You through the logistics of the Q and A. There will be 2 blocks of 30 minutes each for Q and A. And you would really help out the team if you could list your name and the firm or fund you're representing in your question. We will try to get through all of them. During the Q and A session, you'll have an opportunity to unmute yourself to ask your question directly, so we have the most interaction we can get in this COVID environment.
And with that, I'm really looking forward to today. It's my great honor to hand off now to our Co Founder and CEO, Peter van der Doos.
Welcome all at our first virtual Capital Markets Day. We were looking forward, to meet you all, face to face. But, given circumstances, we are very happy that we can have a Capital Markets Day in this way. At the end is focused on building the company for the long term. And today, we want to use to explain more about what that means.
So how we, how that translates to the different geographies and how that translates to the different solutions that we're building. But before I do that, I want to address the COVID situation because it has course, enormous impact on people all around the world, on businesses, the economy, but also on, again, our employees. So what I hope is that the impact on you and your loved ones is limited and that you stay safe. Also something that's top of mind for us is, Arnout has announced that he will resign. Arnout is my co founder and CTO.
Originally, Arnout said, we are going to do this for maybe 1 or 2 years together, and then you run the company. That turned out to be true, but it took 14 years before we were at that point. Although I'm sad that Einar is leaving, I think the engineering team that we built is very, very strong, and I'm very optimistic for the future. So I'm just happy that he states, that he stayed so much longer than his original plan. Then I'd like to move over to the agenda for today.
Ingo and I will talk about, now let's just go one step back. There are there are 3 angles how we look at Atlien, and that is we look through the people and the culture, how we build this company for the long term. We look at the products that we're building and then how that interacts. So how comes that how does that come together in scaling the company? And you see that back in the presentations because Ingo and I, will be talking about how we are building, retaining and develop and, so attracting, retaining, and developing our people.
Then we hand over to, Kamran, our Chief Operations Officer. And Kamran, he will talk about the geographical expansion, our technology stack, and how we and so how we are scaling this company. Something about Cameron, he has been with us for proof for almost 7 years. And, he joined the Board at the beginning of this year. So, I'm very happy that we have such people on the board that which I find very much obvious and style that built the company themselves.
When he started in North America, There was very little there. He's grown it himself, and he moved on to now take operational responsibility. So that's a little bit on the background of Cameroon. Then we hand over to Mariette. Mariette is our Chief Legal and Compliance Officer.
And, she will talk about how we do our product development, which is merchant driven product development. So you need an organizational structure to support that. And, and she will talk about how we have set that up in work streams and solutions. A little bit of background on Mariette. She almost has been 5 years with the company and, Mariette has also proven to have a lot of traction just as general developing the company, but also more specifically on the regulatory framework, getting banking licenses through the whole process of IPO.
And also she joined the board for January this year. So that's a little bit of background on Mariette. And then we're going to move to the solutions. So then we're going to move to the merchant facing solutions that we build. And we do that with Sunil, Derek, Blake and Martina.
And they will explain how we use the single platform to solve complexity in those specific areas that the presentation is about. All the people presenting have are people that have been contributors themselves and as they developed, they moved they moved on to leave a stream or maybe later a solution. Then we closed today with a tour around the world. And we do that with Jean from LATAM, with Brian for North America and with Warren. What I think is interesting, if you see what we learned over the years in building a company, is it's really important that the people who manage regions have a good understanding how you build a global company.
We don't have a single dominant culture, that you might think headquarters in the Netherlands, but the Dutch are not the majority in this company. This is such a mix. So people who are really good in developing a region usually also have a more, have an exposure to different cultures. So if you look at Jean, he's a Brazilian, but he lived he studied for a while in Europe and then moved back to Brazil. So has been exposed more to European culture.
Brian worked 4 years for us at headquarters in the Netherlands, whereas it's an American who lives, in San Francisco. And Warren spent half his professional career in the US and half of it in Singapore and lived in various Asian countries and a bit in the US. So, these are people who are well aware how you make a company work internationally. So here you got the pictures. And then let me start with people and culture before I hand it over to Ingo.
Something that we talk a lot about is the Adient Formula. And the Adient Formula is actually lessons learned in building this company, but also some lessons which we learned in the past. How do you build such a global company and are able to retain speed and build something for the long term? And we wrote it down in 8 points and I'll talk through a few of them. Let me start with the first one.
We build to benefit all merchants. Why is it so important for us and why did we agree that that's the way we build? It is the vision of long term. Short term, you could develop something to onboard a merchant and then you would have to benefit from the revenue of that merchant. But that's only short term if that makes your technology stack more complex and difficult to maintain.
And then if that moves you to a point where at a certain point you lose speed. So because we are there for the long term, we say we build stuff that benefits all merchants and all merchants means it doesn't necessarily need to be used immediately by all merchants, but if we add acquiring in Malaysia, that means that all merchants needing acquiring in that region can use it, and we already have some form of demand. Also, the second point, good choices to build an ethical and sustainable business. We don't need to work with that company that you're not really proud of just to bump up your numbers because we know we are building further way longer horizon. So we want partnerships that work for us.
And if you see how that works, merchants have always been given us more volume over years because they see we outperform. So we steer away from those short term gains. How do we build? We say we launch fast and iterate. We have a direct communication with our merchants.
Mariette is also going to talk about the merchant led innovation. If we feel we can help a merchant a certain way, we quickly test something and then refer to build out such a product. And we feel that's a strategy that fits us much better and going for huge releases. Winning is more important than ego. What does that matter?
We feel that if you run such an international environment with such a complex product, everybody needs to chip in. So a somebody that fits well with the company is somebody who's humble enough to get, to get the satisfaction out of the success in what we're building, maybe commercial success or maybe technical success. And, if somebody wants to be really seen, this is not the environment because there are way too many people who help. And, hence, that's that's made it there for to the formula. Don't hide behind email.
Life is complex enough if people work through time zones, through video. So we try to pick up the phone also in these COVID times to just debug our ideas, to understand like, hey, if we would do that, what would be the impact? If we, run this product, how what would be the impact on the support? Is it easy to maintain or am I overlooking something? So, there's a lot of communication going on and we ask people just pick up the phone and discuss.
Don't go to formal communication. We go through cultures and quickly that's very slow because people misunderstand. The last one which I want to point out is, this is very similar to 7 by the way. We use different people, we ask people. There's a lot of autonomy, but you do have to work according to the formula.
That means that you ask different people for input, different people from different cultural background. Obviously, a marketing campaign which works in one region could really not be suitable for another region, but also from different departments so that you get a good feel for what would be the effect of your choices. But if you do that, there's a lot of autonomy. And the last one which I wanted to point out is we talk straight without being rude. Adient is founded in the Netherlands.
We are originally a Dutch company, not so much anymore because we're very, very mixed. But we stay true to the talk straight. That means something else in Singapore, then it means in New York, then it means in San Francisco, and that's okay. But within the cultural bandwidth, we ask people to talk very straight internally and externally, because we feel it's a lot quicker. Let's get to the core of what's going on and let's try to solve stuff.
Then before I hand over to Ingo, I want to talk about a few things that we always said that Allianz is about, the three things which is, why are we here? That's, of course, we want to change the payment industry. We don't accept how it is, but we think things can be done better. We want to have fun whilst we do it. If we don't have fun, we wouldn't be having so much attraction.
We wouldn't be attracting the right people. And thirdly, we help our merchant grow. If we help our merchants grow, that means that they'll give us more volume and that together we can build out this business. Now over to Ingo. And Ingo will share more about how we hire people, how we grow people and how we retain people.
So Ingo, over to you.
Thanks, Peter. And it's a great pleasure to talk today about our culture because I'm very proud how we've built the company so far and how we've built a team. And in building the team, hiring is of crucial success or crucial dependent on finding the right people. And Peter already talked about the formula. So we're looking for people that fit the formula.
And what does that exactly mean? Well, we're looking for people that are smart and want to work together to build a company. So we're not looking for people that just find a role and try to be successful just in that role, but we want to see people that basically broaden their horizon and really want to see how you can build this fantastic company. We do that by having Board interviews. So still in all rounds that we have with candidates, typically 6, 7 rounds.
The final round is with 1 of us. So one of the 6 Board members, they see each candidate, and that's a very good start of the relationship for people that join because at the one hand, we can make a good judgment whether this person fits the company. At the other hand, you immediately get to know the people that join the company. And that's, of course, if you want to build a flat organization, very important that you know who is working for you. And this also means that it's a measured growth approach because financially we could hire way quicker than we currently do.
But by making sure that we hire in the right pace, that people can actually be onboarded in a good way, we make sure that people feel welcome to the team. So if they join, that there is room to properly onboard them to help them to get up to speed, which is very important. Then the key question, of course, is why do talent stay with us? And a very important factor here is that all the talent gets the opportunity to grow with us. So typically, if you look at the team leads that we find in our company, they are promoted from the inside.
So we almost never hire team leads from the outside. And that's a great way. It's also it works the other way around that if we look for people and they have team lead experience that we sometimes ask them to join as an individual contributor to make sure that they are really hands on and make the company successful because that's what we have seen that if you have hands on people that can also lead a team that that's the best way to grow. Also a very important aspect is that we ask people to create our own path. There are so many opportunities in the company that there are no standard patterns.
This is not a company where, you know, within 2 or 3 years, I get to the next function. We ask people to look around and come up with ideas that best work for them. And by doing that, we create a culture where people really try to understand how they can excel and how they can help to build the culture. So the company culture is a very important reason why people want to stay. The company culture is, I think if you if I also look to myself, I've been now with the company for over 10 years.
The culture is the key reason to work here. It's great to have so many talented people around you that you can learn from each day, and it's very inspiring. So how do people grow? Of course, ownership is crucial. So making sure that people really get the opportunity to work on an idea, build it out and put it into production.
We have a young team. So if you look at average age, it's around 32 years. And as a result, people get a lot of responsibilities at a young age. And of course, that's super cool if you join, work on a product and see that it goes live. Another reason why people grow with us is that they often or almost always work in cross functional teams.
So we're going to talk today about the solutions and the work streams. And all those solutions and work streams are cross functional teams. So it's engineering, product, commercial people. And by doing that, you learn from the different disciplines and products become better. And that's also how individual people grow in the teams.
And then the last point is the Adjacent way of leading teams. We've with the growth of the company, we've been looking for a lot of new team leads over the recent years. And we asked ourselves the question like, how can we bring them up to speed as soon as they can? Often, they are first time new team leads, so they have never had the experience to lead a team and we want to do it in a specific Agen way. So as management team, we spend a lot of time in helping them out, trying to basically tell the key principles how we like to lead the company.
And the Agen way of leading teams is basically the Agen formula for team leads. And we have seen that, that really helps to accelerate the growth of the company. In these COVID times, of course, it's all a bit more difficult. So we used to work all together in the office and now we have to do everything remotely. So working from home is a standard and of course, where possible, we get in limited groups to the office.
But it basically meant that in a few months' time, we completely had to convert all the training and onboard it to online training and onboarding. And we have done that very successfully. The feedback of new joiners over the recent months has been very positive. And of course, as this is going to last a bit longer, we need to continue to prepare ourselves for this situation. Another very important element is the normal course of life principle that we have had within the company for a long time.
This basically means that there's a lot of freedom to do what is best for an individual person. So if you encounter problems in your personal life, we ask team leads to support our team members and do what is best. So there are no rule books there. And I think also in these COVID times, this made it possible that we had a lot of different solutions for the difficult situations where people were sometimes in. And another very important aspect is the events.
We've always organized the events, it's a very important way to interact with our merchants. And we completely migrated all the events to online events. And I think the Capital Markets Day, of course, today is a good example of it. Then a very important part of the formula, Peter already touched upon it. We include other people to sharpen our ideas.
I think it's the key part of our success. If you want to change the industry, you need to have different perspectives. And with a group of 90 different nationalities, we have all those perspectives and it leads to better outcomes. On the ratio of male female, we need to do still better. We are currently at 1 third female, 2 thirds male, and we continue to invest to make sure that this ratio gets even better in the future.
So I talked about how important it is to have the right culture and why people like to work here. Of course, if you further want to scale the company, the scalability of the platform is very important. And I'm very pleased to hand over to Cameron, who's going to talk about that in the next section.
Thanks, Ingo. Pleasure to be here today and speak with everyone about how we're scaling Adyen. Maybe starting off where Peter and Ingo left off, one of the most important pillars for scaling Adyen, both today and in the future, we feel, is people. As an example, when I started approximately 7 years ago, I think we were approximately 150 people globally and maybe a dozen of us in the US. Fast forward today, where I think we're I think we're 1400 plus people at the end of H1 globally and over 200 in the US.
And I think that's a testament to how global our customer base is. And as Peter said, our main goal is how do we help solve complex problems for them? And I think what's that led what that's led to is on the people side, we've expanded to well over 20 offices across the different parts of the world because payments are often quite local and we need that expertise to be able to help our customers solve problems in these different parts of the world and bring the local expertise to bear so that we're offering them proactive consultative advice. So if you're an American company and you expand to Asia, we can partner with Warren's team and say, hey, here's how people like to pay in Singapore or Australia or China or Malaysia, and really bring that expertise to bear for people rather than they have to figure it out for themselves. And this is a great illustration of all the different offices we have and how the team has scaled and continues to grow.
To Ingo's point, despite COVID and some of the challenges, the team reacted extremely quickly and we hired over 250 people in H1 of this year. Obviously, the other huge pillar for us outside of the people is our technology. So I think 2 things that really stand out. 1, we have a common code base and that sounds like that should be the norm, but what you really see is a lot of companies are local or regional only, not global. And 2, a lot of companies have grown through mergers and acquisitions.
And what that means is that introduces a lot of complexities. You have multiple different platforms built over time by different people stitched together. And at IDN, we have one common code base, one single instance of the platform running everywhere. And that means that it's a lot simpler for our customers to integrate with us and that's also a lot simpler for us to maintain. And that basically means you get benefits like time to market in new regions if you're already using Adyen as well as benefits in uptime stability.
And as you can see from this chart in terms of number of transactions, it also allows us to scale exponentially building off that common code base and our stateless architecture. But at the end, if we have the people, we have the technology, how are we really solving the complicated problems for our customers? As Ingo and Peter said, we'll dive into the different regions and the different solution areas, but just to give an overarching picture, here's one illustration. So if you look at how acquiring, was traditionally done, it's the top part of this slide. So typically, a customer or merchant in this illustration would have into a gateway, had somebody to help them with risk management, a different person often for processing, and a different person for acquiring.
So they would have sometimes been partnering with 4 different providers in order to be able to accept payments. And sometimes that would have been per country. So we've had customers who even in Europe often had a portfolio of 20 different partners that they needed to support all the countries that we're operating in, let alone as you expand globally, that number grew. And what Adyen really did is combine all of those into 1. So a customer just partners with Adyen.
We provide all of these different capabilities, and help them offer all kinds of different payment methods in different parts of the world through a common interface, common reporting reconciliation, etcetera. So again, it helps them with time to market, it helps them with simplicity in terms of ongoing operational complexity and cost. And most importantly, because we offer all of these different capabilities in one platform, we're seeing all of the data across the board rather than handoffs between different parties. And this really helps us help our customers grow their business. We can focus on what's the ideal customer experience, how do we look at the data and ensure that their approval rates are high.
So eking out an extra approval for every 100 transactions is pretty material. If you're a multi $1,000,000,000 business, we can help you grow your revenue and top line by basis points, let alone percentage points, that's a huge value add, obviously. And the solution teams will get into more detail of how we bring some of that to bear across different opportunities. If we expand from there, as we talked about recently in the last year, we started doing the same thing on the issuing side of the house. So if you look on the other side, it's as complex or often even more.
So again, you would typically have to partner with somebody for processing, you would have to have a bank partner who's the issuer, somebody to help you with risk mitigation capabilities, with know your customer and anti money laundering as you give accounts to these people or issue them a card. If you're issuing a card, you often have the physical plastic. How do you manufacture the card? How do you ship it? All those logistics.
And we've combined all of that into 1. So you can partner with Adyen and we can basically help you end to end with all of this and again the benefits of time to market simplicity as well as data being aggregated and helping ensure better approval rates, lower risk, etc. We'll talk about a few use cases that that's enabling on the issuing side. So the first one is what we're calling commercial payments, using physical or virtual cards to pay suppliers. So if you look at this example, the platform or our partner in this example may be offering a delivery service.
Basically, we are giving them either virtual and or physical cards, which they're able to give to their delivery people. That delivery person is then going to the restaurant, paying for that order, picking it up and delivering it to you, the consumer. But what Adyen also brings to bear is we can offer more sophisticated controls. So for example, that card cannot be used in the red flow below to buy electronics. So they can't take this card and say, hey, I'm going to go and buy, I don't know, a watch or an iPhone or AirPods.
And we can even enable GPS location sophistication. So, hey, is that delivery person really at the restaurant that they were dispatched to to pick up that specific order? And then the platform would only approve that transaction. Another example is using physical virtual cards to pay for company expenses. So again, we would help issue the virtual and or plastic card to our customer.
They would give their employees these cards, they could be used on all approved transactions. So whether travel, online purchases, office supplies, but again, as you can see in the right flow, what we could help enable is more sophisticated controls. So if they weren't supposed to be using these for drinks or dinners or certain other types of transactions, we could help control that at a category level, location level, etcetera. And then the other thing that we can do is help them with all of the reporting, reconciliation, tracking, etcetera. And if you look at the two sides, the acquiring and issuing, we're bringing them together and that offers even additional benefits.
So if you're somebody who's using Adient Acquiring and Issuing, 1, we can help you with reporting reconciliation. You can see the transaction on the issuing side as well as acquiring side, and we can really help you stitch that together. So a good example would be in the travel space. If you're an online travel agency, think of the global companies like a booking.com or an Expedia. Often, Peter is making a booking with them.
They have Peter's card details, they're charging those. But on the other side, this hotel that Peter is going to stay in at Berlin has to be paid. And often they can use a virtual card to keep Peter's details confidential, but pay the hotel on the other side, and they can make some of the interchange economics off of that, as well as if they're getting the card acquiring and the issuing done through Adyen, could we help them with cash flow and speed up when they have to pay for those transactions in the issuing side versus when they receive the funds on the acquiring side and help them with their liquidity management. So these are some of the ideas and examples of how we're helping solve complexity for our customers globally with a great combination of the people we have, the Adyen formula and our technology. And with that, I'd like to hand it back to the studio for my colleagues on the solution side and Mariette to give you overview and a few more details of how we're enabling all of this.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for that, Kamran, Ingo and Peter. I've heard many synopses of the central philosophies behind Adyen, and that was one of the best ones. We're going into a very short break now before we return with Mariette to talk us through the solutions. We will reconvene in about 4 minutes, so just enough time to get a coffee or a cup of tea at 3:35 Amsterdam time. See you soon.
Welcome back. Before I introduce Mariette, I'd like to remind everyone you can use the Q and A function in Zoom to submit your questions for the Q and A session And now I'd like to hand you over to Marietta Swart, our Chief Legal and Compliance Officer, who will tell you more about the solution planning process we use here at Adyen.
Thank you, Hammo, and welcome, everyone. My name is Marietta Svard, and I'm indeed responsible for all legal and compliance matters within Adjourn. But that's not what I'm going to talk with you about today. Today, I'm going to talk with you about our strategic planning. And Peter already mentioned it.
As a company, we've always had a long term view. And that long term perspective is needed for us to help our merchants in the best possible way. It also allows us to stay ahead of our competition. And as such, we believe that it's been an important driver to our success. And when we keep the long term planning into mind, how do we plan ahead?
Well, let me start by saying that our innovations are merchant driven. We build to benefit our merchants. On a continuous basis, we are having conversations with our merchants to really understand their needs. What are the problems we need to solve for? On the basis of these conversations, we decide what we're going to build in the next year and the years after.
To each of these innovations, we tie a group of people, and we call them a work stream. It's really a cross functional team comprising of people from the commercial side, from the engineering side and the product side. And together, they are responsible for making it fly. And all the streams are headed by a technical lead and a commercial lead. And they help us to translate that long term perspective in really concrete operational goals.
In execution of these plans, their work streams work really closely together with our merchants. It really is a co creative process whereby we allow the merchants to really have an impact on the products and the services that we build. We currently have 35 work streams that never can change if needed, but we won't change this approach because it's really been beneficial to us. It allows us to stay focused and flexible in our planning. What we've learned over the recent years is that the problems that our merchants face are really similar in certain verticals, and that made us decide to group the work streams into 6 solutions.
There are 2 more fundamental solutions in which we work on the foundation. Everything that is needed to make sure that we can continue to offer these premium services whilst we grow the company going forward. The first more core fundamental solution is core platform. On this, we work on everything that is needed to scale the platform. Think of the expansion of our global acquiring capabilities, adding new payment methods or building out on our core data infrastructure, everything that is needed to scale.
The other one is core finance. And in that one, we work on everything that is needed to scale our finance products, making sure that we can, for instance, do payouts on a large scale in different currencies, but also making sure that we stay transparent in our reporting, in our pricing and our invoicing. The other 4 more commercial solutions that we have follow our go to market strategy. They are tailored around the different type customers that we service, making sure that for each of them, we have the right approach. The first is enterprise and digital.
That's our bread and butter. It's what we've always been good at from the start. Large enterprises like Facebook and Uber and Spotify are typically interested in a global reach. And at the same time, we're also interested in KPIs like conversion rate and authorization rates. We continue to innovate also to make sure that we stay ahead of the pack.
The second one is enterprise and retail. And here, we service the customers that typically operate over different sales channels. For these merchants, payments is much more of a revenue game rather than a commodity. And with our omnichannel solution, unified commerce, we give them really valuable insights in shopper behavior and shopper expectations, making sure that they can adapt. I think the recent COVID months have shown that it's really important to have a good omnichannel solution, and we try to offer that.
This is a focus area to us because we believe that here we can really make a difference. The third one is Enterprise and Platforms. With Agenfor platforms, we offer our merchants a tailored platform solutions, having things like split payouts, speedy onboarding. But at the same time, we also allow their sellers and sub purchasers to benefit from the features that we have on our platform. This solution has seen a lot of growth in the last couple of years, and we're really proud to have some flagship customers like Alibaba and eBay.
But we also see that this solution is also beneficial to less traditional third party models like Zenoti or Fiverr. And then finally, we have mid market. Mid market, we define as the next adjacent segment to enterprise. And as such, we see it as a longer term investment in getting sustainable growth by investing down markets. We think that by simplifying our proposition, we can help these customers in a similar way as we do with enterprises.
And as such, we very much invest in simplifying our proposition, our customer area, reporting and onboarding. These are the solutions we are currently working on. We've invited the commercial leads of each of these 4 solutions to talk a little bit about the innovations that we've been working on over the last year. And we'll start with Suneel, who's going to talk about enterprise and digital.
Thank you, Mariette. Hi, I'm Sunil Dixit. I'm a VP of Product at Agen and I work with the enterprise digital and online solution. We're a collection of data scientists, engineers, product designers, and product managers that are helping to create really magical payment experiences alongside our global enterprise e commerce merchants. So what kind of merchants are we talking about?
There are merchants in the mobility and food delivery space that are transforming it and make it more frictionless like Uber. There are large globalenterpriseecommerce merchants like alibaba.com that are changing the way we buy as shoppers. Of course, there are subscription businesses that are supporting SaaS services as well as streaming media like Spotify. And then there are the global enterprise merchants that defy categorization, multichannel merchants like Microsoft that are serving gaming as much as subscription services as much as online retail. So why do all of these merchants work with us?
Going back to something that Kamran had said earlier, it really is about the way we're built. We're 1 platform, 1 codebase, 1 integration. We're not a bunch of platforms that are stitched together, requiring multiple integrations or multiple adaptations every time new innovation comes out. It really is one integration to grow and scale globally. This becomes really important when disruption comes out like PSD 2 requiring new methods and new strong, methods for customer authentication.
And this didn't just happen in Europe. It was a requirement in Australia. It was a requirement in Brazil. And after just 2 years of effort, we were able to launch a 3ds to market leading solution for strong authentication in all of these markets and ensure that it worked beautifully for our Merchants' customers. The same is true for any new technology we bring to market, whether it's a new standard for tokenization using EMVCo based cloud tokens called Network Tokens or whether it's new payment methods and new wallets that span the globe or are specific to local scale.
What kinds of problems are we looking to solve with our platform and the integration of these technologies? At our heart, we're trying to reach the highest level of conversion with a manageable level of risk. What does this mean? In the end, if a customer wants to buy, so the merchant has made the investment to bring a shopper into their site and they finally click the Buy button. After that, if the customer has a valid method of payment, they have the money and the funds to pay, And they're, of course, not a fraudster.
That payment should convert. That is our goal. The problem is the payments landscape is extremely complex, especially in ecommerce. At the point of sale, conversion rates are largely pretty good at with 95 plus percent approval rates and relatively low fraud because most of the technology over the last 10 years has been invested to solve problems there. But the e commerce space is very different.
As Kamran's chart showed before, there are many players involved in the value chain of converting a customer payment. The customer comes in and connects to the merchant site, which sends it to a gateway, which sends it to a payment processor. Sometimes a risk provider is involved and then to a card scheme, then to a bank. And all of these checks have to be in alignment. One way we solve this problem is simply by reducing complexity in this stream, by having one platform that combines the payment gateway with the payment processor and then ultimately having our own connection to card schemes and local payment methods and to banks.
We're also extending that, of course, into issuing. But the other way we resolve this is by understanding the technical issues that come with bringing in new conversion methods with connecting to external providers and new payment methods. We bring this to the importance of this problem is because globally, across most processors, we see about a 20% decline rate for e commerce transactions. So how do we solve this problem? We start with the checkout, which is where the customer begins to buy.
That checkout experience is critical in showing the customer what kinds of payment methods they expect to see for their region or for their preference. And then we make sure that those methods of payment work really, really well with the least number of redirects, with the fewest number of fields to fill out, with the least amount of entry with their thumbs on mobile devices. With the introduction of new requirements for strong authentication, 3ds 2 and other means of authentication also become important to optimize in the checkout. What does that mean? It means making sure that the customers are presented with means of authenticating themselves that are in alignment with the banks that they use and making sure that those authentication methods do not fail.
The merchants can depend on us to automate this for them through our dynamic authentication services. Also happening in the checkout is our ability to protect a transaction against risk. This is where our Revenue Protect product is using machine learning to determine at the moment of payment the level of risk of a transaction and ensuring risk doesn't get passed through to the merchant. Once we've accepted all the transaction information, we then decide where to route it. So across the globe, we have integrations to all the major card schemes, but also to local schemes.
Sometimes it makes more sense to route to a local scheme than to a major scheme, and it's our job to know which is best for conversion and sometimes which is best for cost savings. Once we've determined where to send it and what information has come in for authentication, We also decide what goes into the message. So what is the content of the payment request that goes to the bank and to the card scheme? This message needs to contain enough information to be sure we know who this customer is and that they aren't involved in fraud and that they really have a valid method of payment, but not more than that. Knowing what each bank prefers and adjusting to it dynamically is critical to the process of having high conversion rates.
This has become such a sophisticated exercise. We have over 4,000,000 combinations of things that we could adjust in a transaction flow in real time. And for that reason, we've introduced machine learning this year to optimize this process to ensure that in real time, we can find the best content of a Payment Request possible, to get the best outcome. Now should all of these techniques fail, we still have the ability to try again. So immediately after a decline, we can instantaneously within milliseconds retry with a different set of parameters to ensure a good outcome for that transaction.
And even if that declines for subscription payments, perhaps for insufficient funds, we can continue to retry with our Auto Rescue product over the following weeks to recover transactions and make sure subscriptions are uninterrupted. So what is the origin of some of these technical issues? Why are payments so complicated to solve? In the end, it's because when we started to do e commerce several decades ago, we just pulled the account numbers off the card and started entering them into websites to transact. Security was relatively low and this information that was in the public eye, needed to be taken out.
This is how Adyen's platform helps to future proof our merchants. As payments go increasingly digital with new local payment methods, with new global local payment methods, with new standards coming out from EMVICO supported by the major card schemes for click to pay, for tokenization, and for strong authentication of the customer of 3ds2. We are there for our merchants to combine these technologies and launch them globally at scale through their existing integration so that they're always growing with the pace of innovation in the market. And with that, I'll pass it on to Derek, who's also talking about solutions we're providing to our merchants in the food, beverage, hospitality and retail solution. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Sunil. My name is Derik Buser. I'm a Product Manager in the Retail Food and Beverage and Hospitality solution. And together with that solution and all the team members, we're working on a product that solves the unified commerce problems for these well known brands. So I'll tell a little bit about why these brands choose Agen to help them with this and to tell you about why our unified commerce offering makes us stand out.
So the unified commerce offering is mainly about reducing complexity and making the merchant experience easier, providing them with the tools to give an amazing customer experience in their stores And finally, also to give them the data that they need to really understand how their shoppers are shopping across their different channels and regions. So we have 4 pillars there. We try to simplify operations and our integrations of our customers. We give them full control over configuration and software that they run. We provide a unified commerce offering globally.
And finally, we give them all the data and some insights to help them better understand their customers. So if you look at why payments are complicated, Cameron also went into this. Typically, a customer that's, for example, a retailer that grows from being a large domestic player and grows across different regions or across different channels builds up a legacy of different payment providers, PSPs and acquirers and making him do a lot of integrations, use different types of hardware and also getting different types of reports back on the financial transactions and also getting different ways of settlement. What we at Adjacent try to do is solve that by giving them a single platform where they have a single contract, a single integration for all these different region and channels. They get because all the payments flow into the same system, they get a single overview of all their payments and all their shoppers.
And finally, it's a single set of devices that we offer them. So if they integrate into a mobile device or a countertop device, it will work in all the countries that they're operating. So if you look at our reach, we have an online solution that has global reach and for our in store solution, we follow our acquiring roadmap. So currently, we're available in North America, Europe, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong. And in these regions, we both offer in store payments and online payments.
And by doing this, we can offer our customers the ability to grow together with their shoppers and giving them all the unified commerce experiences that these shoppers are expecting now. So especially with the last couple of months and all the events happening, we've seen a big shift from shoppers going from full cards using all their cards in stores to asking for more touchless payment types and new types of ways that they want to interact with the store. So these examples are, for example, click and collect, self-service ordering, drive through solutions, but also because we collect all the data on these different shoppers across different channels and regions, we're able to amend and help our merchants to provide for great loyalty programs. The setup of the platform and having online and in store payments also makes it a lot easier to address payments in all these new journeys that are coming up in the future. So with our solution, we really want to reduce the complexity for our merchants and we enable them by increasing the transaction speed.
So the handling time in store has to be way faster and quicker. But we also allow them to use the terminal not only for payments, but for example, also for collecting more shopper data. If a shopper wants to type in their telephone number or their e mail address on the payment terminal, we can facilitate that without our customers coming into all these security or certification requirements, but it does allow them to use a terminal on their that's already on their desk to do way more than payments alone. By having all this information in a single platform, we can also provide our customers with the possibility to tailor made the experiences for their shoppers. So if you talk about full control, traditionally, the point of sale or payment terminals have always been very technical and very difficult to operate.
We try to take away all the complexity in the full process. So that starts with our customers being able to order a terminal and to send it back like it was a pair of jeans and allowing them also to configure their complete estate remotely. Then when the terminal enters a store to be installed and configured, a sales associate doesn't need a PhD to install it. The terminal will automatically start configuring itself. Also pairing it with a cash register or multiple cash register is very easy.
And finally, maybe a very unique thing that we do at Adyen is we have a dedicated team that works on a set of robots that go through a couple hundred integration and certification tests automatically every night whenever our developers commit new codes to verify that there's no regressions or bugs introduced. And when we go through this whole cycle, at the end of the day, we try to automate the complete fleet of our merchants automatically to keep them up to date with the latest functionality in the latest products without them having to think about going through this whole testing cycle. So we have the majority of our customers on the latest firmware always with the latest security patches and the latest features enabled. The integration itself, so if you want to initiate a payment either on a terminal or on a screen, so for example, in your app or online or via link, we have 2 very simple integration methods. We have a terminal API for everything that has to do with payment terminals and checkout for everything that has to do with card not present or payments on a consumer device.
As said, we offer these different channels based on the context of a shopper. So where is the shopper at that moment, what's the shopper origin and what's the channel that the shopper is interacting with, we offer the right payment method at the right time. And finally, all this data, so as soon as the payments hit our platform, they enter the same database and we can link all those different transactions together and give this data back to our customers so that they can create a full picture of how their shoppers shop across their different stores across different regions. And one of the insights that we can then provide to our customers as well is, for example, omni channel report that gives a lot of information about the recency of customers, the frequency of customers, but also what value do different types of customers bring to us. Of course, all this data is also available as raw data that we can feedback to our customers so that they can then add that to their own data to create even more insightful insights.
Thank you very much. I'm now going to hand it over to Blake, who's going to tell us something about platforms and marketplaces.
Hey, everyone. Thanks, Dirk. My name is Blake Brethit. And together with a few of my colleagues, I lead up our solution for the marketplace. Now, before I get started into our solution today, I would like to share some brief history about how we got here.
Over the years, Adyen has worked with some of the world's largest marketplaces. With the introduction of PFC2 in Europe, money transmission laws in the States, a lot of these marketplaces look to us to help them navigate these payment complexities. While a few existing solutions were in the market at the time, we also felt that none were truly representative of the needs of enterprise marketplaces. So extending our solution for enterprise merchants to enterprise marketplaces was fairly obvious for us. We launched our solution with the launching partner in GoFundMe, and we actually found really quick great success in providing the solution to other marketplaces like eBay and Reverb and SeatGeek.
However, we also at the time started to witness the rise of the on demand economy. Think about Uber Eats and Postmates, as well as the SaaS platforms, who started integrating financial services into their software stack. This is when we decided to broaden our reach beyond just marketplaces to platforms. And we introduced features tailored to platforms as well, such as integrating our full point of sale suite and also calling our solution now Adyen for platforms. So going to this slide, you can see we never lost focus of serving these key marketplaces.
However, you're also seeing us having great success with platforms like Wix, who recently integrated payments to their software stack. Now, if I went to Wix today and created Blake's website, I have instantly the ability to accept payments through Wix payments, which are powered and enabled by adding the back end. Also platforms like Zenoti, a global solution for salons and spas and wellness centers. Zenoti is extremely focused and providing a unified commerce approach to their sub merchants. And through adding from platforms, someone like Zenoti cannot only onboard a single location barbershop to a multi location franchise, but also use Adient's Terminal Fleet Manager to ship and maintain PO point of sale devices all across the globe to their customers.
So as we're building our solution for marketplaces and platforms, We're extremely focused on on 2 main ideas. 1st, we wanted to create a tailored and configurable experience for these enterprise platforms. For instance, we believe that the experience of onboarding a courier on Postmates should look and feel completely different than onboarding a surgical center on modernizing medicine, a healthcare platform. The second is we refuse to sacrifice anything we've come to be known for here at Adyen, meaning this is why Adient for platforms was built into that core Adient engine. So everything we built on from our risk services of Revenue Protect to all the payment methods we offer across the globe, all the points of conversion and optimization that Sunil mentioned, like like endless debit and network tokenization, to all the innovations that we're introducing now.
Cameron touched on issuing and all the terminal suites that Dirk spoke about. All these features and functionalities are fully available to our platforms. And beyond that, as we maintain and scale one single platform, all the future innovations that we will be introducing to will be our platform's fingertips as well. And we find this very key a big key differentiator for Adyen as we while offering a platform solution, we're still able to offer them all the payment innovations that they come to value. So, as I mentioned, one of our focuses was on configurability and flexibility.
A lot of that sits in the onboarding flows. We offer both an onboarding API as well as a hosted onboarding page. Both can take a risk or tier based approach. An example here. So for instance, in this screenshot, you're seeing in the first screen, a seller can sign up on a marketplace in a matter of seconds with just a name and email and start listing a pair of shoes, for instance.
And as goods and services are sold, more information is provided and verified in real time. This ensures a really frictionless experience for their seller, which is a key component for our marketplace because any marketplace will tell you that sellers are their inventory and being able to create a frictionless path for them to transact on their platform is what will make them successful. So but what's also key is not only enabling this frictionless path, but also being able to verify these sellers are who they and they can protect the ultimate integrity of their platform as a marketplace. And lastly, as we find consistent with these large enterprise marketplaces and platforms is a heavily value of branding. So you can see in these flows and others, adding is completely behind the scenes.
Moving on from onboarding. The next key pillar of the platform structure would be fund movement. With our solution, whether the payment request is initiated from a point of sale device, an app or online, the platform maintains full control of that fund movement, while also staying out of the flow of funds, which is a critical component of removing yourself from any sort of money transmission scope or needing a PI license in Europe. As you can see in this example, you have a shopper buying, let's just say, a $100 shirt at a retail location. And then that payment request, the platform will instruct Adyen how to split the funds.
And this very simplistic example, this platform is telling Adyen to move the funds 90 and 10. $90 is going into a sub merchant virtual account and the $10 is then being split back to the platform's operating account. Now, these funds are all being held in an AdiN owned bank account until they are paid out directly to that sub merchants external bank account. While the example here is rather simple, as I mentioned, our solution does go beyond just this. For instance, we mentioned on demand platforms like Postmates, where for all these on demand platforms they have in common there at least three sided marketplaces, meaning funds need to be split at least three times to the courier, to the restaurant and back to the platform.
Not only can our platform split 3 times, we can actually split as many times as physically possible to accommodate all these nuances that we're seeing these platforms introduce. Lastly, we've also built a funds transfer call. A funds transfer call gives platforms a little more flexibility within this environment to move funds instantly and securely from 1 virtual account to another. And lastly, the last critical component of a platform solution structure would be payouts, the last component of a platform payment lifecycle. As a platform with adding, you have a few configurations of payouts.
One would be scheduled payouts and the other would be API issued. Under scheduled, as the name implies, you can set a unique cadence per sub merchants, whether it's a day, a week, every 14 days. And then upon expiration of that cadence, whatever funds were allocated in the account, Adi would automatically pay on their behalf, removing a little more of that logic from the platform's workload. Furthermore, on API initiated, this gives platform full control, meaning Adyen will hold the funds until an API call is sent to tell Adi and when and where to pay those funds out. As we've continued our reach into platforms, and not as a big result of COVID, we're seeing more and more platforms stressing on payout speed.
Business and individuals are needing their funds and capital sooner. Thus, we're seeing a higher usage of same day ACH payouts in the States, faster payments in UK, and also instant payouts, which rides the Visa, Mastercard rails of paying out to an eligible card where funds are available in 30 minutes or less. And all of these features are fully available with no extra integration needed with Adyen for platforms. So that finishes up the payouts and also concludes our presentation on Adient for platforms. Thanks for your time.
I'll pass it on to Martin.
Hi, all. I would like to tell you about today what excites us about the mid market and how we help our mid markets grow their business. A mid market merchant can be a local player, a local hero who's looking for an additional sales channel or it can be an international company who wants to scale abroad. I'm Martina de Visser, VP of Mid Market Products. And today, I would like you to talk through how we give our mid market merchants full access to the iGen platform and how we help them grow.
So over the past years, we learned that mid market merchants encounter the same payment complexity as enterprise merchants. Logically following, mid market merchants are a great fit for our AgM platform. There is a difference between mid market merchants and enterprise merchants. Mid market merchants tend to don't have the internal knowledge or the internal resources to make payment decisions. So we are here to help to solve their payment complexity and to make the right choices for them regarding the payment setup.
So we're currently supporting mid market merchants in Europe and Brazil. Some striking examples of mid market merchants are from MoF, a Dutch Buy Company, who is scaling internationally Chili's, a bottle company from the UK Beats and Roots, a company from Germany, who is leveraging our unified commerce in all their stores and Cloudilly, a beauty brand from France. So to best cater the needs for our mid market merchants, we have tailor made our product offering. We are offering our mid market merchants an out of the box solution, so they don't need to worry about their payment setup. You can compare it to the AutoSet function of a photo camera.
You can make beautiful settings and beautiful photos with that camera with the Auto settings. If you compare it to enterprise, it's like a professional photographer. They want to adjust all their settings according to their needs. But what we are trying to do for our mid market merchants is to really curate an auto setting and that the product works out of the box for them. And when speaking to create a product out of the box for the mid market merchants, I'm implying that we simplify our solution, but we don't give on in the strength of our platform.
We provide a very easy and scalable way to integrate into our platform. And our plug ins and partnership approach is helping us. So according to our Agen formula, we benefit for all merchants. This translates us in providing access to the Agen platform for mid market merchants as well. So they are using all the same features and products as our excellent enterprise merchants are using.
This scales very well. It's still one platform, one integration and our mid market merchants are using the same products and innovations as we're building throughout the year. Mid market merchants are also growing. They start sometimes as a smaller company and they grow and they scale. So at the beginning, sometimes they don't need all the products or features we have.
So we give them an out of the box solution. And while they're growing, they have access to all the products and features they need. That doesn't mean they need to integrate again. It's still the same integration. We're here to solve their problems, and we can facilitate there while they're growing.
And it's very nice to see that mid market merchants are growing into our enterprise volume in an organic way. So as I briefly explained, we give a simplified version to our mid market merchants compared to enterprise. In order to build the right integration for mid market merchants, we need to properly understand their needs. As Mariette explained, we are in daily talks with all our mid market merchants to understand their needs and to develop the right features for them. So from both a commercial and product point of view, we help them making the right choices, like our customer success team who can give them advice if merchants want to scale into a new country, what kind of payment settings do they need.
Another important growth pillar for mid market is partnerships. Through partnerships, we have access to a lot of mid market merchants. A nice example is BigCommerce, a new partnership and which gives us access to thousands of new merchants in Europe. Also, our plug in solution and approach is key for mid market to grow. A plug in is a downloadable software package You can compare it to an Adyen out of the box.
It scales very nicely and our partners are using our software plug ins to go live very quickly with our merchants, but they also use it because we build our plug ins in house. We build our plug ins in house because we want to guarantee the high quality we're always providing to our merchants. So simplifying the product for mid market merchants. Here are two examples I want to give to you what we've been working on. So during COVID situation, which we unluckily are still in, Pay by Link gained a lot of traction.
Pay by Link is a solution whereby merchants can go live within a couple of hours. They will get an hosted payment page for the shoppers and the shoppers can see their preferred payment methods. A second example we're working on is our customer area. That's the interface we have with our merchants, adjusted reporting, but also going live quicker, which is very important for our mid market merchants. So we're coming to an end already.
It was a pleasure to talk you through our mid market solution. I hope that you take away the following three things. So mid market merchants' needs are product wise are not different than from enterprise, but it's the way how we present it to them. We are helping mid market merchants to make the right choices, so they can focus on building their business. Also important is that we simplify our products for mid market merchants, but that they still have the access to the same platform, they don't need to integrate another time, and they can add functionalities and products along their growing journey.
It's still one integration, one platform. And lastly, we hold a great set of cards in this segment. We are very well positioned for the mid market and to grow into the mid market. We have a single platform, which served our needs, and we're here to support our merchants in their growth journey. Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone. I learned a lot. And on VanMoof, this is serendipitously a VanMoof bike behind me. This is an accident, I promise you. My heart stopped a few times when Blake's Zoom froze up, but luckily, we got through that relatively unscathed.
We'll be going into a break now. You will have the opportunity for a 30 minute Q and A session with the presenters you just saw and our full board. Now, a reminder to please also list your the firm or the fund you are representing. It really helps us to order the questions. And see you soon.
We will reconvene at 4:25 Amsterdam time, which is in 8 minutes. Welcome back, everyone, to the Q and A section, the first one we have today. Just a reminder on how it works. You put in your question. I will give you the chance to unmute yourself and to ask your question in person.
Our first one is from Mohamed Moala at Goldman Sachs. Moog, I would just ask you for the sake of time, there's 4 questions here to pick 2 and ask those and we can circle back to you when everyone else has had a chance. So, Mohammad, go ahead.
Great. Thank you very much. So my first question is really revolving around the technology that you have, lead you have in unified commerce. You talk a lot about that. Which of your competitors competitors in the field are you mindful of?
What is your key differentiator? And when do you expect to see sort of this big take up of unified commerce to really accelerate among larger merchants? Thank you.
So a few on Unified Commerce. Peter, would you like to take that one?
Yeah, sure. The on the question, when do we let me pick on and which is when do we expect unified commerce to really take off? For us, it has taken off. Sometimes you don't really see it in our numbers yet, but if you see why merchants choose for us, that can be, that they choose for us with terminals because they know they're gonna do, online with us later, you do see it the other way around as well, that they choose for us with online because they can do terminals later. And actually, if we look at our current merchant base, we indeed see merchants which have been for quite a long time, I think 1 to 2 years live with us, only now coming up with the next channel.
Also on top of that, COVID has shown the need to be multichannel, we've seen it with our retailers, that when the store volume fell away, online compensated for that. So, I think the trend is actually, is going quicker and is already happening. So the question was, when will we see that mass? I think there's currently already a lot of traction there.
Two questions. So if you want to ask a follow-up, I'm asking the team here to unmute your line again, so you have another opportunity.
Did I answer everything? Because I had the feeling that Mohammed had another question.
Shall I say a few words on the competition because I think that was the other question? So on competition, I think what we really see happening right now is that we have a single global platform where the omni channel approach is really helping us to win the largest deals. There are not that many players that we are aware of that has the same proposition. So really a single code base in all those geographies. And that's what you need if you really want to truly get to a unified commerce proposition.
So maybe you have some local players, but for the ones that want to go to a real international implementation, you need to basically work with us at the moment. And so far, we haven't gotten any signals that someone is competing with us on a global scale here. Right.
That's very clear. Our next question is from Josh Levin at Autonomous. Josh, you can go ahead and unmute yourself.
Hi. So large merchants we've spoken with say reporting and reconciliation is still a challenge. And that while audience offering is better than others, it's still not perfect. What makes reporting and reconciliation so challenging to do right? Thank you.
Ingo, perhaps this is one you can take on.
Sure. Thanks, Josh, for the question. Yes, reporting reconciliation has always been a topic in our company, how to improve it and how to work with our merchants to get it better. And I think if you look at where we currently are, we have a lot of detailed reporting for our merchants. At the same time, you see that sometimes they want to have new types of reporting.
One of the examples is, for instance, sales day payout, where for retailers, we developed a product where Monday's sales get paid out one day or 2 days later, just the full amount, which leads to a different type of reconciliation, and it gives more easiness to our merchants. And that's what we're looking for. So it's always an area where we can further improve. It will also be important to mid market customers to make it even more simple and to make sure that they actually understand what they get paid.
All right. Thank you, Ingo. The next question that's come in is from Julian Serafini at Jefferies. Julian, you can go ahead and unmute yourself.
Thank you for taking the question. So I want to ask on Marketplaces specifically. Can you discuss or share your view on Marketplaces longer term? Why do you think they do or do not internalize a greater portion of the payment value chain? So why do they keep relying on acquirers and such as Adient for part of their payments infrastructure and not choose to in house more and more of that?
Thanks, Julian. Blake, perhaps you could take the first part of this question?
Yes. I think marketplaces and platforms both are actually choosing to take payments in house. Now, what does in house mean to us? In house means a unified branding experience for the marketplace or the platform. Our vision is we want to make sure that every marketplace and platform of ours does have the tools, the features, and functionalities to be able to manage payments in house and have a payments channel within their own company and us being behind the scenes and partnering
them to do so.
Hey, Hamil, maybe I can chime in here.
Absolutely. Go ahead.
Yeah. Sorry. I think Blake broke up a little bit. I think to Blake's point, they're taking it in house in that they're offering to their end customers who are often small merchants payments in addition to the core marketplace offering, right, whether that's a retail offering, if you're an eBay or an Etsy or if you're a SaaS platform like the ones Blake mentioned, Zenoti or Modernizing Medicine, etcetera. But I think there's a lot of complexity.
1, how many regions are you going to offer it in? How many payment methods? How many channels? And it's not just payments, you have to do onboarding. So how are you doing the KYC and AML for your customers, then all the payment processing, then the payout, the reporting and the reconciliation.
So I think to Blake's point, it's a question of what in house means. But there's so much complexity that I think there's a huge value that we can offer in simplifying what they offer to their end customers. But we think this is a huge growth area and opportunity for us as a result of that.
Thank you, Cameron. That's very clear. Our next questions come in from Sanjay Sakhrani at KBW. Sanjay, you can go on mute.
Thank you. So the post COVID-nineteen environment has seen positives and negatives for the payment industry. I'm curious if there's any specific strategy related changes or any considerations we should think about when thinking about the Adient story? For example, has the push on unified commerce accelerated on the part of merchants? And my second question is, it's been about a year since we saw the wave of consolidation among U.
S. Payment providers, processors as well. Could you just talk about any impacts that Adi and Haseem? Thanks.
Thanks, Sanjay. Perhaps, Peter, you can tackle that first question on the strategic impact that COVID-nineteen has had. And then I'll ask Kamran to answer on consolidation in the U. S. Market.
Right. Yes, that is a really good question. It's a question that we asked ourselves is what is the impact of COVID on Adient? And we come to the conclusion that strategically, long term, it doesn't change that much. What it does, though, is it influences certain developments.
And which developments are influenced, there is a more a move from cash to card.
So
patients which were about to happen, happen quicker or innovation changes. Think about businesses which were considering to move online, which now currently do it very rapidly. So it could be a catalyst for change. On the other hand, Adient also sees, of course, that our industries, which are severely hit and, therefore, well, travel, of course, is negatively impacted. So that's how we look at it.
So the answer to your question, should I strategically look differently at Adient? No, I don't think so. I think the trends which have always helped us, which is international single platform and multichannel, that still is all valid and will remain valid for the future.
Thank you.
Camron, do you want to say something about the consolidation? Sorry, Emil.
No worries. Camron on consolidation, we're going live to him.
Absolutely. Thanks, Peter, Camo. Yes, I think what we're seeing as a result of the consolidation is honestly neutral to positive for us. And it goes back to I know maybe we sound like a broken record here, but the common code base on which we can offer global capabilities, omnichannel capabilities and all the different feature and functionality. So we're seeing as players are consolidating, that means that sometimes platforms are being migrated or sunsetted, which means customers then start looking around and saying, hey, what do I want to do in terms of my future strategy?
Where is the world going? And especially with COVID, the acceleration of a lot of trends. And I think that's resulting in a lot more conversations for us given the unique nature of our offering. So I think for us, it's been neutral to positive, to be honest.
So consolidation is opportunity. Thank you, Kamran. Our next question is from Hannes Leitner at UBS. Hannes, go ahead, please.
Yes. Thank you for letting me on. So I have two questions. The first one is on your license road map. You latest added Malaysia to acquiring license, maybe you can talk here.
Also, and on the issuing side, which are your future markets, there you have seemingly more white spots. And then also kind of talk about the economics on the owning their own license and the BIN sponsor, is there a certain volume threshold when it makes sense to have your own? And then lastly on issuing, you showed that integrated
acquiring to issuing platform.
Do you also would you acquiring to issuing platform. Do you also would you also consider to collaborate or cooperate with banks on that issuing platform.
Thanks, Anders. So a question on the road map for licensing and then also on the potential cooperation with banks in issuing space. Ingo, if you could tackle at least the first part of that question, please.
Yes. So I think for the licenses, we've always followed our merchants and always try to get the best license possible. So that means for certain markets, you need to work with bin sponsors that basically help you with the regulatory setup in a country. But if possible, we always try to go direct. And from an economics perspective, given the volumes that we bring, there is not much of a difference between acquiring and Rent A Bin.
And in the current situation, the number of Rent A Bin is very limited. It's at the moment only in the U. S. And Brazil. So we're we continue to build our own licenses, and we continue to follow basically our merchants to see what's next.
Malaysia was the most recent announcement, and we will continue to work on new licenses in the future where possible.
Got it. And banks as potential partners in the issuing space?
Yes. So that's an interesting question. I think, of course, we're building a complete new infrastructure, but we built the infrastructure for our merchants. And we've always seen that, that is the most important target group for us. We see a lot of use cases where we can help our merchants, and we don't see banks currently on the top of our list to help them out.
Of course, if we would run out of ideas with merchants, you could always think about it, but it's not on the agenda right now.
Got it. Thank you very much. Our next question is from Stefan Hourie, who is at ODDO BHF. Stefan, you can go ahead, please.
Yes, hello. Thank you for taking my questions. So my first question would be on the European payment initiative, if you can explain what is the impact for you if you see 1? Third question is, do you have, let's say, the means to develop into the mid market? Because it seems that it's already pretty crowded space with local competitors.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Stefan. So we've got the European payments initiative, how much we can improve the auth rates and the means of development into mid market. I think we'll go European payments initiative to Ingo. Then we'll head to Sunil for the auth rates question and Martino on the mid market space. So Ingo, kick us off, please.
Yes, thanks. So European Payments Initiative is an initiative to create a new payment method. That's how we see it. So banks working together to see how they can build a new product, which I think very similar to some online banking products that we already see in Europe. So it leads to more complexity for our merchants.
If there is a merchant ask for it, we will, of course, have a look at it. So we see it more as a way to help our merchants than like a threat. It's just another product to our platform.
Thank you. And Sunil, how much can we improve the acceptance rate versus the 80% we talked about?
Thank you for that question. It's an important one to ask. I think to put it in context, auth rates is a way of keeping score. It isn't the most important objective. In the end, the important objective is solve technical problems, reduce complexity, and improve customer satisfaction and conversion.
But within the boundaries of that, we find that depending on the merchants model, what they are selling, where they are selling it, you can improve auth rates at different rates. But I'll give you one example that we've talked about in the past, just the introduction of a network token, which is a new means of accepting a digital payment token in as opposed to the account number on the card that can increase auth rates by 2% to 6%. So by integrating these technologies globally at scale, we can make a significant difference in merchant revenue.
That's really good. And then Martina, lastly, on evolving into an already crowded space when it comes to the mid market, especially locally. Can you say a few words about that?
Yes. Thank you for this question. Great question. What we see is that we gain a lot of traction for the mid market and that we're growing at the same pace in the mid market
as the enterprise. It's also a long
term game, as we mentioned. Great example is access to thousands of new merchants in Europe. So it's a long term game, but we gain a lot of tractions there.
Our next question is from Sandeep Deshpande. Sandeep, you can go off mute, please. Go ahead.
Yes. I have two questions, if I may. Firstly, on your new issuing offering. Is this issuing offering dependent on having a banking license in the market where you will be doing this issuing and how quickly this business opportunity can scale up? And my second question is clearly when you look at the revenue of Adyen today it is very European centric.
Maybe it is not actually generated in Europe but in the way you report it is very European centric. You have been expanding very aggressively in the US. Maybe you can talk about how successful you've been in terms of given that many of your customers are originally U. S. Companies, how successful you've been in becoming a payment services provider to them back
home. Thank you, Sandeep. So the first question was on the licensing setup required for issuing. Kamran, if you could take that, please. And then on our net revenue distribution globally, I think Ingo is the best to answer that.
So Kamran, go ahead, please.
Thanks, Hemmel. Thanks for the question. Yes, I think the answer is similar to what Ingo described on the acquiring side. So wherever possible, our strategy is to leverage our own license. So Europe is a great example where we have a full bank license and therefore everything end to end, the license to all the processing risk, etcetera, etcetera, is us.
In other markets, beginning with the U. S, we would partner with with the bank. So Rent A Bin, as Ingo described, as a quick way to launch. So I think similar to acquiring wherever possible go direct, but combination in the short term.
Thank you, Kamran. And then Ingo, on the net revenue distribution, we do have a lot of U. S. Logos. Explain that to us.
How does that work?
Yes. So with the net revenues, we always take a global approach. So if we onboard merchants, we want to make sure that we help them globally. That's also how we've structured the company. And the way we report revenues is where we send the invoice.
So for instance, for U. S. Merchants, we started to work with them with European acquiring. So that's recognized as European traffic and European revenues. But it wouldn't be possible without your U.
S. Team to help those merchants and to service them. I think the good thing is what you have seen over the recent years is that we convert a lot of U. S. Merchants also to the local domestic market in U.
S. And that's the game going forward to make sure that we have the right proposition there, that we if you look at recent wins, I think we have a lot of proof points that we can be very competitive in U. S. And specifically, if you think about unified commerce propositions, we're actually in a very good spot to solve complexity in a domestic market. So our longer term expectation, of course, is that the share of European revenues will go down.
It's quite clear. Thank you. Our next question is from Adam Wood at Morgan Stanley. Adam, I see about 5 questions here. If you could kindly pick the 2 you'd most like to ask, and we'll
Perfect. Thank you very much, and thanks for letting me on. Maybe just first of all, it was about the whole kind of concept of automation of onboarding and you've done that around employees, but I guess that's also important from a mid market point of view. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about how that's worked with employees? Have you found that the success rates have been different as you've started to automate that process?
And then for mid market merchants, how do you scale that up in terms of managing both the onboarding and support of those merchants? So that kind of question there. And then just secondly, around being able to monetize offerings. You talked about accelerating payments and data and analytics. Is that something that differentiates the offering?
Or is that something that you can charge for as you go forward?
Thank you, Adam. And an extremely elegant way of asking 3 questions in
the quarter.
You caught me out. I apologize. Thank you.
Well done.
Hat it off to you. So perhaps we can go to Peter for remote onboarding on Data insights, we'll let Ingo tackle that one. Go ahead, Peter.
All right. So regarding remote onboarding on people, let me start with saying that we'd rather have everybody in the office. So we have done a lot and that has been very effective, but it's not 100% ideal. So what have we done from the beginning of the COVID crisis? We have said, let's assume this takes a long time.
And then we'd rather be surprised that it turns out to be shorter than anticipated than the other way around. So all training programs have immediately been converted to online programs. On top of that, we have also increased our training to team leads. So to help them, what is expected from me during this crisis? How can I better help onboarding new people?
And the third thing which we have done is offices which are open or if we were open or are open with some limited capacity. New joiners are the first one to go to the office with the people who train them so that we have so that we are so that we make it easier for them to get absorbed by the company. Something about I said, you cannot it doesn't work perfectly. So what does that mean? That means that the team leads are asked to also meet with them in something.
And because we're so worldwide, from Shanghai where things are perfect, where are relatively normal to, some offices which are fully closed. But within what can be done by country, people are meeting on terraces to do the last part. Sometimes people are meeting in a subset in the office, but that's how we make a tailor made program so that everybody gets the onboarding, which is very close to what it would have been in a world without COVID.
Thank you, Peter. And then Martina, on how onboarding is different for mid market companies compared to enterprise companies.
Yes. Thank you very much. So I think what's very important for us is that we keep on learning for the onboarding. Step by step on a daily basis, we're looking in how we can improve our onboarding and how we can onboard our merchants faster. This is through automation, but of course, always our customer success team is always very happy to help.
I think automation is very important, and we're also working together with partners, very open for feedback on how we can improve our onboarding.
All right. So we're working in the right direction there. Ingo, lastly, on data and analytics, How does it differentiate us? And can we charge for it?
Yes. So data analytics is key in our strategy. So helping our merchants to give back the right data, to give back the right insights is the way to build a long term relationship with our merchants. That's what our strategy is. And currently, we do not charge for it, at least not for all products.
We do for some products like Revenue Protect, where we use data and give the right insights. But if you really think about unified commerce data analytics, this is something maybe for the long run. But at the moment, we want to make sure that we work with customers, help them build this long term relationship. And the revenues are more reflected in this long term relationship than in additional charging for it.
All right. So a value game for now.
Value game for now, yes.
Got it. Next question is from Josh Beck at KeyBanc. Josh, go ahead, please.
Hi, this is Alex Margraf on for Josh. Thanks for taking the question. I was hoping I'm in if you guys could provide some thoughts just around how much of the recent you know, activity and surge in e commerce volume that we've seen, you know, you expect to be more permanent in nature? And then any sense of how much of that is more of a pull forward in TAM penetration versus expanded TAM bringing new consumers into the TAM? Thank you.
So on the macro impact of COVID, perhaps, Ingo, would you like to say a few words?
Yes. So I think we have seen a couple of accelerations on our platform. But of course, the question is how long does it stick? And it's very difficult to exactly answer because also without COVID, we've grown the company quite quickly. So to completely separate those trends is relatively difficult.
I think it comes back to the question that was discussed earlier by Peter. Like do we see fundamental changes to the market and to the addressable market? I would say the answer is no. Maybe the total addressable market has grown because we have more conversion from cash to cashless, but that was a trend that was going anyways. So I don't think that there is a fundamental change.
That's also not how we look at it.
Got it. Thank you very much. Our next question is from Patrick Lemons at Robeco. Patrick, you can go ahead, please. Stay tuned as we get in touch with Patrick.
If we can't get in touch with him, if the team could Yes.
Can you hear me now?
Yes. Here's Patrick. Go ahead, please.
I was muted. Okay. Well, basically, it is clear that you want to build solutions for all merchants and not customize stuff for just 1 or a couple of merchants. With the recently announced change at board level, there was perhaps some expectation that there will be changes coming to the IT strategy. And well, not huge exchanges, but you have shown in the past that IT core, if you need to change it, you do it.
So perhaps if you can give us a bit of idea of what might be sort of attention points going forward.
Thank you, Patrick. Peter, will there be a change in IT strategy that Arnaut has announced he's leaving? Go ahead.
The our choice to not go into custom development that is lessons learned from the past. And even within the beginning of the end, we have an example where we still did it, where we went into a customer into a specific protocol for a single merchant. It sounds attractive if you're looking for revenues. Long term, it does slow you down. So this is so ingrained in our mentality.
We want to build something very scalable, something which has way more runway than a short term strategy, bolting all sorts of things to your platform and losing speed. So that is not just anchored in Iron Out, but it's so strongly anchored in the Achin Formula and in the food company that, that won't change.
Clear. So Iron Out's legacy will outlive his tenure. Our next question is from Michael Willer. Michael, go ahead please.
Hi, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes, Michael. Go ahead.
Just a question regarding your competitive advantage. How do you guys think about the defensibility of your tech advantage as well as your culture? Thank you.
Thanks, Mikael. Peter, perhaps you could take that. So the defensibility of our tech and culture advantages.
I think that those are good questions to ask and that is something on which we spent a huge amount of time. If you see how much time we spent on educating people in the on the culture, on training team leads, on spotting what we call so what we do is the the unseen talents. So people who are high contributors, we make sure that they make a career and not the ones who are politically active. So if you see, we run all sorts of programs to keep the culture this way. But the question is fair.
I would say if you just let it go, things won't be as powerful as they are today. So it's those things are our constant investment and similar for technology. We are constantly making improvements, changing things that because we also have been running for 14 years that if we wouldn't have, things would need to be revised. So you try to minimize the technological depth in your platform and constantly investing. So it's hard work.
But I think we're really good at it. But it is constant work.
And perhaps a few words on people then and the importance of culture?
The reason why we have been able to move so quickly and attract talented people has I think that has been in the presentation today. We are attractive to to a specific to people who specifically like to contribute, usually the high performers. And that's that's I would give a similar answer that is constant maintenance. That means that that we are very careful in selecting that we are ourselves, that the boards does final interviews, that we invest in people who have a lot of runway. And you've seen it today.
Everybody here today are people who made their career within the company. Nobody has been parachuted into it. And there's also, of course, the part that if there's not a cultural fit, which is the main reason for people to leave Adient, we act. And that's the only way how you keep the organization as agile as it is.
Very clear. Thank you, Peter. Our next question is from Sean Horgan. Sean, go ahead please.
Hi. Can you guys hear me?
Yes, sir. Go ahead.
Great. Thank you. So my first question was just on the platform market places front. The divide payment seems like a large opportunity. You gave the Postmates example.
Have you ever considered expanding into any consumer offerings?
Blake, if you could tackle that one. So the importance of
the genesis of the solution came from the need for platforms and marketplaces to be out of the funds flow, while also still maintaining full control of the funds. So the split payment feature allows us to split the payment on their behalf. We can split the funds as in the post mix example as many times as possible. And then maybe I'm getting to what your question was in terms of the consumer reach. When we split the funds, we not only had the ability to pay out to bank accounts, but also eligible cards.
And also as Cameron was alluding to on the issuing side, right, where the issuing string was built into the solution such that we can pay out to an issued card as well to a courier or whoever it may be.
Thanks, Blake. And the second part of your question, please, Sean?
Yes. Thank you. So next question was just online tailwinds are quickly offsetting a store retail headwinds. And last period, weekly volumes increased sharply after the late March bottom. How are you seeing the pace of transaction volumes recover since the last update?
Ingo, a word on the pace of transaction volumes since the last update, knowing we won't be able to share much detail?
Yes. I think the latest that we have given is our H1 results where you see a good rebound of offline after the of course, the store closures in the spring, whilst maintaining e commerce volumes. And we will update, of course, for the second half early next year. I'm afraid I can't say much on the recent weeks, unfortunately.
Thank you very much. And with that, I think we've come to the end of our first Q and A block. We will be back at 5 minutes past the hour, which is in about 7 minutes, another opportunity for teas and coffees. When we return, we'll have the regional heads presenting, Brian Demir, Jean Michel and Warren Hayashi. And we'll have another block of Q and A following that.
So see you soon. Section where we will introduce you to the regional leads, I'd like to hand off to Kamran Zaki, our COO. Kamran, go ahead, please.
Thanks, Hemmel. Pleasure to speak to everyone again. As we discussed earlier today, how we've been scaling Adyen as a global company and focused on solving for the complexities of our merchants across different channels, but also different geographies. I think Peter also mentioned, our founders are Dutch. We started in Europe and that's still the largest contributor to our net revenue globally.
But as our merchant portfolio is continuing to diversify, we see the revenue contributions from the other regions becoming more diversified as well. And so we thought it would be helpful to give you an overview on the key trends going on across Latin America, North America and Asia Pacific. So with that, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Jean, who will kick us off with Latin America.
Thank you, Cameron, for the introduction. Hi, everybody. My name is Jean Mies. I'm Adient's President for Latin America. Today, I would like to talk to you about our presence in Latin America, give you a brief introduction to the Latin American payments landscape and will then elaborate a little bit on how we are positioned to help our global merchant base to adapt to key industry trends and challenges in the region.
Let me start by giving you a brief introduction on some key metrics on Adient's presence in Latin America. With offices in Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Sao Jose, the Latin team currently consists of 76 full time employees and is growing. In the first half of twenty twenty, our net revenue contribution was of 9%, which represents a 15% year on year net revenue growth. Would like also to provide you with some depth on what the payments landscape in Latin America looks like. LATAM is expected to reach a retail e commerce volume of around US100 $1,000,000,000 in the next 2 years.
Prior to the pandemic, the region was amongst the fastest growing markets in the world at a rate of roughly 20% compared to a global average of 16.5%. Over the past years, what we have seen is a transition towards online and electronic payments in the Latin American payment space. Electronic payments became more popular over the years and to add some color here, credit card and debit card usage grew by 19% in Brazil in 2019. And this continuously increased adoption rate is due to several key socioeconomic factors that are tailwinds for us in the region, such as increased smartphone usage across the region, but also continent wide promotional financial inclusion, resulting in increased access to financial system for all. With this in our minds, we expect these regional tailwinds to develop further in the years to come.
At the same time, of course, it's good to keep in mind that the Latin American economy has been largely cash based. And according to the IMF, 55% of the population does not have a bank account. This, of course, resonates with cash heaviness of the market, but at the same time, it also illustrates that there's a lot of room left for growth when it comes to online and card payments. Now from a payments infrastructure perspective, the whole region is still largely dominated by banks. So high banking concentration has led to scenario of little to no innovation over the years.
And only recently, we have seen the local central banks starting to open the markets to encourage competition. So over the years, markets like Brazil, Mexico, but also Chile and Colombia have started removing or reducing barriers that affected the entrance of international payment companies. There's also allowing Adient to launch its first Latin American operation in 2011. And since then, Agen gradually expanded its scope from offering a gateway only solution to what now is a full stack proposition in Brazil. For us, it's clear that our technology driven approach puts us in a strong position to challenge the dominance of the legacy players across the region.
Now in the Latin American markets, the continuous shift towards e commerce, which obviously has been accelerated due to COVID-nineteen pandemic, has forced companies to invest in their payments technology and to integrate their offline and online sales channels. A good example to mention in our region is a company called Magasin Luisa, a merchant of ours or Magalu, which is a 60 year old traditional retailer. It has pretty much reinvented itself over the last 5 years and is now Brazil prime example of a successful transformation and fiercest competitor to global powerhouses. We, Adient, have helped Magalu over time with our full stack solution and of course, our capacity to significantly improve the efficiency of their e commerce operation by increasing their approval rates, offering more data for them to make business decisions. And although local PSPs are making efforts to offer integrated multi channel solutions, their biggest challenges are still their technological legacy and segregate platforms.
So unified commerce is really a big differential for Adient in this region and it's quite unique in a sense that it solves for fundamental technological challenges like channel integration, dependence on outdated platforms and services, but also, crossing performance and stability. With our single platform, our strong technology is our main differentiator. We are a technology company redefining payments. This ensures that we hold a unique position in the Latin American markets and today service some of the largest domestic digital players, companies like Rappi, Ifood and Hotmart. In addition, of course, to the local operations of global Adient merchants like Uber, Microsoft and many others.
As said before, we are here to serve both global merchants expanding into Latin America, which we can easily offer by our single platform. Additionally, we are here to help Latin American merchants transition towards online. So as digital transformation advances in the region, more and more retailers focus on strengthening their digital channels to better serve their customers. In markets like Brazil, where Adient offers the full stack solution, merchants are increasingly interested in breaking ties with traditional payment providers that really cannot fulfill their need for innovation in the payment space, both online or offline. And because of the evolution of the entire region, large enterprise players from North America, Asia Pacific and Europe are increasingly interested in the Latin American market.
As a result, competition in the e commerce and retail verticals has increased significantly and local companies are positioning themselves to face international competition and are being hugely successful. Companies like Mercado Libre, Rappi and Magazini Luiza that I mentioned before are really seen as references in the markets. But as we are recognized as a truly global payments technology company that has existing ties with many of the global players that are entering the region, most of the times we're seen as a natural choice for local companies and their efforts to defend their turf. As mentioned before, our focus on innovation through technology puts us really in a unique position to solve fundamental challenges for our merchant base. Thanks to the speed of our merchant driven innovation, which Mariette touched upon earlier, we're very well positioned to deploy innovative payment solutions swiftly in the region, like we did it, for instance, with digital wallets, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and others that we pioneered in the region.
The same goes for how we were the first ones to market 3DS 2, a very innovative authentication tool for debit and credit card transactions that enhances security and convenience in those transactions. The speed of how fast we could deliver the solution has been very beneficial in getting access to local champions like Via Varejo, a multibillion dollar retail conglomerate in Brazil. Now coming to my closing remarks, we continue to assess our opportunities for increasing audience footprint in the region. As always, and as Ingo mentioned before, this will be closely tied to our merchants' demands. In addition to that, after successfully launching unified commerce in Brazil as the first ones in the market in 2019, and also as stores begin to gradually open up as lockdown restrictions are beginning to lift, our objective in this area will be to further scale our unified commerce solution in Brazil.
So while helping Latin American merchants inside the region to expand outside the region or our non LatAm based merchants to expand into LatAm, we continue focusing on solving real complexities for our global merchants and local merchants inherent to the Latin American region. With this, I want to thank you all. It was a pleasure to provide you with some more insights on audience presence in Latin America and how we help our merchants over here. And now I would like to hand over to San Francisco to Brian to talk about North America.
Thank you, Sean. My name is Brian Demir. I'm President of North America. And today I'm going to talk about the amazing work that 214 ad every day. North America represents a strategic region for Adyen.
It represents 18% of Adyen's net revenue contribution. And in H1 of 2020, we saw a 58% year over year net revenue growth. We're bicoastal in North America with an office in San Francisco, as well as New York and a growing presence in Toronto for our Canadian business. Similar to LATAM, we have a multifaceted mission in North America. We primarily have a 2 part mission.
The first is to serve North American merchants going abroad. With our one platform, we present a global solution to our merchants. 2nd to that, we serve North American merchants in an increasingly evolving domestic market. I'm going to dive into each of these themes and talk about what we're doing with our merchants here in North America. First, I'd like to talk about the North American domestic market itself.
It's easy at a 10,000 foot perspective to look at North America and see it as a simple market, to see it as card centric to be dominated by a consolidated list of players and a straightforward place to do payments. We would actually disagree with that. North America is evolving much like other markets are around the world. And at the end of the day, payments is a highly cultural experience. We'd like to call out 3 themes that are driving merchants in North America to work with us in their own domestic market.
The first would be around payment method proliferation. Well, North America is predominantly card centric market. It is worth noting that there's an explosion of additional payment method offerings that consumers are adapting. The first I would call out would be buy now pay later methods, which there are many to choose from. The second would be card centric wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay.
And then finally, alternative wallets like PayPal, Venmo and Square Cash. As consumers have additional options, merchants need to consider and weigh the pros and cons of offering those additional payment method options to their consumers in North America. With Agilent's one platform philosophy, the single integration, single contract and single relationship they have with us, lets us adapt to that evolving dynamic in the North American market. And that's why we find that merchants are working with us here. The second thing that I would call out would be unified commerce in general, but also the merging of channels in unified commerce.
COVID-nineteen, while an unfortunate instant globally that's had a lot of effects, has also fundamentally changed the dynamic for retailers and multi channel merchants in general. What we've found under COVID-nineteen is that having these digital channels and having a unified commerce omnichannel approach is no longer a nice to have. In North America, we're assisting merchants growing these digital channels, but then importantly, unifying their own platforms and their own systems around our single platform so that they can present one single holistic offering to their end consumer. And in that, they have one holistic view of their consumer, their shopper, and they can understand their shoppers behavior more as it adapts during COVID and as it changes over time. And then finally, we would call out evolutions from the card networks themselves.
While there are evolutions and alternative payment methods, local payment methods and non card central payment methods, it is worth noting that the card world itself is evolving as well. Sunil called out a lot of very interesting technologies that merchants need to be on top of, whether that's NFC contactless, EMV code network tokens or the 3 d Secure 2 protocol for next generation authentication. When you take these three themes together, we actually see a market that's rapidly evolving and requires merchants and payments teams on the merchant side to be dynamic and quick. And with our one platform philosophy, they're able to tackle this evolving market. We of course have our second theme, which is to help North American merchants expand cross border and see the world.
North American merchants have a hugely global presence in many cases being in dozens of countries around the world. And as I said previously, payments is a highly cultural experience. So whether you're considering offering Oletos and installments in Brazil, Conbini payments in Japan, Buy Now Pay Later in Australia, Bank Based Payment Methods in Europe or even card centric payments in North America, merchants need to consider a wide swath of approaches, payment methods and localization opportunities across their global business. And with Agen's one platform philosophy, we're able to offer them a single integration, commercial contract and relationship to manage all of that complexity. Importantly, we focus on 2 really important things as well.
One would be authorization rates. Around the world, there's different levels of maturity in these markets around both payment methods, as well as just card based payments in general. And with our one platform and with the machine learning and our revenue accelerate system, we're able to maintain consistent high quality authorization rates regardless of the market that we're operating with our merchants. And then second to that, I would say that we offer local expertise. While we maintain 1 global unified platform, we offer our merchants the ability to open up a market with the intelligence that we have about how payments works in that market.
That's exactly why merchants like Microsoft, Uber, Tiffany's and Dollar Shave Club choose to work with Agen to expand around the world. I wanted to take a few moments and focus in on 3 of our solutions that we've talked about earlier today, and specifically talk about what each of these solutions means for our North American merchants and what sorts of problems we're solving for those merchants around the world. The first that I would call out would be technology and online merchants. In many ways, our bread and butter, e commerce centric merchants operating around the world. Main theme that I would call out for these merchants would be scale.
Like I said previously, in terms of one of our 2 core missions of expanding around the world, these merchants benefit from our one platform philosophy. So whether it's focusing on maintaining excellent authorization rates as well as recurrent billing, domestic acquiring connections with a growing swath of offerings there as well as local payment methods. Merchants like Fiverr, Box and Pinterest choose us to operate their digital platforms. One thing that I would really call out and it's been talked about earlier today would be the fact that we build our products with these merchants. And I think a significant success story of the last year or so is 3ds2.
There's a rapidly evolving authentication dynamic around the world, whether it's PSD2 in Europe, as well as authentication requirements in countries like Brazil, Australia, and more to come. We worked with these types of merchants to build a merchant centric solution together that not only met their need to follow these regulations around consumer facing authentication, but also maintained their business at the same time. 2nd, I would call out unified commerce and point of sale. And the most important theme here would be adaptation. There's a huge amount of change going on for unified commerce merchants right now.
Many of those changes were happening before COVID-nineteen. Many of them have been sped up because of it. These merchants are introducing touch free and digital payments as well as additional payment channels onto their platforms. And because of that, they're rethinking their approach to facing their consumers. And they're needing to rethink their technology approach to how may they maintain those different channels.
We offer one platform that offers all of those channels and all of those regions to those merchants. That's why merchant like Subway, for example, works with us. At the same time, they're evolving on their side, adapting their systems to unify their approach to unified commerce. In the end, what this means is that consumer behavior is changing. Consumers used to stick around in a single channel, but now they might float between a kiosk flow and in app flow and online order ahead, a traditional counter payment or maybe even a drive through.
And with Agen's unified system, one platform and singular token vault, we're able to give a holistic single view of the shopper back to these merchants. This is exactly why merchants like Subway, Gap and Restoration work with us so that they can evolve their approach in a quickly adapting unified commerce environment. And then lastly, I would like to talk about our newest and most exciting, I would say, new area, which would be platforms and marketplaces. There is a new economy going on right now, around offering payments as a service. You know, we have foundational merchants in this area from GoFundMe to Ebay.
And what we're finding is that there's multiple challenges that these merchants face when wanting to present payments as part of their overall platform. And the first would be how to simplify, How to simplify a highly complex set of requirements from processing payments, splitting them, paying them out, onboarding sub merchants, KYC regulatory compliance. And with Agile for platforms, we're able to offer an API first solution that lets these platforms maintain their brand and relationship with their end customers and end merchants, but also simplify the overall approach with our API design. Over time, we're working with these merchants like we do with all of our merchants to build with them. And that's why it was very exciting over the last year to announce our issuing offering, which in many ways is an adaptation of the overall ad platforms flow as merchants are looking for unique ways to split funds as well as to payout funds to sub merchants or to third parties.
And then finally, I would call out our recent announcement of integrating Agen's point of sale and terminal offering into Agen for platforms with Zenoti and modernizing medicine as our exciting launch merchants for that offering. Now with the same API driven approach, these merchants can offer payments to their end customers, multi channel and adapt that same unified commerce dynamic that I talked about before. I hope you enjoyed this overview of what we're working on here in North America. I'm happy to hand you off to Warren, who's going to talk about Asia Pacific. Thank you.
Thank you, Brian. Hi, everyone. Thank you for Headquarters in Singapore. A little bit about our business. So as of June 30th, we have 132 employees in the region with offices in Singapore, Australia, China, Hong Kong, India and Japan.
Contribution of APAC to our total net revenue was 10% in the first half of twenty twenty with year on year net revenue growth of 28%. Asia Pacific is a very exciting region with 2 of the largest e commerce markets globally in China and Japan and 2 of the fastest growing ones in India and Southeast Asia. And it's continued to be seen from a payments perspective as a very fragmented region, many countries, currencies, regulations, cultures, payment habits, and because of that, payment methods. The macro trends that we've been seeing over the last few years are now accelerating, leading to further digitization in both the online and offline settings. And this bodes well for Audience unified commerce offering in the region.
Well, these trends are really exciting. Ironically, merchants now face even more choices and complexities with this digitization and it's amplified if they're looking at covering even more countries. And this places Adyen in a strong position to help our merchants simplify payments through our single platform, where they are global merchant reaching consumers in Asia, or if you're a merchant in the region that has aspirations to go beyond the borders. We're solving at the very core for this foundation for this fragmentation. Now consumers are leading the digitization of commerce.
In particular, 4 trends are happening all across the region. The first trend we're seeing is the acceleration of cash, cashless payments, shift from cash to cashless. Now, this trend started before the pandemic, But with the COVID, first of all, it's accelerating because shoppers and store employees are now minimizing the use of cash. And second, shoppers have really shifted their purchases to e commerce, necessitating and accelerating the use of adoption of cards and other digital payment methods. And the first thought that comes to mind when we speak about cashless are the mobile wallets like Alipay and WeChat Pay, which played a large part of driving the cashless agenda in China.
The cashless is a lot more than this. For example, in Australia, Tapengo or contactless card payments now represents over 90% of retail transactions, including the use of mobile payments like Apple Pay and Google Pay. And across Southeast Asia, QR code wallets are growing with multiple players in each country, not only offered by innovative tech companies, but also by local debit cards teams, all playing in the same arena. In fact, our research shows that 48% of merchants in Singapore are seeing increased use of mobile wallets in store, and 54% are seeing an increase in QR code payments in store as well. And even in Japan, which has historically been one of the most cash heavy markets in the world, consumers are adopting QR code based and mobile based wallets as well.
And in most countries, there's a big tailwind because governments are also actively pushing the cashless agenda. Now, when you go shop online or in store across Asia, one of the first things you notice are the breadth of Casa's payment methods available to shoppers, which creates dilemmas for our merchants. Which ones do I need to offer? How many do I need to offer? Are there differences in online and offline?
And how do I then scale this across countries? And we expect this cashless trend to continue and for more and more consumers to adopt cashless payments. And that's a big tailwind for Adia. The second trend is the rise of the super apps. And earlier I talked about Alipay and WeChat Pay.
Both have evolved into super apps that offer consumers a wide range of services, including ride hailing, commerce, financial services and of course mobile payments that can be used both online and in store. And for years, super apps were unique to China. But now we're seeing them across Southeast Asia with both Grab and Gojek, creating super apps that allow shoppers to pay online and offline. And we see this as a big accelerator to digitization. 1st, consumers now have an additional cashless payment at the deck and they that they can use for their shopping.
Now just a decade ago, 45 people in Southeast Asia had no internet connectivity and limited access to the information superhighway. But today, Southeast Asians are one of the most engaged mobile internet users in the world, with internet penetration over 80% in places like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. And this means that consumers are primed for digital and mobile shopping experiences. And furthermore, in countries with low credit card penetration, the Super Apps means that tens of millions of consumers are now able to pay for e commerce, not just from domestic merchants, but also from international merchants from Europe, from North America and other places that are increasingly targeting these shoppers. And second, this has accelerated offline merchants to adopt digital commerce and move into unified commerce and contributing to a growing ecosystem of technology savvy merchants who as they grow over time, face the same challenges of accepting payments beyond their borders and across multiple channels.
The 3rd trend is buy now, pay later, which we first started seeing in Asia, in Australia several years back. But this is no longer an Australia specific trend, but a global one with the likes of Afterpay and Zip Moving International. And it's not just about these two companies, with approximately 20 players alone in Australia and many tech startups trying to emulate the success, particularly across Southeast Asia. Here, merchants are really looking for an alternative solution to installment payments, which are tied to complex legacy implementations and require merchants to contract with each issuing bank in each country. And finally, Unify Commerce is also happening in Asia Pacific.
Like other regions, the pandemic really shifted spend to e commerce, in particular where stores, whether you're a retailer or QSR, forced to shut down during the lockdown periods. Asia Pacific was no exception either. We saw rapid growth of essential online services, such as food deliveries and groceries. And in many cities across Asia where shopping is synonymous with going to foot traffic and going to malls, retailers accelerated their digitization initiatives even when the stores opened up. In Hong Kong and Singapore are great examples.
Given the shopping densities in the 2 cities and the digitally savvy populations, unified commerce strategies helps retailers not only to quickly adapt for the situation now, but also prepare for opportunities in the future. And with that, we're seeing more and more cross channel experiences that are more frequently seen in the United States and Europe and LaSalle, buy online pickup in store, buy online return in store, or audience pay by link solution, which was also adopted by many retailers during this time. Now these trends are really exciting, but also means that merchants now face even more fragmentation and therefore complexities, especially when looking at more countries. It's daunting. International and local card schemes, wallets, super apps, online banking, convenience store payments, vouchers, and that's true smorgasbord of payments.
And that's why we have our unified commerce offering because we can then simplify payments for our merchants, whether they're growing within Asia or going abroad or in across multiple channels. We now have our unified commerce offering in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and New Zealand that offer payment methods and super apps like GrabPay, Alipay and Apple Pay as well as buy now pay later methods like Afterpay and Zip amongst many others. Which brings me to the final point around globalization of commerce. Now, Audience grows with our merchants and really proud to work with our global customers to simplify their payments, whether it's digital e commerce, luxury retail or QSR that have established a presence here across Asia. However, Asia based merchants are now growing global as well and growing beyond their home countries.
If you're an entrepreneur based in Singapore, you're thinking of growing across Southeast Asia. And if you're already a regional retailer, the aspiration is to go global. And consumers worldwide are now shopping from recognizable Asia based brands, whether it's shopping on Singles Day on AliExpress, or going to a Lorna Jane or ESOP store in the United States or Europe. And as more and more brands are expanding recently and globally, they face the same challenges global merchants that have come to Asia. They face an incredible number of choices of unfamiliar cashless payment methods, super apps, buy now pay later, which is then amplified when expanding into multiple countries and then multiple regions.
And that's where Audient comes in. So, digitization accelerating across Asia and Audient's single global platform is helping our merchants deal with this fragmentation and work with some of the most relevant payment methods across 3 channels. And we're now helping many of the top brands in Asia, both here locally and beyond the region. Thank you so much. And with that, I'd like to turn it back to Hemo.
Thank you.
Thank you, Warren, and thanks to everyone presenting. That was really insightful, really cool to see the pace of evolution of all these trends across the world and how we're dealing with them. Quick break. We will be back at 10 to 6 local time, which is in about 6 minutes. And then we'll begin our last round of Q and A with all the regional lead presenters you just saw and the full Atrium board.
See you soon. Thank you. Welcome back everyone to our 2nd block of Q and A. We're just going to start it off. I would say there are still some questions left open in the queue from the first session.
It is my personal aim to get through all of this before we end today. So with that said, the next question is from Antonin Bodry. Antonin, you can go ahead and ask your question, please.
Yes. Thank you very much. In fact, my question was about the mid market on its developments. You answered part of my question, but I would want to know it's a different go to market. So I would want to know if the mid market development would necessitate more investment in sales and marketing and or probably do you aim to develop the small merchant markets with mobile point of sales terminal, for example?
Thank you.
Ingo, would you like to take that question on the development of the mid market strategy and the investment required?
Yes, sure. Absolutely. Thank you, Emil. Yes. So of course, if you want to invest in mid market and reach the right target group, you need to invest in marketing.
So that's what we have been doing. It's also very crucial to work with the right partners because they typically build a relationship already with those merchants. So we will continue to invest in this segment like we have done over the past year. So it won't be a big change compared to what you've seen so far, but we will continue on that path for sure. And then related to smaller merchants, I think we've always said like we're focusing on mid market, and mid market is the next adjacent segment to enterprise.
That's something that we will continue with. So we're not targeting the smaller merchants directly. That's one of the reasons why we work with the platform strategy, and we hope to target those smaller merchants through platforms.
All right.
That makes a lot of sense. Our next question is from Thiago Almeida at Milestones Capital in Brazil. Thiago, go ahead, please.
Hello. Hi. I'd like to ask, if you think about long to mid term strategy of the company, what challenges and opportunities that you're seeing that you're facing most within the products? And also in terms of geographies, which ones that you believe it's the most promising in terms of growth and to keep the high growth of the company within the next 5 to 10 years, let's say, let's put this way, please. Thank you.
Right. Thank you. So opportunities with products and the most interesting geographies growth, it sounds very much like a CEO question to me. Perhaps one of the regional leads can jump in after Peter. But Peter, if you could kick us off, please.
Peter, I think you have to unmute yourself on your end.
Yes. My fault. The reason for us to be in a geography is twofold. It is to have a good coverage for our merchants that they can work with us. And it can be because domestically we think it's interesting.
So if we invest in a certain region, it's usually that we invest there because our merchants are interested in that region. So if you look at our Malaysia acquiring license, that is because merchants that internationally are working with us want to also have us cover that market. So the relationship between the most exciting market is that also the market where you invest. That relationship is not 1 on 1. We invest in markets because it are great places for our merchants to grow with us or we invest in markets because it are great places for our merchants to land us.
And if you've seen what Jean has done in Brazil, Brazil has been a very complex market for many merchants. They started working with us because we're good at Brazil, but then they also came with all other markets. So the relationship that is assumed behind the question in reality is slightly different.
It's kind of like picking children, right? You can't play favorites. I think we all understand. Our next up is, Mohamed Moala at Goldman Sachs for his second attempt. I think he has 2 more questions.
Mo, go ahead, please. Are we getting in touch with Mo? If not, all right. Moe, we'll get back to you should it be possible to reach you again. Our next question is from Louis Benoliel.
Louis, you can go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yes. Hi. Thank you. Just two questions. One is I'd like to hear from some of the regional heads whether they can get the employee growth to address all these opportunities that they have ahead.
And then secondly, I'm just curious, in Latin America, whether kind of MercadoPago is a competitor or an enabler for Radium?
Thanks very much, Luis. Perhaps, Jean, if you can tackle that question first. Is MercadoPago Pago a competitor for us?
Well, Mercado Pago is not a competitor of ours. As I said in the previous conversation, I'm wrong. Also, this whole presentation, we really focus on large enterprise merchants and the mid market. And this is our sole focus also in this region. So MercadoPago, as far as I understand, and of course, I would like to comment on other companies, but has not this target group.
Thank you kindly, Jean. And then perhaps Brian and then followed by Warren. Are we able to hire quick enough to be able to capitalize on all the local opportunities we have in the markets? Brian, go ahead,
please. Yes. It's a great question. I think as you've seen in our earnings results every 6 months, we continue to focus on hiring in the regions. And I think there's been a strong emphasis under COVID in particular of moving to a digital based onboarding approach, which I think in the long run will just make us simply more scalable in general in terms of onboarding.
That being said, at the same time, our focus is on quality. We could always hire quicker, but at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we're bringing in the right people, that we're having the right discussions and that we're focusing on the right opportunity. So I think the focus is on balancing these two things, but continuing our growth in terms of people so we can capture those opportunities.
Thanks, Brian. Very clear. And Warren, your take, please, for APAC?
Yes. And to add to Brian's point, we're also benefiting from the overall digitization and the agendas that are going on across the region. And because of that, we're seeing a lot a deeper talent pool that we can pick from. There are much more many more people, talented employees that have international backgrounds, multi regional but multi country backgrounds as well as technology backgrounds. I think that really helps in hiring the great people that we have.
It's very clear. Thank you, Warren. I don't think we've been able to get back in touch with Moe. There's a new one that popped up in my queue. Our next question is from Ken Hill at Loop Capital.
Ken, you can go ahead, please.
Yes, great. I had a question. So for Latin America, you mentioned unifying commerce in the region and a focus scaling the effort there. So I'm wondering if there's still any structural impediments that might be suppressing growth in the region and if you expect any of those to kind of ease here going forward? And I guess the second question for the region is if you could kind of maybe break down the growth between who might be maybe you guys growing with customers entering the region for the first time?
Or is it more established companies there kind of coming to your platform for the first time. Just kind of wondering if you could break it down between like new and existing customers there and how that might vary across the regions?
Thank you very much, Ken. So Jean, the first part of the question was, are there any regulatory or technological hurdles for the scaling of our unified commerce solution in LatAm? If you could please take that first.
Well,
also as I mentioned before, we're really solving for very strong complexities that exist in the markets. But since we are really benefiting strongly from the one platform, single platform approach, we're circumventing many of the challenges that exist in the market. So what we have been able to set up over the last few years also for our unified commerce solution is completely different from what other players offer in the market. Because as I said before, there are many times dependent on many different platforms and services that we don't so and this creates a certain dependency that we don't have.
That's very clear. Thank you. And some breakdown perhaps even if just anecdotal on the split between international companies coming into Brazil with us or Brazilian companies that we're helping grow outside of Brazil?
Yes. So we see a continuous trend of international companies from the regions, as I mentioned, North America, Asia Pacific and Europe coming into Brazil because the market is simply becoming more and more interesting because of the evolutions that we have seen there in terms of penetration of digital payments, electronic payments. So, at the same time, we feel that we are tackling exactly the challenges that Brazilian companies have been faced with over decades, if you will. So in my opinion, it's quite balanced in terms of traction. We see a lot of traction coming from local merchants, but also a lot of traction coming from international merchants.
That's very clear, Sean. Thank you. Now we're going back to Adam Wood at Morgan Stanley. Adam, go ahead, please.
Hi, thanks very much for taking the question. So I was very interested to hear you talked about the complexity in the domestic U. S. Market, which I think is probably underestimated by a lot of people. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about how far the opportunity in the U.
S. Goes? So we've heard a lot in recent years around the price competition in that market, particularly for the big box retailers in the U. S. That the rates they're paying are very, very low.
Is that a market that can open up to you as omnichannel becomes more important? Or do you think you stay much more kind of in a more mid market and more complex part of that U. S. Space, please? Thank you.
Yes. So that first part of your question, I see another one listed here, but that should be answered by Brian Demir. Brian, could you perhaps talk through the opportunity in North America, especially as it relates to relates to pricing?
Yes, absolutely. And glad to hear you affirm our opinion that it's an increasingly complex market. And I think the thing that I would simply note there is where Agence strength is, is where complexity lies. And that's not necessarily geographic complexity or even always channel complexity. What we're finding is that these merchants, though, are generally, if you're solely a domestic merchant, still have a lot of challenges in their single retail channel, whether that's on bringing additional payment methods, terminal offerings, adapting to things like curbside pickup contactless, but then of course taking on a multi channel approach.
As digital continues to be a more and more substantial channel for these retailers. They're realizing that they need to unify their overall technology stacks that they have sort of one view of their consumers as they float between those channels. So specifically as it pertains to pricing and price pressure in that market, I won't necessarily speak directly to that. What I will say is that we tend to do very well with these merchants who have these complex channels and complex challenges. And the more complex challenges they have, generally, the more they're willing to pay for those services.
So we definitely see benefits in that in the overall pricing dynamic.
It's very clear, Brian. Thank you. And Adam, I wouldn't want to be called evasive. So would you still like to ask the second part of your question? If we've lost touch with Adam, we can pivot to the new question.
It seems that Adam is out. Our next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani at KBW. Sanjay, go ahead please.
Thank you. So, I was curious if the buy now pay later product is something that Adyen would consider offering on its own off of its balance sheet or is the goal just to be a facilitator? And then the second question, more strategic is the whole land and grab strategy. I'm just trying to think about if there's any definition around the progress that you guys have made over time on existing relationships. And maybe if there's any metrics that you could provide where you are in terms of your share today versus what the addressable share might be within their existing merchant base?
Thank you.
Thank you, Sanjay. So the first part of the question on offering a buy now, pay later product of our balance sheet. When I hear balance sheet, Ingo, I think of you. So you can go ahead.
Yes. So indeed, it's a question that often comes up like we could develop our own payment methods, including buy now, pay later, but then we would go into direct competition with our merchants. And so far, we've always said, let's not do that. Let's make sure that we help them out because the moment you start to offer this payment method yourself, you're trying to get a relationship with the same consumer, and we don't think that, that's on the long term beneficial. So we will be more facilitator if needed than developing a product like this ourselves.
It's very clear. And then on the land and expand strategy that we've operated for over a decade now. Peter, would you like to say a few words on how that's evolving?
Yes. That is on the one hand side, we see more than 80 percent of our growth coming from existing merchants. So this is merchants that indeed we landed either a product line or a region and that give us more volume. On the other hand, we're also constantly on boarding new merchants so that process is a continuous process. The efforts to quantify that, it's very difficult.
It has been with the company sustained over time that the vast majority of our growth is from existing. What we do ourselves is we look at pipeline to make sure that we are indeed onboarding enough more merchants that that process continues.
Thank you, Peter. That's very clear. Our next question comes from Girish Baku at 10 Core Partners. Girish, you can go ahead, please.
Sorry. Thank you. Can you hear me?
Yes. We can hear you clear. Go ahead, please.
Great. I have two questions. One is on customer service. Mostly customers love Audient, but one thing we hear is that sometimes the responsiveness is a little bit slow given how critical the payments processes for them. And so they say maybe the people in Netherlands are sleeping.
So I wonder, how do you think about human relation responsiveness and how do you think about maybe becoming less time zone specific in terms of the technical responsiveness? And then second question is regarding the platform strategic vision over the long term. Given we're used to thinking of merchant acquirers in a certain way, but your vision and your platform is so much broader. I wonder where are the limits of it in terms of how much how deeply you could help your customers long term when I think about the back end in terms of finance their financial and banking software stacks?
Thank you very much, Girish. I think the first question is definitely one for Kamran on the responsiveness of our tech support around the world and us relying on time zones. And perhaps, I'm not sure if we still have Blake, but the strategic vision behind our platforms, if no Blake, then Kamran, feel free to take that one on as well. Go ahead, please.
Thanks, Emil. Yes, the first one, I think, as we highlighted throughout today, I think we're continuing to expand internationally. And I think the goal is definitely to not just be responsive to our customers, but as we discussed, be proactive in highlighting strategies that can help them grow their business. So obviously, always helpful feedback if we aren't living up to that promise, but that is definitely the goal and definitely work in progress. And I think Blake's there, so I'll let him tackle the platform one.
Happy to chime in if he's dropped off.
Go ahead, Blake.
Yeah. Yeah.
No problem. Yeah, so for platforms, what we're seeing is more and more of these software companies implementing financial services, specifically payments. A lot of these same software companies and platforms are also encouraging innovation from us to do things like issuing and other forward thinking traditional financial institution products and services. So I think that the platforms will bring a lot of innovation going forward to Adyen. And I also think, yes, I think we're prepared serve them in that same vision.
Thank you very much, Blake. Our next question is from Anthony Baudry at HSBC. Anthony, go ahead please.
Yes, thank you. A question about competition again. You speak since the beginning about one platform, one contract for Internet on marketplace clients, something that I understand. But at the same time, we see, for example, that you address many European business of U. S.
Companies, implying that these companies have other providers for their payments in the U. S. How do you see the future on this type of cross border clients? Do you expect certain time to grab the volumes of your U. S.
Clients in the U. S? And when do you see that?
Thanks, Antonin. Perhaps, Brian, you can kick us off on the opportunity for U. S. Volumes, for U. S.
Logos for which we mostly process European volumes at this time. And then Ingo, if you want to jump in after, feel free. Go ahead.
Yes. I mean, it's a great question. And usually, we start Brazil. They might have needs in APAC, Europe, whatever. I think that that's been the dynamic for a long time with Agit and that we focus on growing that business over time.
And I think it goes without saying almost that their domestic U. S. Business in many cases is an opportunity. I would argue that we have hit a watershed moment over the last few years where in many cases part of the initial discussion is their domestic U. S.
Business. And I would point to companies like Subway, for example, that are predominantly a U. S. Centric business, but then also have a global presence where that may be the case. So while we don't necessarily report specific numbers on that, I do think that there continues to be progress on working with our merchants with their domestic U.
S. Business.
Thanks, Brian. And we should always remember that payments is lumpy and sometimes it's slow and it takes a while for opportunities to realize themselves. Paul Jeffrey, you are next up. Paul, go ahead, please. We're getting in touch with Paul Jeffrey.
Paul Jeffrey is a no go. And we have one from Nuschin. Nuschin, go ahead, please.
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. So I understand the benefit of the senior platform You're seeing now that you're issuing solution that has been in the pilot phase for a while. Can you tell us how you see this strategy going forward? How sustainable do you see this strategy versus M and A? And secondly, do you plan to better monetize your banking license by also offering issuing solution to consumers, let's say, consumer financing?
Thank you very much, Nusin. I almost thought we would get through this day without an M and A question, but here we are. Peter, perhaps talk us through our M and A approach and why we feel that building from scratch is better.
Yes, that's so we have never bought something. And you said isn't it time consuming? I think the Chief of Staffing
could please mute Nuschian's line. There's some interference there. Sorry, Peter, for interrupting you. Please go ahead.
So, what we feel is that whereas theoretically, if you acquire something, you immediately have the functionality. What it does, it makes your business a whole lot more complex. So we think that ultimately it's slower. Suddenly, you start to run multiple platforms, multiple technologies. And then the question is, would you want to migrate that to a single platform to have those benefits again or are you from there exposing yourself to the complexity of running multiple platforms?
And why is that complex? From a security point of view, you use different technologies. From an uptime point of view, where do you put your best engineers if one of the platforms suffers? Many of the people involved with Ation have, at a certain point in their career worked for a payments company with multiple platforms. We all lived through it and we're not fans of it.
So I think it's a lot quicker to build stuff yourself. If you if but it depends on the window over which you measure success. If you measure success more over 7 years, I think it's a lot quicker if you measure success over 1 year and then it's a lot slower. And that's why we always say we look for the long term. If you really want to build something that consistently outperforms, you're looking at single platform, you're looking at end to end and you're looking at the same platform that works in multiple geographies.
Hence, if you look at card issuing that we're now building, you can say how much did you get done since you started on it. I think a lot. We are now live with it in Europe, and that will be the same rollout where we will have licenses to it. And actually, I think it's fairly quick.
Thank you, Peter. And then on the second part of that question on using our banking license to offer issuing products to consumers. Ingo, would you like to say a few words?
Yes. I think it's very much in line with the earlier question on the buy now, pay later question, like do we want to use our balance sheet to offer financial products. And we would go into direct competition with our customers. So I think it's highly unlikely that we will do this on the short or midterm.
It's very clear. Thank you. Our next question is from Fahad Kunwar. Fahad, you can go ahead, please.
Hi. Just a question on the trends that we're seeing to the account to account retail payments versus card networks. It looks like the regulators are trying to increasingly incentivize account to account payments. Can I just ask in the markets that you operate in, how have you seen this shift occurring? And also how does the economics differ for Adient when you go through a card network versus account for account payments, if it differs at all?
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Fahad. Ingo, would you like to take that question on how account to account is
different? Yes. I think it's, of course, something that we have always been good at. Like if you look at European market, for instance, there's a lot of online banking payment methods that have been there here for a long, long time. Often, the payment fee structures are slightly different.
So not ad valorem like with car payments. So you need to think about, okay, what does it exactly mean. But if you look at our economics, typically, we can make similar type of margins on account to account payments compared to card payments. So it's not a threat to our business. I think it's even an opportunity because it leads to additional complexity,
which we like to solve. Right, more complexity. All right, our next question is from Nick Barnes, Advantage. Nick, you can go ahead. Do we have Nick?
We do not have Nick. Then we have Josh Levin for attempt number 2. Josh, you can go ahead, please.
Hi. When there's an RFP by a merchant and in those occasions when Adyen does not win, is there a typical reason why? Is it pricing? Is it technical? Some other reason?
Okay. So why don't we win RFPs at times? I think this might be an interesting one to have all the regional heads answer and see if there's any difference there. So Brian, if you'd like to kick us off. When we don't win, why is it usually?
I'll give a bit of a cop out answer. It's across the board. It really varies. What it's generally not about is our technological capabilities. What it's generally not about is our reach.
Now sometimes they might be looking for a specific product that we haven't yet found enough demand with our merchant base. And then there's an incompatibility of what we're looking to offer. That's usually the case where we're not winning an RFP. They're effectively looking for something that we aren't yet selling, I would say.
That's very clear. Warren, does that sound familiar to you?
Very much so. I think it's really a wide range of depending on the merchant and what they're looking for. It can go all the way to looking for some merchants looking for long tail market in regions that we don't currently support yet.
All right. And Jean, anything to add?
No, I think it's very much aligned. I think that when most of the times when we win businesses here, it's because of our technological solution, our proposition to the market that is different from our incumbents. That's typically choose because of the challenges that they have, they choose to go, for a price based strategy. So dropping prices, which is nothing that we do. We like to sell value and we offer value.
Right. That sounds very familiar. Thank you for those answers. Our next question is from Michael DelGrosso. Michael, go ahead, please.
Yes. Thank you for taking my question. On the hospitality industry, you've announced several new partnerships recently. Is there an increased focus on this industry? Or more broadly, can you comment on your growth outlook for this vertical?
So our growth outlook for the hospitality vertical, I think perhaps, Derek, you could talk through some new developments. And then our growth outlook. Let's pivot to INGO for that part.
Okay. Yes. So indeed, Hospitality for the last year, 1.5 years, has been a focus of us next to expanding retail and also looking at food and beverage. Setting up partnerships there is very is key as in all our different markets that we're operating. So a couple of key partners have been introduced, and we're planning to now extend that as well in the other verticals that we're active in.
It's very clear. And Ingo, anything on the growth outlook for that?
Yes. I think it's long term investment in hospitality. Typically, if you'd like to work with partners, like Derek just mentioned, you need to build the relationship. So you won't see here like big increase in volumes in the next year. This is more like the next 3 to 5 years.
And we never give any specific guidance on verticals. But of course, we wouldn't invest in it if we would not have very high expectations for this vertical.
That sounds reasonable enough. Our next question is from James Goodman. James, go ahead, please. Do we have James?
Good afternoon. Can you hear me?
Yes, sir. Go ahead.
That's excellent. Thank you. And my first question is around the unified commerce strategy. You talked in an earlier session about the importance of things like terminal automation and faster install merchant onboarding. The question is to what extent the current terminal hardware solutions that are out there from the major manufacturers are really keeping pace with the payment experience that you want to provide in unified commerce?
And to what extent you're experimenting with alternative in store hardware? The second question, just a bit more numerical, but thinking back to some disclosures, I think in the prospectus around the number of customers you had that generated certain levels of TPV, I think you had just under 500 merchants, which were generating over €1,000,000 of monthly TPV and about 3,500 total customers. I wondered if you could, at this opportunity, give us an update on how the customer numbers have evolved. Thank you.
Thank you very much, James. So for the first question on our hardware strategy, perhaps, Derek, you can provide a bit more color there.
Yes. Of course, so we're always looking at our existing range and looking at the range and evaluating it. We're also looking at the market, how the point of sale market is evolving, also going away from terminals in the future. And that's, at this point, what we're doing. We're not actively announcing any new terminals at this point.
But they will those announcements will come in time, I promise. Secondly, on the evolution of our customer number that we disclosed pre IPO, Peter, would you like to say a few words on the merit of disclosing the number of customers we serve?
Well, what I think is good to note is that the dependency on large merchants has decreased over time because we've been adding more and more to them. So our spread over merchants and over industries is much more sophisticated than when we went public. And regarding number of merchants, we don't guide on that.
That's very clear. Thank you. Our next question is from Robert Lam at Citi. Robert, you can go ahead, please. Hello.
Can you hear me? Yes, sir. Go ahead.
Super. Within the health care vertical, such as the modernizing medicine win, how should we think about your position in the payment flows here? Is this purely out of pocket and co pay? Or perhaps there's also an opportunity to help with the ultimate flows that come back from insurance reimbursement in the U. S?
Blake, do you want to take that question on payment flows concerning modernizing medicine?
Yes. Yes. I think in the health care space, we're seeing a lot of this verticalized software, specific to the healthcare industry. I think we mentioned modernizing medicine, but, they're not alone in that space. And I think while payments is key, a lot of the doctors' offices and surgical centers, they don't solely pick MonMed because of payments.
They pick them for everything else they do. And I think it's going to be interesting what these healthcare software companies do next. A lot of them today are issuing virtual cards to these providers. Obviously, that's something that we can now support. So I think that's also interesting to see how we incorporate that to this offering.
Beyond that, yes, I think it's going to be interesting to see where everything plays out with that space, but it's one that we're very excited about. We see a lot of growth there And there's been plenty of partners like a good one or eyes in medicine.
That's very helpful, Blake. Thank you. I think we're on to our last two questions from Sandeep at JPMorgan. Sandeep, go ahead, please.
Yes, hi. Thanks for letting me on. My first question is regarding, you know, through the COVID crisis, how you have onboarded customers. Do you think that your onboarding of customers through this whole last 6 month period is in line better or worse than what you had expected at the beginning of the year? You clearly had a plan or a roadmap at the beginning of the year and how that has gone versus the roadmap.
And then secondly, clearly, Adient has continued to take share in the market over the past year. Could we try to understand where Adient has taken share from? Clearly, you know, you expand, you know, you land and expand, but whenever you expand after you've landed, whether you're taking share from the legacy banks or you're taking share from the more modern companies or you're sharing business with the very modern payment companies? We'd like to understand where your market shares are. Thanks.
Thanks, Sandeep. So the first question is on the evolution of new deals we signed. Ingo, if you could answer that one. Has it been largely in line with pre COVID times or not?
Yes. I think it's been different. I think that's fair to say. Of course, we had a complete stop of implementations when COVID started. And I think the good news is that since then, a lot of implementations resumed.
And of course, that's important to get new customers live. I think one of the reasons why we guide for the medium- to long term is because we believe that the key question that we ask ourselves like is, has something fundamentally changed to our company? And I think that's a key question. And our answer to it is like, no, nothing has changed. We still believe in our medium- to long term outlook.
And of course, there this year is completely different than we expected. There's so many other trends, but it hasn't impacted how we look towards the future. All right.
Thank you. That's very clear. And then perhaps, Peter, to close us off. We win share from a number of different buckets. I think we've talked about a lot about that a lot over the past few years.
Has that evolved at all since our IPO, for example?
I think there are 3 buckets that we typically see that we gain from, which can be a domestic player that the company outgrows. It can be the banks. Sometimes we replace in a single country multiple banks to move to us. And the third one is the older existing payments company. There's not that much competition between the newest players.
It's so it's more gaining share from the likely large players, the likely suspects.
So the pie is growing. That's very clear. Thank you. My Q and A prompt is empty, and my heart is full. So I think well, before I say goodbye, I want to give a really big shout out to the team that made this possible.
Of all the virtual Capital Markets Days I've ever attended, this is by far my favorite. Really, really good job. I This is quite a production. So thank you to everyone who's worked on this. And I don't know if we can do one of those cool panning shots where we see the whole room here or see all the people on the screen, But I'll just talk a bit while yes, there we go.
I think from all of us, thank you very much for joining. We hope that next time, we can all be together again in the same room. But if not, I think this worked quite well. If you have any remaining questions, our IR team is always at your disposal at ir.com. And now for me and everyone here and everyone on the screen, thank you, and good night.