunity that we're facing.
It's not an opportunity which plays itself out in a year or two. It's an opportunity that can play itself out over the next decade if we're truly successful in it. I think that type of mentality is what I also wanted to share today, but also how we think about building the business.
Great. There's another question back there.
Yeah, hi, thanks. Craig Moore from FT Partners. Two questions. One, specifically, I was hoping you could address your relationship with Shopify. They're growing extremely fast in Europe. It seems likely to continue as merchants want to improve on legacy platforms. There's obviously internal competition there. They've had a long-term relationship with Stripe. They've brought in Braintree to cover spots that Stripe might not cover and obviously have partnered with you guys.
How do you view sort of internal competition within Shopify when they're taking over merchant admin? In the U.S., to be more specific, there are clearly some wounded animals. Very likely you're going to see those merchants that are giving significant volumes to those processors look to RFP at some point. How are you viewing the opportunities there? How aggressive are you willing to get on price? Obviously they're going to protect their turf as hard as they can from a position of weakness. Thanks.
Great. Gary, can I give you the Shopify question? Trevor, as a rep from the U.S., do you want to take that one? Yes, sure. Great.
Yeah, for Shopify, I mean, we do not comment on any one specific partner, but we do work with quite a number of partners, including Shopify, Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, Sedgwick, and a number of others. Our goal is to make sure we just support a healthy ecosystem and follow merchant demand in terms of which partners they want to work with and how do we make sure it is a really great integration such that our customers have a great experience.
Yeah, and to your second question, I mean, there is no doubt, right? If competitors stumble, there is always opportunity. We are in contact with a lot of customers who are using potentially or potential customers who are using other providers, and we are constantly chatting with them about the value we bring, the opportunity that we can provide to them, the stability and being future-looking at the end of the day.
Yeah, I love your statement. I think we would agree. This is an opportunity. We'll continue to push on that and be hopefully the PSP, the provider that they'll look to and turn to to ensure that we're there for the next 10 years, the next 20 years for them. We'll see how that plays out.
Great.
Maybe if I can just add on price, because I think that was the second part of your question. I think we'll continue to stay disciplined on price because we're winning from the legacy providers consistently over time. That's how we've gained share, right? That's where the vast majority of payments volume is over time. We can do that by selling value. We'll continue to sell value, and we expect that we'll continue to gain share from the legacy providers by doing that.
We'll stay disciplined still on price no matter what happens around us. We'll stay focused on selling value and bringing the best to our customers.
Great. Isaac, do you want to hand it to him?
Hi, it's Fahed from Rothschild & Co. I had a few questions. Your customer cohort chart was fantastic, and the increases are fantastic as well. Can I get a sense of how your customer split is in those year buckets? Obviously, a lot of that information is based on digital, which is the bulk of your business. Does that change when you look at unified commerce and platform where a lot of the growth is coming from when you see how those cohorts mature? My second question is on capital. You're obviously growing your margins and you're growing well. You're generating a lot of cash.
Should we think some of that cash is going to go to funding the capital business? Will it be on your own balance sheet, or will you have arrangements to take a lot of those loans off balance sheet given the growth you expect in capital? My third question was the relation with the card networks. Currently, you really scale up on the card networks. If I think about your preventative fraud solutions, Mastercard, your sport business called Recorded Future, which does something similar. If I think about tokenization, Mastercard and Visa have talked about tokenizing all of e-commerce by 2030. Is your relationship with the card networks changing from kind of partnership to more competition, particularly on those fraud solutions and tokenizations, or am I misunderstanding how your product fits in with the card networks' products? Thank you.
Ethan, do you want to take the first two?
And then Trevor, I think, can take the third one.
Yeah, just so I understand. The first question, was it about the 2030, 2040, or was it about the new? Okay. Of course, the oldest set of cohorts, that was all digital. We had no unified commerce or platform offering back then. Now, of course, I'm sure there are some customers who started with us digitally and moved to unified commerce once we had that solution. The original sale back then was all digital. That was the original offering. Over time, of course, the proportion has grown more towards unified commerce and towards platforms if you get to earlier and earlier cohorts. Yeah, that's ultimately how it's developed. I think your question was indeed, how have you seen share of wallet ramp? Yeah. I think we see pretty similar trends.
In general, the thing that is maybe a bit different is that on platforms, we also grow through the fact that our platforms are selling their product into their customer base, right? It is not only gaining share of wallet in what is existing for them today and their own organic growth of that existing business, but it is also that they are often selling payments into their customer base as well. Maybe they are at 20% attachment rate or 30% attachment rate, and they are trying to drive that up much higher. As they expand, we also get that expansion as well. You see share of wallet, like the total pool of platform customers, be impacted by their own growth, but also the growth of payments within their business. I think that is the only other thing I would call out. Your second question, remind me of the second question?
Capital funding, capital.
Capital funding, yeah. Given our own licensing structure, we have full flexibility to do it on our own balance sheet, and that's what we're doing today. We feel like that gives us the best and deepest understanding of the full end-to-end process, right? Doing everything ourselves. As that scales, it may make sense financially to involve partners in that model. We will see how that scales and how that grows, and I'll update you all accordingly.
Yeah, on the card network question, the short answer is no, we're not competing with them. We're in deep partne rships with them and every other card network that's out there. The reality is we have the same incentives. Ultimately, we want to let every transaction go through that's good, and we want to block every fraud that's actually bad.
Yes, jointly, we have different products, and we have for years, frankly, right? They implemented 3Ds as an example, and we actually are one of the key providers in the industry for 3Ds, right? Many of the products that they create, we will actually consume and leverage them within our own Adyen Uplift or other products themselves. We work hand- in- hand on these things. No, we are deep partners, definitely not competitors.
Great. We got one from Adam over here.
Hi, Adam Frisch from Evercore ISI. Thanks again for putting together a great program. On the M&A side, Ethan, just to follow up on the first question, understand you do not want to, I guess, contaminate is the kind of word I am looking for. I do not know if it is the exact word, the Single Platform with acquisitions.
Would you be more open for assets that are more tangential to the core? This might not be a great example, but something like stablecoin infrastructure or something which is not anything that would conflict with what you do today. If you could just talk about tangential assets, if you're more open to stuff like that today, as you become more complex, the markets expand. My second question is on the growth framework, really clear disclosures here today. I think it was great. It'll probably alleviate some tension in the debate on the stock. If you could provide some insight into your collective mindset about asset allocation for growing existing versus growing new and why you think the new cohorts are accelerating faster than they have historically. Thanks.
Do you want to take both of those? I also can tap Thom on the M&A if you feel comfortable answering. You want to take them both? Go ahead.
Happy to take them. Yeah. I think where did our philosophy come from, right? Our philosophy came from to run a payments business. The best outcomes come from having end-to-end control, right? That was how we started. A lot of our competitors, they either got channels, they solved for channels, right, in store or online through M&A, or they solved through global through M&A. That just led to a worse customer experience in our view. We said we focus on that. We build that global end-to-end single platform that we discussed today. We build that ourselves. Now we've layered on banking licenses and technology onto it. The fact that these products work embedded together, you heard it from Jason today.
I thought that was a great takeaway that the fact that these products can be embedded is so powerful. The fact that they're connected to one another is of a lot of value, which is also why we took the approach, get your own licenses, build it yourself. I think in that setup, it makes a lot of sense to have end-to-end control. As we're widening our product offering, of course, it makes sense to look at other things. This is not fundamentally a change of philosophy at all. This is how we've always thought about things. For instance, when we started with issuing, we thought, is this something we should build? Should we build this end-to-end ourself, or should we do something different? We said best outcome will come from building. It's not that this is new for us.
This is just a continuation of our strategy. There is a very high bar because we think what we can build is going to be of very high quality for our customers over time. That is how we will continue to think about it. The second question was around asset allocation for new versus existing. That is in essence the team, right? How we are building the team. I think the best way to think about it is that account management grows as the biggest part of our commercial organization, and it grows pretty in line with the number of customers we bring onto the platform. One of the really important factors in why customers want to work with us and why they want to bring more share of wallet is the experience they get working with our teams.
The account management team is a really crucial function in delivering that level of service to them. We grow that team pretty much in line with how customers grow. Of course, we're looking for efficiencies. We're trying to make their work more scalable, right? We talked about investments we're making in tooling and other areas to support that. That is a team that relatively in line grows with the growth of our customer base. In sales, we made bigger investments in 2022 and 2023. This is a much smaller part of the overall commercial function, given that they cycle through accounts, right? They work on deals, and they close deals, they pass off to account management, they work on the next deals. We've been still making investments in that team over the last years.
I would say if you think about it in total, we make bigger investments in the account management team because that team is just a more sizable team. We are adding more accounts on a continuous basis. The sales team, that is growing in a more deliberate way. We make strategic investments, and the sales team becomes more effective the longer that they are with Adyen, basically through four years, we see on average.
Maybe one thing I would add, if my mic is ringing, and I think this kind of picks up on a previous question slightly too, of as we are selling different kinds of products, right? What does that mean for our team? The piece that I would add is that when we started our payments business, right, we had a foundation of really strong payments knowledge.
We could hire talents with different types of backgrounds, and we could teach payments our own way and really get people up to speed. I think we also continue to make investments today in our financial products teams, right? Making sure that it is not huge numbers, but bring on really strong capability in certain areas and complement the existing team. The team that is building and selling financial products is still in progress. I think we have really been building a great team. You saw some of them today. We will also continue to make those additions to the team where it makes the most sense.
Great. I think we might only have time for one more. We will see how fast we get through it. Paula, where are you? Right here. Thank you.
Hi. Gabe Farajollah from Mattan Capital Partners. You have previously mentioned that even though EFP adoption is still early days, many platforms have been choosing Adyen to future-proof themselves. With Agentic Commerce today, even earlier days than EFP, the question is, do you think that the increased focus on Agentic will help increasingly shift or accelerate volumes from incumbents to Adyen to similarly future-proof themselves before it becomes mainstream?
That is a great question. Trevor?
Sure, yeah. I mean, we hear the number one thing that merchants are asking about right now is Agentic Commerce. Hence, that is why we are putting dedicated resources to it. Hence, that is why we talked about it today, because we do see this as a new channel in the industry going forward. We absolutely do believe we are going to invest in it.
We do believe it's going to have the opportunity to drive not only perhaps share wallet or stickiness with existing merchants, but also attract other new merchants who want to be leading edge. They want to work with a FinTech company that's going to help get them this new channel and to really future-proof what they're going after in the future. Yeah, we absolutely expect that as well.
I would just add, because Trevor's completely right, at the same time, it's so early days, right? There's so much still to be figured out. It's not that there's this huge amount of volume that's running through Agentic Commerce today, right? This is an important discussion point with our customers, but it's not a solved problem yet. There is going to be a lot of discovery.
It will take time for iteration cycles of what really works and what does not to play out. It is also not something that you should expect means major changes on the short- term.
Now, you are asking a question to a commercial guy who is very excited about this, for sure. It is a fair point. I am glad you clarified. It is a line of business. It is going to take years before this really generates significant volume, right? Let us be clear. This is a long journey that we are investing in. The yin and the yang.
Let us do one more. Somebody over here, we got Harshita over here. Thanks, Isaac.
Hi, Harshita with Bernstein. Two questions. One, I want to follow up on the new layer on your foundation, the Dynamic Identification. I guess at EUR 1.3 trillion of scale, you do have a lot of data to kind of power that.
Maybe talk about what differentiates Adyen here compared to other modern peers, the networks who are also developing similar capabilities. Then, it is very rare these days to have a payments presentation and not talk about stablecoins. I thought I would use that as an opportunity. Clearly, you are very customer-focused, and you are kind of following what your customers are telling you. There is a lot of hype, et cetera, right now in the market. What are you hearing from your customers here? Especially as you go and look at crypto-native companies, there is a lot of volumes there. Do you need those capabilities to go after those crypto-native verticals? Thank you.
Thanks, Harshita. Carlo, do you want to take the first part of that question? Ingo, do you want to take the second part?
Yep. I see three major advantages we have. The first one is this focus on enterprise customers all those years. That's a good foundation when it comes to the data sets. Second, in-person payments spread all over the world. You can imagine the touchpoints we have with good cardholders. I know that helps provide the foundation to the data set to Dynamic Identification. Third, back to how it all clicks together, the Single Platform, the way this data model is set up, the way we've built our infrastructure in-house, the way these models are now passing along, like Tom mentioned in his presentation, the information upstream, downstream, those are capabilities we feel give us that edge.
Yeah, on stablecoins, of course, we track closely what's happening in this world.
Of course, if you think about our main way of working with merchants, it is in the main markets that we currently operate, Europe, U.K., U.S., is where we have banking licenses, and we can already move money around the world very easily. We do not need stablecoin to do that. Of course, if you think about the future, maybe markets where we are less active, or if we want to send money around instead of through correspondent banks, you potentially could think of, okay, we do that through stablecoin. That is certainly something that we are currently not doing. It is something that we track, and that might change in the near future, but it is not a current high demand from our customers. As a payment method, it is still very far away. I think that is another way to look at it. It is super interesting to follow.
If you think also about priorities of the company, the things that we can do right now, there are so many other things that are real needs of a merchant that have a higher priority that we focus on, that we currently focus on stablecoin.
Great. Thank you. I think that's all the time we have. I want to thank you again for joining us here today, all of you in person who made the trip to come out here in Amsterdam. We really appreciate it. Everyone who's watching online, thank you so much. For those of you here in the room, we're going to be heading back to Rokin right now for some cocktails and a product demo. Thank you again.