Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for holding and welcome to the Adyen's second half 2019 results conference call. At this moment, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the introduction, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Pieter van der Does, the CEO of Adyen. Go ahead, please.
Thank you, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the earnings call for the second half of 2019. As always, I'll talk you through the high-level results and what we're seeing in the industry, then Ingo will take a deeper dive into the numbers. After this update, we'll be happy to answer any questions.
We continue to see strong, profitable growth in the second half. Process volume for the full year was EUR 240 billion as we continue to grow at scale. Full year net revenue was EUR 479 million, growing 42% year-over-year. We saw a continuation of several positive trends in the second half of 2019. Our merchant portfolio is more diversified. Over 80% of growth came from existing merchants, our volume churn is still below 1%.
These facts leave us confident that we are delivering a best-in-class solution to our merchants, helping them to future-proof their approach to payments. full stack volume continues to take up an increasingly large share of our total volume, and this trend continued in the second half of last year. We are now at 73%. Point of sale volume also keeps growing at an impressive rate.
It comprised of 12% of total volume for 2019. There's a lot to be excited about in the business, in the business on this front too, as we now can report tangible success in the QSR space following McDonald's and Subway wins. Just like in the retail sector, shopper behavior in QSR is changing, and we are right there at the forefront helping our merchants to adopt to this new reality.
Platforms too are interesting, providing the long tail of the market with access to the full strength of Adyen. Usually, these are marketplaces or business toolkit providers for small businesses. Examples include Wix and Zenoti. The reach of these businesses is very impressive, and it's a great space for us. We're not sitting still either.
We seized an opportunity to grow the team more aggressively in the second half, adding 195 FTE. We made some great improvements in our onboarding process, allowing us to get more people on board to help our merchants grow. At the end of the year, we employed 1,182 people. Our merchants growth takes us all over the world, and we recently opened new offices in Mumbai and Tokyo.
It brings me great joy to see the Adyen offices popping up all over the globe. APAC is specifically a very exciting region. On the product front, we are constantly building new stuff. A few products worth highlighting for the second half are Pay by Link and Issuing. The Pay by Link pitch is twofold.
It allows smaller merchants to go live quickly with us without needing to commit significant development resources to the integration, and it allows merchants of any size to power contextual commerce, whether it's chatbots or VIP shopping service. Issuing is really exciting too.
This product has several use cases in travel, food, delivery, and hospitality verticals, allowing for quicker payouts, faster disbursements, and for marketplaces, quicker onboarding. For more detail on what we are seeing in the business, please see our shareholder's letter. For now, Ingo is here with more details on the numbers.
Thank you, Pieter. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining. Second half process volume was EUR 135 billion, growing 52%. The full year number was EUR 240 billion. Of this EUR 135 billion, point of sale volume comprised 13%, totaling EUR 18 billion. This number has kept increasing over the past half-yearly periods.
We didn't see a slowdown in second half of last year, which says a lot about merchants need to adapt to a new shopping environment requiring a unified commerce approach. This is also what we're seeing on the platform with hundreds of merchants adding an additional channel.
Net revenue was EUR 276 million in the second half, up 43% year-on-year. Full year net revenue was EUR 497 million. The net revenue growth was again well diversified across the merchant base and geographically.
Take rate is down slightly, mostly due to new volume tiers kicking in for enterprise merchants. OPEX were EUR 134 million in the second half, up 57% year-on-year, as we invested more deliberately in increased hiring. Full year OPEX came in at EUR 240 million.
We will continue to invest in growing the team and in marketing to support our sales efforts. EBITDA was EUR 154 million for the second half, up 37% year-on-year. Full year EBITDA was EUR 279 million. EBITDA margin was 56% for both second half and the full year, and with a positive impact of about 2% from IFRS 16.
Net income was EUR 112 million for the half year and EUR 204 million for the full year. Lastly, CapEx was up as we invested significantly in the scalability of our data centers. Even with these investments, CapEx still came in at just 4% of net revenue. This applies to both the second half and full year numbers.
We're happy to see the business continue to grow at scale while profitable and giving us room to invest in its continued success. Now on to our guidance. As we stated at the IPO and several times since, we will not change guidance unless our view of the business changes substantially, and at this stage, it has not. We maintain the same long-term outlook. In light of this, I would like to reiterate our outlook. On net revenue growth, mid-20s to low 30s in the medium term.
On EBITDA margin, we expect EBITDA margin to increase to levels above 55% in the long term. Please keep in mind that this objective was set prior to the IFRS 16 accounting change. On CapEx, we aim to maintain a CapEx level of up to 5% of our net revenue. As Pieter said, you can find these results in the shareholder letter on our website.
Before we head into the Q&A session and unrelated to these earnings, we want to provide a brief comment on the impact of COVID-19 due to the level of interest in the market currently. We have looked into the traffic on our platform over the recent weeks and have not seen a material impact to date. Of course, there are some groups of merchants that are potentially exposed, like airlines and OTAs, but on an aggregated level, there's not been a significant impact.
We have taken the necessary precautions to ensure that our service levels won't be impacted. We will monitor the situation on a continuous basis. Naturally, we hope that the situation will be under control swiftly as the impact on society reaches further than just the impact on business. With that said, we're both happy to take any questions now.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will start the question and answer session now. To be registered for the question and answer queue, please press zero one on your telephone keypads. Your questions will be answered in the order that they are received. If you have a question, please press zero one. Our first question is from Sandeep Deshpande of JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you for letting me on. Good afternoon. A couple of questions or 3 questions, more short questions from me. Firstly, regarding the growth that you are seeing. You know, you've seen significant growth in these QSRs, and you've announced 2 major contracts, and this was something you talked about at your analyst day last year.
Has this played out now in terms of the customers you are targeting, or is this a vertical that continues to be a, you know, potential driver of new customers, clients for you? Are there other verticals that you are targeting, just as you've targeted QSRs? Secondly, my question is more regarding 2020. I mean, we've seen there has been some economic impact associated with the ongoing situation globally.
Has Adyen seen any impact from that situation? Regarding the customer base, we've seen that your growth, particularly in North America, has been very strong, and you are clearly targeting that market. How should we be looking at Adyen customer base going forward from here, given that, you know, majority of your revenue is still European?
I, you know, I don't know exactly whether they're European from European customers. Maybe a lot of that is from U.S. customers. Is there potential that now you could grow with those same U.S. customers that you have in Europe, in the United States? Thank you.
All right. Thank you. They're all great questions. First, about QSR space. It's a space where we saw that the needs fit very well to how Adyen can help these restaurants. That's why we were focusing on it. What you always see is if we target a certain industry, and we are successful there in onboarding merchants, that others are looking at that as well.
What I particularly really like about it is that when we said we are interested in that space, that you then also see that there are merchants like McDonald's and Subway signing up with us. Also, if you look at Subway, that is U.S. and Canada. For McDonald's, it's global contract.
That's not the European is it just European volumes that you are asking later in your questions? The answer is, of course, we are interested in seeing more merchants in that space. This is now too early to say to a specific other verticals that that's where you will see the next merchants being onboarded.
Of course, we are interested in all the verticals where complexity, multi-channel and international play large roles. On the COVID-19, if you look at the impact for us, if we look at aggregate numbers, so over the full customer base, we cannot see significant impact. You would have to dive into specific merchants, specific regions to see it. On Adyen as a whole, we don't see an effect at this moment.
Then your third question on the growth per regions. Yes, it's true what you're saying. We are looking at the volumes based on where the, where the entity has its legal, or based on legal entities, so on billing address for us, and not on where the merchant, which office, did win the merchant. So some of the U.S. volumes or the APAC volumes could very well fall in another region.
On the other hand, we also see a lot of local success. The example which I mentioned is, say, a Subway, that's a U.S., that's a U.S. contract. It's also a matter of timing. We were first in Europe, later we rolled out in other parts of the world. It's lagging a little bit behind to see those domestic volumes.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of James Faucette of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hey, good afternoon, Pieter and Ingo. Thanks for taking the questions. Three from me as well, please. The first one's just on penetration, and I know this is something that you don't talk about much, but I was wondering if you could just give us a feel for how you think it's changed over time or since the IPO.
You know, is your merchant penetration going up or do the new wins keep this broadly flat or even lower it? That's the first one. The second one is just on the issuing products. Just keen to get a bit more color as to which of those different sectors you see the biggest opportunity, and how you Any traction that you're seeing so far on the issuing products. Finally, just on your capital allocation, clearly the net cash on the balance sheet is building up quite a lot. How are you thinking about capital allocation from here? Thank you.
All right. If you look at, is our wallet share increasing, the difficulty in the question is we are constantly going live with new merchants and constantly getting more share of wallet over that merchant base.
Yes, 80% or more than 80% of our growth is from getting, is from existing merchants. You have to see that as a continuum. We are also constantly boarding new merchants. That is not an ending process where you say we have now such a large part of the, of the share of wallet that it cannot increase anymore. On issuing, where is it really interesting?
It's really interesting for platforms when they want to sign up new sellers, or there could be hotels where it's easy to settle to them, even in remote areas where there's maybe less infrastructure or if you want to do it in a very efficient way. Think about virtual cards, which can be used by a hotel to get the cash for a booking which has been booked through the platform. Do you wanna add something to that and do the capital allocation?
Yeah, of course. Thanks, Pieter. I think if you look at issuing, I think our focus has always been on helping merchants. This is also the case for issuing. It's a business to business product. It's helping them to give cards to their customers. That's the key focus area. Online travel agencies or marketplaces or platforms are the most logical use cases in this area.
We see that based on the functionality that we can provide, like a global platform for issuing, that's something that is not existing. That's also the type of play that we want to focus on. On capital allocation, of course, we're still very proud to have a business without any debt. Everything has grown organically.
Of course, our cash balance is increasing, but it helps us. Speed and organic growth is very important. If you look at the current discussions that we're having with large customers, for instance, our financial position or stability is never a discussion. The same for regulators. We're constantly in discussion with many regulators around the world, and if you can provide them with a very stable balance sheet, it raises no questions with them.
Of course, in the speed of rollout, that's enormously important to us. This is the reason why we want to continue with current capital allocation. Of course, in the future, when this changes, when we add additional cash and it's no longer needed, we will revisit the strategy. For now, we think it's a real enabler for the speed of our business.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Hannes Leitner of UBS.
Yes, good afternoon. Thank you for letting me on. I got also a couple of questions. The first one on the headcount increase. You over proportionally increased the headcount in H2. Should we expect this as a run rate going forward? Also, is this any way attached to a specific vertical? That's the first question.
The second question is regarding the full stack. You mentioned that you raised now to 73% in H2. Can you give us an indication where you think the right equilibrium should be? Will you expect it to close to 100% over the long term? Thank you.
Thanks, Hannes. If you think about headcount, we are very proud that we found a way to onboard more new team members to the company. We want to continue with this. We see a huge opportunity in the market.
If you look at how it's distributed, it's very much distributed how we've built the company. Around 40% engineering, around 40% commercial, and 20% staff. We will continue with this. It's finding that right equilibrium between the speed of hiring and keeping the culture.
We're very much a culture-driven company. We want to make sure that we keep this. For instance, all the final interviews are still done by the management board of 6. We want to continue this in the future.
We think that we can continue with this growth. We think it's very important if we want to get to long-term sustained revenue growth. Of course, we hope to continue with that. On the full stack percentage, we're currently at 73%. Of course, we don't see it as a ceiling. The percentage that is not full stack is mostly related to airline volume.
Of course, if you look at total airline volume in the payments market, it's way smaller than around 27%. In the future, we want to further increase this full stack percentage. At the same time, we see a lot of growth with airlines, so it's not a goal in itself. We want to make sure that we help our merchants in the best way and that also airlines feel welcome on our platform.
Okay. Thank you. Just a quick follow-up on the issuing side. Do you expect to also charge the customers here per transaction volume, or is this a flat fee to use the product?
From a fee perspective, we expect to charge in a very similar way as with the acquiring product, so on a per transaction, basis.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Aditya Buddhavarapu of Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Good afternoon, guys. I have four questions. Firstly, just looking at the eBay ramp. I just wondered if you could provide us with some clarity around what's happening here. I understand you're already live in Germany and the U.S. Presumably you've had a chance to prove your capabilities to eBay and should I assume that the ramp will be relatively quick come the second half of 2020, or should I be a bit more conservative?
Any color here would be much appreciated. Secondly, just on the Subway win, I noticed one Subway in the U.S. and Canada, but one of your European peers won Subway in Europe. Obviously, given the advantages that the single platform provides in your global reach, I was a bit surprised to see that happen.
Any color around why that happened, and how you see that progressing in terms of the contract over a global basis would be very helpful. Thirdly, just on the issuing business, again, any color you can provide around how we should think about the opportunity.
We've tried to do some analysis, but any color from you would be very helpful. Finally, just a question for Ingo on the tax rates. Clearly the Dutch tax rates are coming down, how should we think about that over the next 2, 3 years? Thank you.
Okay. If you look at eBay, we're very happy to be live with them in Germany and the U.S. Of course, they still with PayPal for main volume. That contract is until summer of this year. For the further rollout, it's really up to eBay. Of course, we do whatever we can to get as much volume as possible. Based on feedback, I think also what is what they discuss in their earnings calls, they're happy with the rollout of their own payments stack. We're very proud to be part of it.
On Subway, like I said, we are very happy to have them as a customer. The contract which we signed is U.S. and Canada. We are very used to having merchants which have multiple suppliers. As you see, 80% of our growth is from existing merchants, so we have a good track record there. We are very used to having to prove ourselves with merchants, so we are fine with the current situation.
On the issuing, I think the opportunity is really big, of course we need to prove ourselves. We're still in a phase where we're working with a couple of customers to further improve the product. Based on the initial feedback, it looks very promising. Of course it's still very early stage. Like always with a new product, it takes time to build out to something significant.
That's where we are with issuing. On the tax side, indeed, tax rates in the Netherlands are going down. There is also a reverse trend, which is the impact of the Innovation Box that we have in the Netherlands. Given the size that we currently are, it's not fully scaling with the amount of profits that we have.
That has some sort of reverse impact on the ETR. Longer term, we think that a current ETR is, yeah, sort of, what we also expect going forward. Of course, with all the global tax changes, this is something that we track closely, and we always try to pay taxes locally. This can also change again over time.
Understood. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Mohammed Moawalla of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you very much. Hi, Pieter, Ingo. I had two questions. One on the hiring and the additional investments you are making and looking to make. Can you perhaps break it down in terms of where they're going? I know you sort of gave us the commercial engineering and stuff, but is it mostly around bulking up the enterprise sales force, or are you looking to build a parallel and scale up the mid-market?
Then maybe also by geographies and kind of where you see those incremental opportunities. Should we then see a sort of a shift perhaps in the mix between the kind of 80% existing versus new? Then my second question is just in terms of sort of broader pipeline opportunities that you see.
You obviously added to eBay, Alibaba, kind of big customers that potentially ramp too. What is the pipeline looking like? Which are the, you know, other than quick service restaurants, which are the verticals, where you see the kind of biggest opportunities to drive growth? Is it mostly omni-commerce or still in the more traditional online space?
Great. Thanks for the questions. I think if you look at the hiring and how we grow the team, we see if you look at the offices around the world, I think there's a graph in the shareholder letter which explains how we grow the offices at the moment. Most of the offices that are relatively smaller are fully sales offices or commercial offices.
If you see people adding there to the team, these are commercial roles. In some hubs, we also have a more broader engineering staff. There, I think it's fair to say that the general distribution that we see, like 40% engineering, 40% commercial, 20% staff is still applicable to this. For the commercial roles, we're also heavily investing in mid-market.
It's both enterprise salespeople that we hire. It's mid-market salespeople that we hire. It's account management for enterprise, and it's customer success managers for the mid-market. It's in the full spectrum. This is also how we see the growth at the moment. The growth of the company, the growth in net revenues is over the full merchant base.
That's also one of the things that we're very proud of. If you look at the pipeline, I think that the pipeline that we have is basically over the full width of what is possible. I think that's why we're so happy with the current development of the business. We have, of course, an organic growth strategy, where we pitch to merchants directly.
You see that the, also what Pieter already said, if we have one or two customers in a certain industry, this is often a very logical moment to also talk to their competitors. This helps us a lot in onboarding new merchants onto our platform. The pipeline is very diverse.
There are many opportunities for us, and it's just a matter of having this long-term view to get them onto the platform because some sales cycles take pretty long. Eventually, if merchants are looking for added value services in payments, they like to work with us. I think that's the good news.
Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of James Goodman of Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks. Thanks very much. Just firstly, as the unified commerce volume really takes off, could you remind us here just how you contrast, you know, the growth take, the net take, and any incremental EBITDA contribution versus the core part of the business?
I think it's fairly limited, but that would be helpful. Secondly, on the working capital, the operational working capital of the business, I think there was a large inflow in the trade payables.
I'm wondering if you could explain what that is and whether that reverses next year. Then finally, around the contract liability associated with one of the large customers that we've been discussing. It's not amortized on the balance sheet at all, but I think you're getting some revenues there.
Am I right in understanding this will be netted against revenues and when might that start? Just on the milestones around the warrants relating to that, can you tell us if we've reached any milestones or when we might be looking at testing against the milestones set out at IPO? Thank you.
Okay, thanks. I think if you look at point of sale, we mostly look just at volume. In the end, what we try to share in the shareholder letter is like the number of transactions or the volume that is originated on the point of sale terminal.
From a business perspective, it's all about unified commerce. How do we solve the convergence between online and offline for a lot of the retailers and QSRs? In discussions with them, also from a pricing perspective, they often see it very similar, whether it shouldn't really matter whether there is a transaction originating from a terminal or online. It's, like I said, it's converging, so there is no real difference. Also on our platform, there is no difference.
Longer term, for us, the strategy is to grow volume with our merchants. The marginal cost of a transaction is very low. That means that each additional transaction onto the platform is accretive to our to our margin. That's what we try to achieve. That's the strategy. On working capital, there is no fundamental change in trends in this year.
If you look at the balance sheet per end of December, this is a timing issue. This will disappear over time. For the contract assets, indeed, it's right. We will net this with the volumes that we will get in the future. It will be netted with the revenues.
On the warrant, your last question, we haven't hit any milestones. That was also not to be expected given the fact that the main contract has not expired with PayPal.
Perfect. Very clear. Thank you.
Yeah.
Our next question comes from the line of Ron Heijdenrijk of ABN AMRO. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. A few questions from my side. Firstly, you mentioned Black Friday and Singles Day. Would you happen to have the TPV on both those days for 2019 and 2018 for us, please? Secondly, coming back to the growth in the FTEs, which was indeed higher than we had expected.
At the half year stage, you were saying that you were managing for maximum growth, and at that time, you grew 29% in your FTEs. Now you're at 35, and you say you're going to continue with this. Is that a blended number between the two? Let's say 32, 33-ish, i.e, one-third per year in FTE growth, or is that more like towards the top end of that range?
If you could give some color on that would be great. On other expenses, that went up quite dramatically as well due to your marketing efforts. Is that a lot of that online marketing, i.e., Google clicks and stuff like that, where you get to bill afterwards?
How do you spend those marketing dollars, and when do you think that that marketing spend will be normalized? Maybe finally, sales cycles are indeed long, as you say. I was wondering now with the marketing and the brand recognition after the IPO, do you find that your sales cycles are shortening because of that? That's it for now. Thank you.
All right. Thanks for that. Yeah, we give our volume over a year and not on specific days. For Black Friday and Singles Days, we don't provide the process volume for those days. The headcount growth, yes, you're right, we're growing quicker because we became better at absorbing those people.
We always said we want to grow at maximum speed because the opportunity is huge. We are in a good spot where we see that competition is in integration processes. We wanna grasp the opportunity. We will continue to grow at the pace at which we can absorb people.
Looking back at this number, we are very happy that we can successfully do this and keep the culture at the first place. On the third thing, you see that our marketing spend went up. Large part of that is events on that's in corporate segment, also some mid-market events, and the online lead generation is specifically target to the mid-market.
The fourth question, sales cycles. The first deals in a certain industry are always the most difficult. Ongoing ones can be a little bit quicker. In general, this industry in the corporate segment has long sales cycles, and in the mid-market, sales cycles are significantly shorter.
Thank you for that. Maybe if I could ask 1 more question. I know that you don't like to talk about single merchants or single clients. On the Alibaba contract, which you announced in August, can you give us some color on when this went live and also on how much throughput or how much of the total share that you could get from Alibaba that you are capturing?
Yeah, no, you said it in your own intro. We don't, we don't do them specific. You have all the right to ask it, but we don't, we don't talk about specific merchants and the contract.
All right. Thanks.
Our next question comes from the line of Josh Levin of Autonomous. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you and good afternoon. I have three questions. It is interesting that you're not feeling much of an impact from COVID-19, given that Mastercard and PayPal have pointed to an impact, and you do have a fair amount of airline exposure.
I guess, are you surprised, and could you speculate about why you may not be feeling the impact from COVID-19 so far? Second question is, how much TPV is cross-border? The third question is on secure customer authentication. How ready do you think your merchants are to deal with that? Thank you.
All right. Let me start on why we don't see COVID impact in the numbers because of course, also for us operationally, it does have impact in how we limit travel and things like that. If we look at the numbers, why we would see less impact than say Visa or Mastercard is we do interchange passthrough.
If there would be less international transactions, less intercontinental transactions and more domestic transactions, that would from our business model not make any difference. Whereas typically in the card schemes, you see that cross-border traffic generates a higher cost, and that money goes to the card schemes. Therefore, you see more more of an impact there than. Because we have a passthrough pricing, for us that's less impact.
On the airlines is for us a gateway model. Not always, but for the vast majority, for us, it's gateway service only. That's not in our, we don't do the acquiring there. That means that we are, in that sense, we impact for us is limited at this moment. We cannot see it on the aggregated number.
Your question on volumes for which are cross-border, we do not disclose this. I think typically what we try to accomplish is local acquiring contracts. That's also why we build a single platform that works on a global scale. That's also why we have all those local acquiring licenses. Because for merchants, that makes their setup more efficient.
Also, to Pieter's point, if you have local acquiring, you work with lower cost. That's what we want to get or want what we want to achieve for our, for our merchants. Yeah. Then on, you had a question on service levels. Can you please repeat that one? I'm not sure if I got it, Josh.
The question was about Strong Customer Authentication, SCA.
Oh.
How ready do you think merchants are to deal with that?
Oh, sorry. What we want to do is we in secure authentication is that we are always on the forefront to help our merchants. I think the, as a result of PSD2, we introduced the second version of the 3-D Secure tooling. We were the first to market there. That leads then to additional traction with our merchants.
We always try to be on the forefront here. Of course, it's always the question, what is next? We like to work with the regulatory bodies also to see what's being developed and that we can develop as well to be ready for it. Does that answer your question?
It does. Thank you very much.
Okay, cool. Thanks.
Our next question comes from the line of James Friedman of Susquehanna Group. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi, thank you for hosting this call. I'll just ask my three up front as well, make them short. If you could, with regard to the 80% of the growth coming from the installed base, can you remind us, if you happen to have it, what it was during previous disclosures, say, at the IPO? That's the first one. Maybe that hasn't changed. I just don't remember.
The second one is, could you give us your thoughts on the U.S. bank licensed local merchant acquiring, apropos the previous question, how that creates some competitive advantages to you.
Third, with the disclosure in the letter, and you talked about this earlier, about opening up a Bombay office, I was just wondering, should we think of that as commercial, like front office? Is that more technological? Is it a typical mix? I am just trying to understand your opportunity in India. Thank you.
Thank you for those questions. Typically how Adyen works is indeed that we onboard merchants, and that we get more and more of their volume, and that 80% has been always in all our calls. That's an unchanged number. Your second question about the U.S. banking license. Yes, we have applied for that.
We're in the process with the Fed and OCC. The reason why we do this, we are constantly looking in each region what's the best way to be regulated. It's often that you have multiple choices under which you could operate, but we feel that this is a more efficient setup, like in Europe, where we applied for a banking license.
On India, we are expanding, and usually those offices are pure commercial offices. It's not done to develop specifically an engineering hub there. Although we see that in many of our offices, we do have some engineers. The strategy that the core of engineering is at our headquarters in Amsterdam remains.
Thank you, Pieter.
Our next question comes from the line of Nishin Najati of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you for taking my question. Good afternoon. I just have 1 follow-up on your issuing business. To my understanding, basically your merchant's gonna use your APIs to issue these cards to their customers, and then they would basically get the money, whether it's virtual or prepaid or gift cards and so on.
I was wondering who's taking this issuing fee, basically. Is this Adyen or is this the merchant? Because if it's Adyen, then it's it has a lot of upside opportunities for you guys. Also I wanted to know, like, when do you expect this to become incremental? Thank you.
Thanks for the question. Issuing the question is who's getting the interchange? That's based on the commercial arrangements that we have with our merchants. Of course, we want to help our merchants in the best way. And we will discuss with them what is a logical revenue share based on their business model and expectations.
This is a long-term play. If you look at this growth of the company and the additional volume that we get, it won't be incremental very quickly. It's a long-term investment. Of course, we would only do this if the potential would be big. We believe that could have a really big impact on our business, but it's going to take time to get there.
Okay. Thank you. Basically, it's not set yet who would get this fee?
It's basically a rev share.
Okay.
We believe in a model where we are always transparent about our fees and also how much the issuing fee would be, and discuss with the merchant what is a reasonable split between ourselves and the merchant like we have always done in our pricing with merchants.
I understand. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Sanjay Sakhrani of KBW. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you. I have a couple of follow-ups to previous questions and two others. First, on the merchant share question. There's obviously been a big spike in new merchant signings over the last couple of years. When we think about onboardings this year, in 2020 versus 2019, could you compare and contrast sort of the size of those onboarding backlogs?
Second, given the higher, the hiring plans remain elevated in 2020, I'm just Ingo, maybe you could help us think about how we should think about EBITDA margins. Should we expect them to be flattish in 2020 as a result? The two other questions are, one, we've seen some slowdown in APAC growth over the last year. I'm just wondering if that was expected, and maybe you could just help us think about the go-forward view.
Pieter, I just was wondering if there's any comments on whether your, you know, sort of your plans on acquisitions going forward have changed in any way because I know you have been pretty opposed to doing any. Thanks.
All right. Thanks, thanks for those questions. If you look, if this, there are backlog in onboarding new merchants, no. The spike, I don't know. You see that the company has It becomes more established. We have access to larger contracts, but I see it more as a continuum on our path to where we wanna go in the next years, and I don't see much short-term effects in there.
Also scaling up is not related to working away backlog. Scaling up is just because we can, we have a huge opportunity to grasp. If you talk about APAC and how the number is reflected versus the success of that office, many of the large deals which they closed indeed have a billing address in another region.
We are very pleased with what APAC accomplished, but I agree with you that the numbers, because we do them on billing address, don't fully reflect that. Regarding M&A, we don't believe that putting payment companies together creates a lot of synergy.
It's not that we would be opposed to any type of acquisition, but I don't believe in acquisitions between payment companies. We feel that working off a single platform in all over all channels gives us on many aspects a huge advantage. We won't veer away from that. No M&A plans. Ingo, maybe you could do the EBITDA margin question.
Yeah. On the EBITDA, we want to continue to invest in the team. We have given this long-term guidance to have at least 55% EBITDA margin. We won't give specific guidance for 2020. We'll continue to invest in the team. I think if you look at the 2019 levels, that there is no reason why there would be a immediately drop in margins.
I think the main message that we wanna give is that we see a lot of opportunity for the long-term growth of the business, and we want to make sure that we keep investing because that's the best for the company at the moment.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Josh Beck of KBCM. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thank you for taking the question. I have just a couple of product questions. You know, with the issuing product that you've launched, do you have any ambitions to really go to customers that would not be merchants? In other words, it wouldn't necessarily be an add-on to a merchant.
It would be a net new relationship for you, and you lead with the issuing product. This would probably be more of maybe the newer bank community and some of those. Just we'd like to hear the longer term ambitions around issuing.
You know, with Pay by Link, it certainly seems like it has applicability to smaller customers, but also larger customers who are interested in the concept of contextual commerce. Is that, you know, a product that applies to your entire base and is something that, you know, there could be material looking out towards the long term?
All right. Thank you for those questions. Look, if you see where could, where could card issuing take us, we are a B2B company, so this is a product for businesses, and it's logical to start with businesses which are in our focus area, which are the OTAs, which are the marketplaces. It's supportive of our strategy there.
Where that long term, if that would expand into other parts of the business, that could be. For us, doing something which is not B2B is at this stage less likely. It will remain a B2B product for the foreseeable future. Pay by Link, yes, it applies to the whole base.
Like you said, it is an easy way for small merchants to connect with without committing too much resource. Indeed, it is also applicable for other merchants in our base. It is applicable for our full merchant base.
Very helpful. Thanks, Pieter.
Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. I'll ask my 3 upfront as well. Any changes to your strategy regarding going after smaller merchants? We're obviously seeing your ads here in the U.S., and I'm wondering if you provide any color around there or the penetration rates.
The second question, any updates on authorization rates and your ability to improve those? Finally, I know you gave color on the margins at about 55%, and you wanna invest in the business. Do you plan on updating your midterm targets at the analyst day? Do you think long term, you know, I should say very long term, you could see an improvement on the margin profile? Thanks.
Okay. Thanks for the questions. I think our strategy for going after small businesses is more through our platform business. We built Adyen for Platforms exactly to do this, because those platforms are way better at handling all the questions from small businesses than we than we are. That's the strategy.
We don't have a idea to go after the small merchants ourselves. On the authorization rates, it's one key performance area for us if we talk to our merchants. It's a key topic why where account managers spend time on with our merchants. For us it's very important to, on the long term, keep outperforming on this on these rates. We get very positive feedback on our performance there.
On the long-term margins, I think there is a lot of scale in our business. We can absolutely further benefit from the economies of scale. At the same time, there is a huge growth opportunity. Finding that right balance is one of the key areas for us as management to focus on.
At the moment, we see most of the opportunities in growing the company on the long run, so that means growing it from a revenue perspective. Of course, if we would like to optimize for EBITDA, we could. If you just look at, for instance, how we increased the marketing spend over the second half of the year, if we would manage on EBITDA, we would never do that.
We believe that we have a very long-term opportunity here, and we want to get out. Does that answer your question?
It does. Just one last one, if you could give it. Any data points on how much better your authorization rates are versus the competition you care to share? If not, I understand. I'm just trying to anchor it with a data point. Thanks.
Yeah, sure. It's to be honest, it's very hard to say what the difference is in authorization rate, because authorization rate so much depends on the situation that you're in, the industry of the merchant, the country that you're in, the type of consumers that you attract. For us it's having this conversation for the merchant, with the merchant is very important, and then using our technology to basically get to the highest levels. That's exactly the key of our focus. It's hard to get that into a single number.
Got it. Thank you.
This was the last question. I would now like to hand over to Pieter for closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you all for participating, and please reach out to our team if you have any further questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the Adyen's second half 2019 results call. You may now disconnect your lines. Have a nice day.