Third Bridge专家称Adyen增长仍可维持但支付编排与新竞争者压制份额

[[00:01:48]]
Adyen seems to have come under some pressure recently, with its stock dropping nearly 40% YTD [year to date] off of a couple of poor earnings and lowered guidance. The company actually ended up missing an important metric, which is net revenue growth of 20%. What is your assessment of Adyen's positioning today?

[[00:02:21]]
I think despite what's happening, Adyen is actually in a decent place. I think that people lose sight of the fact that for all the hype that Stripe gets, for all the hype that these other companies get and Adyen included, there's a ton of volume being processed on legacy providers whose technology just is not that great. Adyen's share of the US market relative to those players is still quite small. I think there's definitely room to grow, but I also do see some of the cracks in Adyen as well. I think that these acquisitions are tacit admissions of that.

[[00:03:18]]
You mentioned seeing some cracks in Adyen today. What are the main cracks?

[[00:03:28]]
I think Adyen, they're rallying cry is one platform. Everything is built on one platform. Having worked there, I know that that's not completely accurate. This is not material information, but if you're a customer there, then at least on the Platforms team, I was working there, Adyen was working off of three different platforms and not everything was interoperable. A lot of the way things are built from a platform that was created 20 years ago. Adyen is not as aged as, say, Elavon, but the interoperability of the things that it builds is getting harder and harder to maintain. In addition to that, I think it was TalonOne is the loyalty one or even or Orb bill, but TalonOne, the fact that Adyen didn't have a loyalty solution for a company whose bread and butter is supposed to be digital and omnichannel is… I always thought it was very surprising, especially if you look at like FIS has it. I don't know how good it is, but a lot of the payment providers have it. PayPal has it. I think that's a problem and then bill management. How many SaaS platforms does Adyen work with? It's dozens, if not hundreds. To not have that in your repertoire is definitely problematic.

[[00:05:17]]
Are there any large trends that you think Adyen will have to navigate today or over the coming 2-3 years? Are there any that could define the company's positioning?

[[00:05:36]]
Adyen is going to have to work a lot harder because I think payment orchestration is becoming increasingly popular and increasingly necessary as a hedge against, (1) having a single point of failure with respect to your payment processing. (2) If you have a diversified card mix, customer base, geographical customer base, you're going to want orchestration. That, by nature, is going to decrease the amount of volume that Adyen gets from its customers. To compensate for that, they're going to have to get more customers but they may not always get 100% of the volume, which I think they're historically pretty accustomed to.

I think that's going to be a big challenge. I think Stripe just rolled this out, there are definitely some newcomers in the market like Sokin or whatever, who is an Adyen partner, and then you have Airwallex who do these sort of other services, meaning like FX, multi-currency wallets, even card issuing on the Adyen platform is quite difficult. I think there's definitely some headwinds, but volume is the bread and butter. It's just going to be harder to earn that going forward or they're going to have to close more customers with smaller shares of wallet than they're used to.

[[00:07:10]]
Why do you think Adyen is going to be increasingly reliant on new customers?

[[00:07:21]]
Not increasingly reliant. Yes, let me restate that. Especially in the Platforms world, but I think in general, Adyen strives to get 100% of a customer's volume of their payments volume. Orchestration by nature, means you're not going to get 100%. As payment orchestration continues to proliferate and become more popular and more necessary, Adyen is probably going to be getting less share of wallet per each customer that it signs on to its platform. I'm generalising. What that means is now instead of getting 75% or 100% of a given customer's volume, you're getting 50% or 25%. Now you have to close two or three more customers to get that same amount of payments volume. It just makes the work that much harder.

[[00:08:18]]
I thought that having a primary and secondary PSP [payment service provider] was already fairly common, but it sounds as though that wasn't your experience. What percentage of Adyen's customer base was 100% Adyen vs a mixed environment?

[[00:08:37]]
I don't think I could answer that question with any degree of accuracy, to be honest. There's so many customers. I will say, having worked on the Platforms team, I think most of those customers gave Adyen 100% of their volume. That might just be the nature of Platforms. Even I had a very large platform who gave all of their North America business to somebody else and that is possible. I think doing orchestration from a technical perspective in a single region as a platform, it's probably too difficult. It's too much to manage for now.

[[00:09:23]]
It's the redundancy or split PSP nature coming into Platforms that's the main difference where customers are looking for more than one PSP. Am I following you correctly?

[[00:09:35]]
No, I think that's actually probably more prevalent in digital retailers and omnichannel retailers than in Platforms. I think in Platforms, it's more than likely that you're going to have one or two, but it's not going to be orchestrated because with Platforms, you're white-labelling payments effect essentially and redistributing it to sub-merchants, like take Toast. You're putting Adyen payments into your software and then restaurants are going out there and using it and orchestration becomes too much of a burden from a reconciliation perspective and from a distribution perspective for a platform. I actually think orchestration is becoming more prevalent in digital and omnichannel.

[[00:10:25]]
Could you elaborate on the orchestration piece, particularly when it comes to the digital and omnichannel aspect? What does this add to the original Adyen solution? Is this more customer behaviour looking to bring on other PSPs?

[[00:10:39]]
It's customer behaviour. Orchestration unites multiple gateways, processors or alternate payment methods into one place. That's why Adyen is going to lose volume, I think.

[[00:11:03]]
I believe Platforms is considered a growth driver today for Adyen. How do you see the competitiveness of the company's tech stack matching up against those of Stripe and others?

[[00:11:20]]
There's two ways to look at it. From an enterprise perspective, I think Adyen is still probably stronger than its main competitors because of the flexibility of its platform. That said, Adyen is going to miss out, I think, on a lot of middle market and SMB business because its platform is so time-consuming to integrate and stand up. There's a flexibility inherent in Stripe. If you or I wanted to start a business tomorrow, we can go get a Stripe account and begin to accept payments. You see a lot of these nascent companies building on Stripe and Stripe can graduate them into something more sophisticated as time goes on, whereas Adyen cannot do that. You're either a very large business using Adyen or you're extremely savvy and willing to devote the tech and operational resources to integrate. I do think that Adyen is challenged in that way a little bit when it comes to Platforms. Overall, from an enterprise perspective, their platform is stronger. I can elaborate on that if you'd like but, yes.

[[00:12:45]]
What do you see as the main strength? Could you elaborate on that?

[[00:12:50]]
Yes, totally. Adyen is far more customisable than Stripe. Adyen historically, it has better acceptance rates because it has local acquiring in just about all the places it operates where Stripe does not. Then Adyen's value-added services with respect to Platforms are still quite a bit stronger than Stripe, so they can support card issuing, they can support account creation as well as working capital loans or yes, let's call it a working capital loan, where Stripe does that as well. Adyen does it in a much more sophisticated and easy to distribute way for Platforms.

[[00:14:07]]
On the orchestration point, when Platforms acquires a new customer, is this basically all of the volume, or is this about getting a small foot in the door?

[[00:14:19]]
No. The Platforms, it's all-or-nothing regionally, if that makes sense. Say Adyen is approaching a platform, this platform operates in three countries. More often than not, Adyen will get all of that region's volume. They're not going to split it across processors in a given region, whereas if you're an online retailer, a digital-only retailer, using orchestration, you can more easily divvy up that volume. That's how Adyen is an all-or-nothing when it comes to different geos, but not not with respect to all of a company's payment processing.

[[00:15:08]]
20% net revenue growth is typically what's expected annually from Adyen. As I mentioned, that came under pressure towards the end of 2025. How do you think the company's revenue growth may trend in the next 2-3 years?

[[00:15:30]]
For Adyen, I actually think it's going to slow down. I do think that the product is a bit sclerotic vis-à-vis its competitor, mostly Stripe. If you look at how fast Stripe moves and how quickly they seem to deploy things. Then, yes, I do think orchestration is going to make things more difficult. I would say those two things are going to make getting more revenue challenging. Then there's a lot of new players coming up who are going to start to steal volume. I think Nuvei is a big one. Airwallex is a big one, who are going to start to take volume from Stripe and Adyen.

[[00:16:31]]
You mentioned that Adyen's revenue growth is starting to slow. What is the significance of this? Consensus expectations are for 19.5% growth in 2026 and then 20.5% in 2027. Is that the slight near-term slowness that you see? Could the company return to around 18% growth, which it saw in 2025, or even lower?

[[00:17:06]]
No, I think that's probably more in line with where they are. Again, despite all the things I said, Adyen's share of the US market is still relatively small. I think that will help sustain the business to those, what, 19.5% or 20% revenue growth numbers.

[[00:17:33]]
Just very minor fluctuations.

[[00:17:37]]
Yes.

[[00:17:38]]
Why can't Adyen net-win with orchestration and use this as a way to take more volume than it's going to lose potentially?

[[00:17:53]]
It definitely can. It absolutely can. I think it's like a boat, but it's a boat where there's a hole in the bottom… That's probably a bad analogy. It's like a gas tank where there's a hole in the bottom. You're trying to fill it, but a little bit is coming out at the same time. You have orchestration causing some people to divert volume away from Adyen. At the same time, you're signing new customers. It balances itself out. Adyen can get volume from customers where maybe it didn't have an opportunity to get volume before because of this orchestration. It's a fair point, it goes both ways. I do think for some of these larger merchants, they're going to see changes that are potentially, they're not used to or maybe disruptive to… Not disruptive, but just changes they're not used to or that are unexpected in terms of total volume.

[[00:19:07]]
You see those large enterprises causing the most disruption when it comes to orchestration?

[[00:19:23]]
I would say higher-risk merchants who are really pushing to drive fraud and chargebacks down and who have maybe a less-than-ideal customer mix or card mix. Orchestration is going to be very useful for them as well.

[[00:19:54]]
I don't typically view Adyen as a high-risk player in payments, but you mentioned that the company has a strong footing in large enterprises. Given that's one of the two markets where you see the most disruption from orchestration, is that what's giving colour around presenting orchestration as more of a risk that could net out to be flat or positive, rather than the other way around?

[[00:20:20]]
Yes, I think so. This is one thing I can't speak to, but I don't know how robust Adyen's partnership function is with respect to these orchestrators. I have no insight into that. It may be more robust than I think, but I've worked with, I would say, three or four orchestrators and a lot of them, Adyen is not part of the mix.

[[00:20:53]]
What names are top of mind when it comes to payment orchestrator companies?

[[00:21:01]]
You know it's really strong. They're growing, Checkout Champ. It's not Worldpay. Is it Worldpay? No, it's not Worldpay. Is it FreedomPay maybe? They're a big one. Those are the three that I've thought of. Yes, FreedomPay.

[[00:21:29]]
What's stopping Adyen from taking on the role of a payment orchestrator?

[[00:21:32]]
I don't know actually. I would think just from my point of view, you can't have a referee that works for the team that's playing one of the games. An orchestrator is ostensibly meant to route your traffic in a way that is as beneficial as possible for the seller or the merchant. If Adyen is the orchestrator itself, isn't going to have a home team bias towards sending volume over Adyen rails. My sense is probably. There's no probably law or rule this is they couldn't build an orchestration platform.

[[00:22:26]]
Coming back to Adyen's roughly 20% revenue growth, you indicated there could be some slight downside growth over the coming years. Could you segment that out? How many percentage points would you expect to come from general market volume growth, new customer wins or market share expansion, and existing customer upsells or pricing increases?

[[00:22:51]]
Can you restate that? Are you seeing what percentage of the revenue growth will come from existing customers and what percentage will come from upsells and whatnot?

[[00:23:03]]
Yes. We have new customer growth, and then, on the other hand, we have existing customers. I would split that into two. There is general market volume growth. As the market grows, customers process more volumes and payment processing naturally increases. The second half of the existing customers are upsells such as RevenueProtect, so expanded wallet share.

[[00:23:33]]
I would say most of the growth will definitely come organically. I would think upsells are a very small portion of that. It would be organic growth, then winning new share of wallet and then the upsells in terms of revenue contribution.

[[00:24:01]]
When you say growing organically, would those be new customers?

[[00:24:08]]
New customers and the increase of the market, the general trend towards growth of the market.

[[00:24:20]]
Would it be fair to say that for Adyen to have that 20%-ish revenue growth YoY, it needs to be taking market share and winning customers? Is that integral?

[[00:24:38]]
Yes.

[[00:24:44]]
What are the main reasons why a customer would choose Adyen?

[[00:24:54]]
It depends on what they do. I think in general, flexibility of the platform, how customisable the platform is. Then Adyen also is unique in that it assigns an account manager to every customer that it has. There is a level of service at Adyen and consultative guidance that other payment providers don't have that they don't provide. I think those are the main reasons. I also do think, even though Adyen would never say this, from day one, they drill into, "We don't compete on price, we don't compete on price." You have to bear in mind that they have local acquiring licences, in probably 90% or 95% of the countries they operate in. That makes their margins a little bit better. I think that's also a competitive factor. I would say those three things.

[[00:26:07]]
How reliable do you see Adyen's growth being, especially with the new customer wins? If we were to see market volumes stagnate or inflationary pressures rise, would this create more risk for net revenue growth?

[[00:26:23]]
If inflationary pressures rise, yes, I would. Adyen, I don't recall exactly, but I think most of its revenue in the US comes from digital and omnichannel. If you combine those two vs Platforms. Those two are historically B2C type of businesses.

[[00:26:54]]
If we do see market headwinds, what could that roughly 20% revenue growth drop down to? What would be the lower bound?

[[00:27:05]]
It depends on how bad the economy would get really. Most payments companies are tapped into their volume ebbs and flows with the market or not really the market, but the economy. If the economy slows, then I would expect a commensurate slowdown in Adyen's revenue at some ratio that mirrors the market. It's very difficult to answer that question without knowing how bad you think the downturn would be. There's definitely correlation. I just don't know the extent of that correlation.

[[00:28:04]]
Would this just be existing customers hurting and a general decrease in payment volumes? Could we also see Adyen actually losing customers?

[[00:28:19]]
No, I think it's the former. I think it's the former. A perfect example is an Adyen customer's Bathhouse. Do you know what Bathhouse is?

[[00:28:32]]
No.

[[00:28:34]]
It's a chain of spas, like bougie spas here in New York and I think elsewhere that if the economy starts to go down, people are not going to be spending USD 400 on a monthly Bathhouse membership or going to spend USD 60 as often to go into Bathhouse. That's an extreme example. You have other ones. You have Molton Brown, I could go on. All these sort of discretionary or that are mostly discretionary type of businesses, yes, if the economy slows, they're going to slow. Even the ones that don't, think about all the restaurant platforms that Adyen supports or the equipment, I think Adyen works with ServiceTitan. They work with softwares that provide payments to contractors and builders. If the economy slows, that's less volume. It's just the way it is.

[[00:29:34]]
You mentioned some new competitors entering the space, such as Airwallex. What enables them to take volume? What makes them a threat to Adyen?

[[00:29:58]]
I think a couple of things. One is they're a little bit more nimble. In the context of Airwallex, they have a broader financial operating system that they can offer, like multi-currency accounts, FX, treasury, employee cards, all of that. Then Nuvei vs Adyen, they're going into higher-risk verticals like gaming, betting, pornography, crypto, travel that Adyen historically doesn't go into. Once you build up that volume and then you can start to go after other aspects of the market. I don't know enough about Nuvei to know for certain that that's their plan. These are definitely places where Adyen isn't as competitive.

[[00:31:18]]
What's the potential consequence there? Is that outright customer churn? Do you think it's going to be a pattern of movement?

[[00:31:26]]
I think what it is, is similar to what I discussed with Stripe earlier, which is replacing Adyen is incredibly difficult and incredibly time-consuming for an organisation. That same thing that makes Adyen, is a defensive mechanism for Adyen is also the thing that's going to cause it to not win customers in the early stages. If you're a series D successful start-up, that's where Airwallex comes in is maybe they won you at your series B, your series C and they can grow with you, similar to Stripe. That's where it's going to hurt Adyen in the coming years.

[[00:32:17]]
What makes the barriers to switching so high?

[[00:32:22]]
It's just a bear to integrate a payments provider, especially in one geography, let alone on a global scale. With Adyen specifically, it's an API-driven integration. It's highly customised. It's a significant amount of time investment to turn it on, to get it set up, all of that. Then you have to think of all the follow-on items that come with payments. You have reporting, you have reconciliation, you have data privacy, all these sort of functions that aren't payments directly but touch payments. Ripping out and replacing your payments provider has huge ripple effects. If you scale that out or extrapolate that to an enterprise organisation, it just becomes a real bear.

[[00:33:32]]
Given the increased competition and the increased presence of payment orchestration, do you think Adyen can continue to justify its 17bps net take rate? Do you see that coming under pressure?

[[00:33:49]]
Take rate in payments is dictated more by Adyen's ability to control its costs. Let me back up. When you say take rate, you mean just the fees that Adyen charges its customers. Is that what you're saying?

[[00:34:14]]
Yes, the fee per transaction.

[[00:34:23]]
17bps. I do think Adyen can continue to justify that because of its services and because of its platform. It depends on the level of sophistication from payments that the customer wants or requires. Some customers want a more sophisticated and a little bit more robust offering for multiple reasons, and Adyen can help support that. Therefore, that take rate is justified not only because of what the platform provides, but also because that company then has an account manager who will support that and guide the company through that and be the consultative resource for that, that other payments providers could not or would not offer. I do think that, that will continue to be justified for Adyen.

[[00:35:31]]
The acquisitions are an interesting change and break from tradition for Adyen. The company announced its first-ever acquisition – TalonOne, a loyalty and promotional pricing engine – in April 2026. That was quickly followed up by the acquisition of Orb, a billings engine. Both deals closed in July 2026. What demand do you see there being from merchants for a broader PSP offering in Adyen moving up the payment stack?

[[00:35:57]]
What do you mean by a broader offering moving up the payment stack?

[[00:36:02]]
Moving towards loyalty from TalonOne or from processing and recurring payments with Orb, so an expanded offering beyond just facilitating a payment.

[[00:36:15]]
I think for loyalty, it makes perfect sense. That's why I'm not shocked. I knew then I thought it was very surprising that Adyen did not have a loyalty programme, especially when you consider the sheer amount of data that Adyen processes. All of it is siloed. You can't have McDonald's shopper data, you can't use that to guide loyalty decisions at Wendy's. What you can do is anonymise that data, the same way it does for its risk and the same way it does for its risk engine, you can anonymise that data. You have all this cardholder data and you can use it to guide these loyalty programmes and to inform them and that Adyen, it's very natural that they should have this and they should have had it a long time ago.

For its merchants, it makes sense because it consolidates the number of vendors in an ideal world, it consolidates the number of vendors they have to work with from a payments perspective, and it unifies their loyalty with their actual payments data. Then finally, it incentivises merchants to give more volume to Adyen because Adyen has the loyalty offerings. What I mean by that is if you're processing 50% of your volume elsewhere and then 50% of your volume with Adyen, 50% of that volume won't get run through the loyalty engine, which means the data is going to be less impactful. The offerings might not be as enticing or whatever and the programme will be less robust. It incentivises them to give more volume to Adyen.

[[00:38:09]]
It seems you think the lack of a loyalty programme was a bit of a hole in Adyen's solution, and you were surprised that it wasn't already there. Do you think this will be able to drive meaningful market share gains in the coming 2-3 years? Is it that important?

[[00:38:25]]
No. This is something that they should have had a while ago. I don't think it's going to drive too much change, no.

[[00:38:38]]
If it's something that Adyen should have had a while ago because it's so common, but the company didn't, was it just not that high a priority for customers? Now it's a nice-to-have, but it's not going to move the needle. Is that the situation we're in?

[[00:39:02]]
It's the type of thing that Adyen should have had a while ago. It's not going to bring in a ton of more meaningful volume. What it's going to do is it's going to just create better retention. Adyen, I think, will maybe at scale, be able to pick up volume at the margins from a lot of these customers. That's what I mean by that.

[[00:39:37]]
To confirm, was loyalty something that came up less in the sales pitch and more during a renewal or during a customer's experience, where they would churn because the company didn't have it? Is that where the pain point was?

[[00:39:56]]
No, the pain point is that you have these retailers who run loyalty programmes who also do payment acceptance. Those two things were siloed. It makes sense to have your loyalty programme be run and based off of payments data. Because loyalty offerings weren't that robust from other payments providers like Stripe or what is it, Braintree or anything like that, a retailer is not going to jump ship from Adyen to go do Braintree. What I'm saying is it just makes the offering that much stronger. It's not seismic.

[[00:40:45]]
It's less about fighting between other PSPs. It's more that this solution could phase out the need for a third party to come in and run the loyalty engine.

[[00:40:56]]
Yes

[[00:41:01]]
With the TalonOne acquisition as well, though, do you think that this materially changes Adyen's go-to-market of having a single tech stack?

[[00:41:16]]
That depends on how well they integrate this product. I don't see it integrating that well, but that's me, yes.

[[00:41:28]]
Could we see stretched sales cycles as customers wait to see how Adyen handles the integration?

[[00:41:44]]
No. I don't think that's what's going to happen. I think Adyen is going to build some sort of integration, and it's going to be just so, so. The interoperability is not going to be super strong, but it will work, but not in a way that I think people are going to love. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but they'll integrate it. It just might not look that smooth.

[[00:42:23]]
TalonOne seems to be a bit of a non-factor – maybe some marginal revenue to the side, but you don't see that impacting volumes. Do you see that impacting customer value at all, as in a subscription offering or something for the solution?

[[00:42:44]]
You mean the amount that the customer would pay for Adyen. Is that what you're saying?

[[00:42:50]]
Exactly, yes. At the moment, it sounds as though TalonOne doesn't really seem to bring a lot to benefit Adyen's financials. What does it bring?

[[00:43:05]]
Yes, it brings better retention, and it makes the platform stronger for the future. I don't know how they're going to charge for it. I don't know if that's been announced, but it does offer some good upsell opportunities as well. Again, not seismic upsell opportunities, but upsell opportunities nonetheless. I think ultimately, this comes down to retention, and it comes down to Adyen offering a more holistic platform that other payment providers cannot.

[[00:43:49]]
In the near term, you don't see that driving market share changes?

[[00:43:53]]
Not in a significant way, no.

[[00:43:56]]
Acquisitions are expected to drive a 1% increase in Adyen's revenue in 2026. That's both TalonOne and Orb. Does that sound about right to you? Do you think that will continue for the next 2-3 years?

[[00:44:16]]
I think depending on how Adyen looks at it, Orb has more potential than TalonOne to contribute to increases in revenue just because of the sheer volume of billing payments. If Adyen can monetise that across a lot of its software providers, a lot of its recurring customers where there are recurring payments necessary, both in the B2C and B2B space, that's big potential. I do think that 1% is accurate, but I also think that it could be 1.5% or 2% if Adyen finds a way to compellingly integrate the billing product into its platform and take it to market successfully.

[[00:45:24]]
Where do you see Orb shining? Is that going to be with new customers? Is that monetising existing customers, so perhaps the revenue streams that were previously shut off?

[[00:45:34]]
I actually think monetising existing is probably better or not better, but monetising existing is more likely, yes.

[[00:45:42]]
Could you expand on that? What types of customers?

[[00:45:55]]
What types of customers, think of any software business with usage-based pricing, that's going to be super useful for Adyen. It enables Adyen to also… What am I trying to say? Yes, that's the big one is usage-based and user-based pricing is something that this is going to facilitate much better for Adyen to facilitate for its customers.

[[00:46:29]]
Do you think that's going to impact things now, or is this more an aspect of future-proofing? When I'm looking at software, particularly when it comes to AI, things do seem to be shifting towards usage-based pricing models.

[[00:46:44]]
Yes.

[[00:46:46]]
Is this future-proofing, or do you think this is going to have a near-term impact?

[[00:46:49]]
Is it future-proofing? It's definitely future-proofing. Can it be both? I don't see why it can't be both.

[[00:47:07]]
Where do you see this being weighted? Sure, we might not see much impact from Orb over the next two years, but with usage-based pricing, that's where the acquisition value is really going to come in. Basically, don't factor anything in for the near term, only the mid-term onwards. Is that the right way of thinking about it? Can Orb drive decent expansion today?

[[00:47:30]]
I think it can potentially. It enables Adyen to go after a segment of the market that it probably has struggled with prior to this. You think about all of these AI businesses that probably Adyen would have loved to have had, but could not support because they had usage-based pricing. This does open up a huge segment to Adyen in a growing part of the market or a growing part of the economy.

[[00:48:04]]
You mentioned that most of the value is going to be existing customers. What did those conversations look like previously? Was there a segmentation, in the sense that Adyen can have X amount of volume, but the other part is recurring or consumption-based and you're not going to be able to access that? Is that what conversations looked like? How might customer relationships change now with the Orb acquisition?

[[00:48:29]]
I didn't manage or have line of sight into a lot of customers like that. Just by virtue of the way the product worked, yes, that's how it went, is Adyen wouldn't be able to access that volume because it was usage-based or whatever. It wouldn't roll into Adyen's total volume. Yes, I think that's what I mean.

[[00:49:05]]
How much additional volume do you think Orb could unlock?

[[00:49:14]]
You have to think about the total payments volume of all of these AI businesses and all of these… I just have no sense for what that is. There's other usage-based products out there as well. I wouldn't even know how to start calculating that. You have to think about what the total revenue of all those businesses are, and it's all primarily through payments. That's how their revenue comes in. It's not through B2B like cheque or wire transfers or ACH or anything like that. It's through mostly card payments and the like so I do think that there's a lot of revenue out there to be had, but I just don't know what that number would be. I wouldn't even know where to start with it.

[[00:50:09]]
I read that Orb can act as an inroad for LLM [large language model] customer acquisition. Both Anthropic and OpenAI currently use Metronome, which was acquired by Stripe in January 2026. What appetite do you see there being for LLMs to go down the multi-vendor route and utilise Adyen now that it has Orb?

[[00:50:38]]
I don't see a lot of appetite to having two. If you have Stripe and Metronome and you have Adyen and Orb, you went from two vendors, even though they're owned by the same company, you went from two vendors to four vendors. It just does not make a ton of sense. I do think that Adyen would compete with Stripe using Orb to take all of that volume potentially. I don't think that a multi-vendor approach is going to be very attractive.

[[00:51:29]]
If Adyen is targeting an all-or-nothing customer win when it comes to companies such as Anthropic or OpenAI, what can Adyen and Orb bring to differentiate itself and win customers away from a player such as Stripe and Metronome?

[[00:51:47]]
I think that all other things being equal comes down then to Adyen's attractiveness as a payments platform. I don't think it's going to come down to billing. I think it's going to come down to what Adyen can do to support their growth vis-à-vis payments in general and what other capabilities Adyen is going to add to its platform to help sustain that customer's growth. Are they going to add multi-currency wallets? Are they going to add… I don't think this is anything, but Stripe has, what is it, bridge or whatever, and they do stable coins. You know how these fads catch on. Is Adyen can do something with stable coins. Again, it comes down to the broader payment stack, not differentiations in how one company runs billing vs the other.

[[00:52:44]]
Another shift at Adyen came with the announced departure of the CFO, Ethan Tandowsky. Paired with the acquisitions, do you think this signifies a new strategic direction for the company? Could there be more changes to come?

[[00:53:03]]
I definitely think there's more changes to come. I believe the CFO stepped down or left or something. They just elevated Gayathri to, what, CPO, I think. Yes, I would say definitely, there are more changes coming either by way of acquisition or especially with the product. I am a little curious to see how it goes because Gayathri comes from old school payments. It will be interesting to see what direction she takes the platform.

[[00:53:46]]
How do you see merchants reacting to all the changes at Adyen? Do you think customers are going to be impacted by this at all? Might their decision-making change? Do you think it's going to have any impact on the merchant relationships?

[[00:54:18]]
I don't think so. I think Adyen may have bitten off more than it can chew with these acquisitions just from a product integration perspective. I just don't foresee them doing this well just based off of having worked there and using the back end of the platform. It's difficult for me to foresee how this goes well, but maybe I'll be wrong. To finish that off, what I mean is, it's going to make things messier and might potentially make customers even more unhappy.

[[00:55:06]]
What impact do you see the changes having on revenue? Could we see some near-term volatility?

[[00:55:21]]
No, not near term. Longer term, I would say the thing you have to bear in mind as well is most of these customers are locked into contracts agreements. They can't leave or they have to give Adyen a minimum amount of volume or they end up paying a monthly fee or something like that. I would think, if anything, it would happen two years from now at the soonest. That's where that volatility would start to show itself.

[[00:55:49]]
Is there anything else you want to include regarding Adyen?

[[00:56:05]]
No, I think payments is funny because everyone hates their payments provider. It doesn't matter how good you are. I do think that Adyen's platform is, I mentioned this briefly, but is older and more sclerotic than people think it is. I do think the longer-term growth prospects of Adyen because of this are dampened. I don't think that, that will be shown in the next couple of years here, yes.

[[00:56:39]]
When do you think we could see that?

[[00:56:43]]
I would say 5-6 years, yes.

[[00:56:49]]
Is that enough time for Adyen to avoid any downward pressure? What would you want to see in order to keep the company going in the right direction?

[[00:56:59]]
Presumably, that's why they're kicking out, I don't know if they're kicking out, but what do you call them, these people that have been there forever and elevating newer people like Gayathri to these leadership positions is to rejigger the platform. I just don't know how successful they'll be. I think she comes from Worldpay or FIS. It remains to be seen. I do think that they're making a shift for that. The same way they got rid of Ethan. Ethan was the CFO. He was a home-grown talent. They got a CTO from Cash App, what, two or three years ago, they are making efforts. I don't know how easy it is to turn things around, not turn things around because that implies they're doing badly, but to change the direction.

[[00:58:03]]
Fantastic. I think that's a nice point to wrap up today. I just want to say thank you so much for giving me some of your time. It's been a real pleasure, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.

[[00:58:11]]
Thanks.

[[00:58:12]]
All right. Hope to talk soon. Bye-bye.

Transcription ends at 00:58:17 of the recorded material