Inside the Future of Payments: Adyen CEO

[MUSIC] So we say winning is more important than ego. We have very strongly a culture where the whole company wins and the whole company should celebrate that there's nobody who can just say like, hey, that was me. We have to do it as a company. Welcome back to Talks at GS, where we speak with pioneering leaders about their careers and the future of their fields. In a live conversation, Goldman Sachs' Cliff Marriott joined Peter Vonderduce, CEO of Adyen. This session was recorded on November 5, 2025 at the Goldman Sachs office in London. Let's listen in now. Welcome to another session of Talks at GS. I'm Cliff Marriott and I'm delighted to be joined today by Peter Vanderdose, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of Adyen, one of Europe's leading Vintech companies. >> Well, thank you for having me. >> Thank you for coming, Peter. So you've built Adyen to transform the payments landscape. The company has grown from a startup in Amsterdam to a global company with operations in six continents and a market cap of 45 billion. You have two decades of experience in the payments industry before founding Adyen, you were co-founder and chief commerce officer at Bitbit, which was acquired by RBS in 2004. Let's first just dig into your origin story or the Adyen origin story. The company is actually named, I guess, in Dutch's Start Again. What did you see in the market that gave you that idea to start a new company? >> The original idea was that we had this payments company, which was a layer over existing bank networks. We were partnering with acquiring banks who would run their systems, which connected to the payment methods like Visa, MasterCard, or Local Method. We worried at the time how long we could run such a model being dependent on being so dependent on banks. So that was the reason why we sold. Then I agreed to stick for two years with the company. Then after those two years, we saw that there was so little innovation that we thought, wow, there is an opportunity. But when at the moment that we sold, if you would have asked me to sign that I would never work in the payments industry, I probably would have signed it because there were no plans at all to start again, which is Adyen in Sranan, a Surnan language. But at the time you also could, as a non-bank, become a direct acquirer for Visa, MasterCard, and we thought, wow, we can basically build a system which does all layers in one and then get to a higher quality. And at that time, the assumption was that acquiring systems are boring. And then we felt like, no, if we really invested it, you can make a difference. You can make a difference in acceptance rates. You can make a difference in performance. There is an opportunity. So what was the process like leaving RBS? Did you just leave one day, start up the next day? Did you have the idea? I left exactly after two years as agreed. I think you could read that contract both ways. If you agreed to stay for two years, you also agreed to leave after two years. And then I went on sabbatical to Brazil with the whole family because I thought, if I don't do it now, I'll probably never do it. So we lived on a small beach. My main goal in life was to get bored, to get that feeling like, hey, I'm on a beach and I'm really, really bored. It took a while before that happened. And then my co-founder called me and he said, maybe we should do something again. And how quickly did it take for it to start to take off? You felt like you had something new, you had something that was working. And maybe what was that secret spark at that point of time? With hindsight, it all looked like plain sailing. But it was really, really hard because we did something which I wouldn't advise to any other person starting a company. Usually, company starts with working with merchants, with the detail that large companies don't care about. And from that, you sort of shape a product and then you slowly move up market. But what we were doing is we were building a system which outperformed. But the small merchant didn't care because if you do 10 transactions per week and it's 5% better, you cannot measure that. The large ones cared about it. So as a start-up, we were dealing with large merchants. So in 2008, I was talking to Amazon, hey, what about this? And of course, Amazon then doesn't say, like, yeah, why don't you do Brazil and Mexico for us? That takes time. So it took us a while to find a company which would roll out globally and it turned out to be my city deal, which was from the somewhere, brothers. Oh yeah, okay. They were very good at doing American concepts in Europe. It later got acquired by Groupon. So then we had Groupon as a merchant and they were so fast in rolling out that they really needed the payment company to keep pace and that helped us with volume and at certain point, that was more than 50% of volume of the company. Then after that things became easier and very quickly, we had many large customers and we didn't have that dependency anymore on a very small group of merchants. And you do the credit processing better. So when I first started meeting you, the key differentiator was we were basically allowed for the merchant to close more transactions out of 100 than the competing company. Was that the key driver of your success in terms of building the company? Yeah, we could provenly do that, which is pure authorization rate. So if you buy something online, why do you sure transaction gets turned down? It's related to running fraud systems. How do you make sure you don't do false positives? Because it's not just about authorization rates in transactions that you send in, but it's also identifying what looks like fraud, but it's not. Typically in those days, it were the flower shops that were suffering, because there were always people from abroad that were ordering and then it all looked not aligned because the origin of the card was different than where the person was ordering. The flowers was sitting, was different than where it was being shipped. That's a part of the business, which of course totally got disrupted by AI. So we are eating every transaction currently runs through AI to be very exact in flagging fraud, to be very good at also allowing transactions which in a rule-based system would look like fraud. And another component that got added to it is least cost routing. Merchants became way more aware that there are some payment methods which might be that riskier but have lower cost. And when do you offer them and when don't you offer them? So least cost routing became a thing. And it's also sometimes value dependent, which method works well, fixed fee methods. If you have a high value, then that's of course cheaper and for low value the other way around. So the business became more complex. So now you're doing 900 billion dollars of transaction processing per year as of last year. Your clientele includes tech companies like Spotify, Facebook, Netflix, eBay, etc. etc. What propelled that growth from starting off with my city deal and then moving into those big merchants and then to the business that you have now? We've always been very focused on what we do. We don't interact with consumers. We only help merchants. We are invisible. Many of you might not know us and we want to be in the background. We are very deep on a single problem which is helping merchants to accept consumer payments. So I think it's a combination of the focus and having the patience to go very, very deep into a product where a lot of the companies around just wanted to build a shell over what's already there and make a quick win and a quick splash. We were actually intrigued in really trying to solve the problem rather than blowing up a balloon as you would say. How did the business grow with each of the merchants? We started to have traction with out of our US office with US companies but we didn't get their US business. So you would do a European business or Latin American business for US brands. Then typically only after getting traction there, we would also get US domestic traffic. We measure in merchants by legal entity that we work with. So for us, an Uber could be measured by legal entity in Europe. Then we flag it as European traffic and not as the head entity of the company. So that's how it works. You can win traffic in countries. So winning the customer is not related to where you have the traffic. In the most simple culture you have one team that wins and then one team that celebrates in Atty and therefore we are very strongly a culture where the whole company wins and the whole company should celebrate that because you win as a salesperson in the US and it's a count managed maybe. out of the Netherlands or out of France, that is more complicated than if it's all on the national level. So it requires a culture where you really share your winnings together and where you cooperate very intensively together. You cannot work with small units. We're going to get to culture in a second because I think that's one of the very unique things about your company. Let me go to your IPO in 2018. That was also a critical year in terms of banking license, expanding the product suite. As I observe, Adian and you is been about simplicity of focus on certain products. Has it been difficult to scale to new products away from your core? How has that gone? For us, if you look at the IPO, it's a logical step for a highly regulated business. As a financial services company, we have banking licenses. To also have the regulatory pressure of the public market, that all fits together. That wasn't a huge difference. If you look at how the market is evolving, of course, we now have more products than at the time when we were a single-product company. First, at the time, it was online payments and in-store terminals. If you now go to say, "It's an MUC, our terminals, if you go to Nike, you see our terminals." We're both online in-store and make that work together. Right now, we have extended that to financial services. Small loans to a mid-size merchants, card issuing. You see that the portfolio gets wider over time and we use our banking licenses to do that. Small merchants, we don't sign up directly but through platforms. We support platforms in many small sellers. If you go to a yoga studio, that yoga studio will be on the platform. If the yoga studio has our terminal, then people are like, "Wow, why did you sign up my logo yoga studio?" We didn't sign up the platform on which the yoga studio runs. We need to be able to onboard large amounts of smaller merchants. We need to give them services because for a search yoga studio, if your coffee machine breaks, maybe you want the loan of a few thousand. That's exactly what we can do because we have all the data. We can do the assessment. For us, that's very effective to give a loan there because we can do it at a relatively low cost. What do you think you are on that journey? Are you 10% of the way there in terms of expanding products or a little bit further? No, we are early on that journey. But we have all the building blocks to do it. So I would more say we are very well positioned to expand there than that we currently totally capitalized on that. That's great. I want to get to that. Maybe that's a good segue to the next question. The payment sector has been highly consolidating over the last few years. So a number of companies that you sold your previous company to, those types of companies, the old merchant acquires have merged and spun out and bought things. You have been steadfast and focused on your platform. Do you see more consolidation in the space? Are you happy with your kind of focus on your platform? I tend to look very much as our own company. And to talk to our merchants to hear what's the next thing on their journey and take inspiration from that. So we don't implement what they need, but we look at the common denominator. And that's what we implement. So that you get a scalable business. Because if you fall for the trap of custom made solutions at certain point, you cannot help all your merchants because you're viewing off your strategic path. But if you listen to, okay, this is a problem that this merchant has, which is if we solve it for this merchant, we also solve it for others. That's the way we go about. So if you ask me for a view about what do you think is happening in this industry, our focus is on the new players. They have a small part of the market. And the vast vast majority is still with the incumbents. So our focus is, let's make sure that the delta between what we can deliver and what the incumbents deliver is maximized so that we are the one that everybody's moving to. Of course, we have about a third of the company is engineering. So that means that we by now have a large group of engineers working on this. So yes, there's a smaller company. It's more difficult to compete with that. We've been very, very disciplined and not going through acquisitions. So we have one platform, one stack. So our overhead is way lower than if you compare that to other companies who went through acquisition processes and are constantly into migration processes. So let's get into kind of innovation and AI. What is changing in the payments landscape in terms of how people are buying goods and how are you adapting to that? There are a few trends in the payments. And what you see is that merchants all became very, very educated on payments. So companies are increasing their standard and are increasing measuring how good you are, which is both an opportunity and also of course something which we're always up against. There is a huge scale. So there is way more than when we started. If you look at now the deal size that we have access to is enormous. There is a demand for other services. If you want to win in this market, what we do is we talk about the online world combining that with the physical world. There's an endless need for really understanding your shopper. Being able to identify who it is and being able to identify. Do I have in my shop now somebody who's recurring customer or a first-time shopper? Having that history at hand and being able to give a customized treatment to that shopper on the spot that is still the holy grail that everybody is investing in. Makes sense. Anything about payment methods? I mean has that started to change? I would say people will want to hear about crypto, for example, being used. The payment methods which are in demand for the large merchants that we have are not in the area of crypto. In countries where which are very unstable then that makes more sense. Now it's a complication if you add crypto to it. So there's been no demand for my merchants at the moment. So that our merchant group is large international or often listed companies. That's interesting. Having spent some time with Adian, you're not the type of company that goes and talks a lot about AI and all the great things you're doing. I also suspect under the hood there is quite a lot going on. You mentioned it briefly earlier on about how AI is involved in every one of your payment. Yeah, I'm going to approve those. There are a few areas we turn into eating. For one, all transactions for us run through AI to optimize for authorization rates, to optimize for cost, to identify potential fraudsters. So in that sense we are a huge AI user. A part of the business that's really different and which are find complicated is that for anti-mony laundering, anti-terrorism financing. So the whole KYC part. Of course, we use a lot of AI as do the fraudsters. Yeah. So there's a bit of a competition going on there where the old rules to make a fake password is quite easy with AI. So a traditional check like sent me a photo copy of your password might not be as useful anymore as it was in the past. So that's a game changer because think about it. If we sign up a platform, they could have 500,000 sellers. So you have to bring 500,000 sellers through KYC. If you can do that in a highly automated way, which we can, that's an enormous game changer in functionality. What I do hope is that the European regulators also keep up with that pace. Because if they, there has been an occasion in the Netherlands where a neo-bank was fighting over whether they still should ask somebody who opens a bank account what the intended use of the bank account is. That might be in an AI age not the best check and maybe a little outdated. So it requires also for the regulator to really understand what you can do with AI and to understand how to keep the pace with where the business is going. Great. So let's move into culture and you mentioned some of the things already on culture. When we first started meeting, you talked about hiring people with a certain type of skill set and culture. And the fact that the founders and then I think the management team have to interview every candidate. How important was that to building the culture that you have now that hiring formula? We're actually still doing that. So every time you're doing that, you're doing that. een hele emplorie dat is hierkt somer, en gaat door een final interview met een paar mensen uit de global leadership team en de idea is als manier als je hierkt je je zoveel voor het probleem is en het kan zijn dat je heel busy en je denkt dat, hey, misschien deze persoon is 6,5 van de scale van 1,2,10, maar ik wil dat persoon aan mijn team dat, atleens, zijn er less busy. Deze persoon is van een philosophy point van het view, we zien dat als een deterioratie van de level van de team en daarvoor de attractiefheid om te hierden de next persoon, omdat je want dan een plaats met de toplaers en niet met de andere league, en dat is een paar van de fund dat we promiseen dat we geeften als je werk voor Adrien, de high identity van de politie mensen. In een fijne interview is het mooi, omdat je een interview op de persoon, maar je niet echt vindt het eerst het verkeerde, dus het is moeilijk om de high standard te houden en te maken dat je niet een diloten is dat de idea behind het, dat je meer een uitzicht, meer een independent view is dit een goed edition, maar het is de motivatie, dus dat is wat we doen om de culture te houden. En hoeveel is het persoonale feit, de culturel feit, tot de branden, of het een combinatie? Je bent niet gegeten om een interviewe te houden, als je niet geeft om je gegeven te houden, om je gegeven te houden, dus dat is dat je een schermijker persoon is. Dus wat we het meer te houden is voor de culturel feit, en het is dat als je op de website kunt vergeten als je een formlaat kan verhaan en dat we het culturel zijn, dat we mensen houden. Een van de de dingen is dat we als een korte, te meer focusen, en als een company, dus we het meer een keer een winnig is, dan eeuw. De reason is dat we niet in zo'n many countries, en als ik ben benen, zet je altijd dat je een h&m in de uitzicht bent en ze rozen in de U.S. Dus er is geen korte, die kan gewoon zeggen dat was ik, we moeten met een company doen. Dus ik was om te laten zien, in de informatie, je hebt een global werkvorm in meer dan, natuurlijk meer in 6 condens, maar dan met 115 dene nationalities, hoeveel jouw verhaal is het in Holland, in de externale, en hoe je de culturel is, is het een heel erg hoogtere proces of is het een continuus cultural investement die het kieft in het culturel is? We hebben een beetje lessen en half in de Nederlandse, ik zou het zeggen, en de Nederlandse is nog steeds heel belangrijk, omdat dat is waar de majoriteit van onze ingeniers zijn. We doen een paar dingen rond de culturel. In alle assessie, we kijken naar het culturel fit, maar we doen de hele dingen, we hebben alle mensen met het hele 1e jaar, om voorzien dat de globale teamen niet te zien, maar ook het feest te zijn, maar er zijn slechte interpretatie van het, omdat het een officie is, ik denk dat de San Francisco officie is slecht anders dan in New York, en het officie is in het culturel in het culturel gebouw. Ik niet expect dat we een zinkel culture is, dat is niet een realistisch te te zien. Wat zijn de grote dingen die je voorzien voorzien voor both Adian en voor de sector in general over de volgende vijf jaar? Ik denk dat de volgende grote dingen, capitalizing, op de globale element van onze business, op de opportuniteit dat we hebben met alle dingen in een plezier, omdat we een grote product, die wel in de volgende feest te helpen, waar de markt is gehoord. Dat is wat ik voelde en ik denk dat nu we nu heel goed positionen om de hele deze deze deze te gaan. Great, dat is een heel leuk verantwoord. Ik dacht dat je er heel erg goed komt. Dank u voor de grote. Dank u voor de gegeven van ons. Dank u voor de gegeven van ons voor een andere episode van Talks@GS, gekocht op November 5, 2025. Als je het gevoel bent, we hopen je op de platform van de gegeven en te ene voor een andere episode. De opinionen van de vijf jaar spreest je erin als de date van de publicatie, de subjecten shother difficies rupt niet te HOWD ambiente in de alke van die As to the accuracy or completeness of the statements or information contained herein. En disqueep any liability whatsoever for reliance on such information for any purpose. EACH NAME of a third point organization mentioned is the property of the company to which it relates. Is used here strictly for informational and identification purposes only and is not used to imply any ownership or licency rights between any such company and Goldman Sachs. 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