Adyen, H1 ‘26 Earnings Call, August 13, 2026
Growth is still being driven less by new logos than by existing customers steadily handing it more of their payments business. Roughly two-thirds of first-half revenue growth came from merchants that joined before 2025. Merchants typically give Adyen less than 20% of their payment volume in years three through seven, but more than 40% after year 12. Customers such as Uber, Microsoft, Spotify and Google are still expanding after more than a decade, implying the addressable opportunity inside an existing account can be several times larger than the initial contract.
Adyen increasingly wants to own the infrastructure surrounding the transaction, not simply the card-processing step. Payments remain the anchor, but management now describes Adyen as a “financial operating system” spanning loyalty, billing and money movement. Talon.One brings promotions and loyalty into the same platform as Adyen’s online and in-store transaction data, giving retailers a better shot at recognizing the same shopper across channels and targeting offers accordingly. Orb is strategically different: it adds metering and usage-based billing, which management thinks is increasingly essential for software and artificial-intelligence companies whose customers pay according to consumption rather than a fixed monthly subscription. Management insists this does not mark the beginning of an acquisition roll-up strategy: core technology will generally still be built internally, while adjacent products will be evaluated on a build-versus-buy basis.
Van der Does repeatedly argued that combining payments, loyalty and billing data creates a richer picture of the customer and therefore a better foundation for personalization, pricing and conversion products. This is also how management is thinking about the threat from AI agents: merchants worry that consumers will increasingly shop through ChatGPT-like agents rather than visiting a merchant’s app or website directly, weakening the merchant’s direct relationship with the customer. Adyen Agentic is supposed to act like an interoperability layer, letting a merchant connect once to Adyen rather than separately integrating inventory, pricing and payments with every emerging AI-agent protocol.
Adyen compared this explicitly with Adyen’s traditional role connecting merchants to many payment methods: Adyen would publish inventory into multiple agent ecosystems and then route the resulting transaction back into the merchant’s existing fraud, payment and operational systems. The vision is therefore not some proprietary AI model; it is Adyen’s position as the neutral translation and transaction layer sitting between a very large merchant and an increasingly fragmented set of commerce protocols.
So, competitively, management’s claim has broadened noticeably from “we get better authorization rates” to “we can simplify more of a global merchant’s infrastructure than anyone else.” Van der Does was unusually explicit: “there’s no other company that can do everything that Adyen can do,” arguing that breadth increasingly makes Adyen the logical consolidation platform for large merchants. That is a more defensible position than competing purely on payment acceptance rates because the switching cost rises as Adyen touches more workflows, jurisdictions and products. Adyen also continues to distinguish itself by refusing to own the consumer relationship. It has no current plan to build a branded consumer wallet, which management says appeals to large merchants that view their shoppers as their own asset