Adyen

Overview

Adyen is the Dutch payments company built on a second-time founder’s refusal to repeat the industry’s mistakes. After selling their first online payments processor, Bibit, to Royal Bank of Scotland in 2004, Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff founded Adyen in the Netherlands in 2006 — and, as van der Does told Bloomberg, this time they had no intention of ever selling out (Bloomberg). Their founding thesis was architectural: rivals offered services built on “a patchwork of systems” running on outdated infrastructure, so Adyen would build its platform in-house, from scratch, as a single system connecting directly to payment endpoints (FinTech Magazine). That bet carried the company from a 2017 European banking licence to a blockbuster 2018 IPO and, by 2024, to €1,285.9 billion in annual processed volume (Global Banking News; Bloomberg; Adyen).

Built, not bought

Van der Does and Schuijff had helped establish Bibit, one of the first online payment processors, during the 1990s dot-com boom (Bloomberg). After RBS acquired it in 2004, the founders regrouped and in 2006 started Adyen with an unusually ambitious market-entry plan: build the highest-quality product possible and sell directly to the best companies in the market (Bloomberg). Adyen bootstrapped for almost five years before raising its first venture round in 2011, by which time it was already breaking even (Bloomberg).

The single-platform pitch became Adyen’s identity: one integration giving merchants end-to-end payments capabilities, data-driven insights and financial products “in a single global solution,” as the company’s own boilerplate puts it (Adyen). Industry analysts noted the practical payoff — retailers “don’t want to have to deal with multiple payments processors in different countries and different banks,” a Forrester analyst told Bloomberg; “here they can just plug into Adyen” (Bloomberg). Adyen’s transaction fees were typically lower than those of younger e-commerce-oriented rivals such as Stripe or Square, and it handled more currencies and payment types than the big US processors (Bloomberg). In 2012 the company extended the platform into physical retail with its own point-of-sale terminal (Bloomberg).

The licence and the IPO

In June 2017, Adyen received a pan-European banking licence, giving it the status of an acquiring bank — which meant it could bypass banks and process cross-border payments directly for its merchant customers (Global Banking News). A year later, on June 13, 2018, Adyen listed on Euronext Amsterdam, raising as much as €947 million for existing investors at a valuation of $8.3 billion — one of the biggest European fintech IPOs in years, and the largest European tech IPO since Spotify (Bloomberg; Ecommerce News). By 2017 Adyen was already processing more than $122 billion in payments for the year, up 61% on the year before, with $1.2 billion in revenue and customers including Uber, Netflix, Spotify and Facebook (Bloomberg).

Growth compounded on the same single-platform model. By 2022 the company was processing €767.5 billion a year for clients including Uber, Facebook, H&M and eBay (FinTech Magazine). For full-year 2024, Adyen reported net revenue of €1,996.1 million, up 23%, on processed volume of €1,285.9 billion, up 33% — with point-of-sale volumes up 46% to €232.7 billion and an EBITDA margin of 50% (Adyen). By late 2020, Revolut’s business-payments push had put the London fintech in the same payments-acceptance space as Adyen and Stripe, a sign of how central Adyen’s territory had become (The Business Times).

Founder-led, then shared

Van der Does, a University of Amsterdam and Harvard Business School graduate who had worked at ING and RBS, led Adyen as CEO for its entire history up to 2023 (FinTech Magazine). In February 2023 the company promoted Ingo Uytdehaage — CFO for 12 years — to co-CEO, formalising an arrangement van der Does said would let him spend time on his health when needed while Adyen “stays its course” (FinTech Magazine). Fellow founder Schuijff had stepped away from the business a couple of years earlier (FinTech Magazine). The company employed more than 3,000 people across 27 offices worldwide as of 2023 (FinTech Magazine).

What this profile does not claim

• This profile does not claim Adyen is supervised by De Nederlandsche Bank specifically; the DNB register entry was not independently retrieved. It states the European banking licence and acquiring-bank status per the sources read.
• It does not repeat the “Adyen means ‘start over again’” etymology; the only source for it was not citable.
• The profile does not claim Adyen has no competitors on the single-platform model — by 2018 analysts noted rivals including Stripe, PayPal and Worldpay were catching up with similar conversion-boosting tools (Bloomberg).
• Financial figures are the company’s own reported numbers (net revenue, processed volume), not independent audits of market share.