Adyen N.V. ADYEY

The business

Adyen runs one payment platform it wrote itself and operates on its own private cloud, handling the full flow for large enterprises: gateway, risk, processing, acquiring, settlement, online, in-store and in-app, connecting merchants like Uber, Microsoft, Spotify and Google straight to Visa, Mastercard and local rails. It processed EUR 803.8B of volume in H1 2026 and kept about 16.2 basis points of it. Digital carries the franchise at 55% of net revenue, EUR 719.7M on 53% of the volume, with Unified Commerce at EUR 417.7M and Platforms at EUR 165.5M; the top 300 merchants supply 60% of revenue. Because the platform is already built, incremental volume lands at very high margin, which is how a 16-basis-point toll produces a 50%-plus EBITDA margin. The single codebase is the moat in one sentence, a cost-and-scale advantage no acquisition-assembled rival matches; the durability audit lives in the July 19 Moat Dive.

What the financials do not show is that the compounding is a wallet-share mechanic, not a new-logo mechanic. Merchants typically hold under 20% of their payment volume with Adyen in years three through seven and more than 40% after year twelve, and roughly two-thirds of H1 growth came from merchants onboarded before 2025. Three things changed in the last quarter. Adyen closed Talon.One (EUR 750M) and Orb ($335M) on July 1, its first acquisitions in twenty years, adding loyalty and usage-based billing. It launched Adyen Agentic and Intelligent Money Movement, and won OpenAI, Xiaomi, GOV.UK Pay and a US expansion with Toast. And CFO Ethan Tandowsky leaves on August 31, with Hwa Tsao stepping in as interim from September 1.