One platform to accept payments online, in apps and in stores - built end to end by a Dutch fintech that most shoppers have never heard of, yet use every day.
Adyen is a financial technology company that lets businesses accept payments - and it does the whole job on one platform instead of the patchwork most companies inherit. In the traditional model, a large merchant assembles a payment gateway from one vendor, a processor from another, and an acquiring bank from a third, then wires them together country by country. Adyen collapses that stack into a single integration. It is the gateway, the risk engine, the processor and, crucially, a licensed acquiring bank, connecting merchants directly to Visa, Mastercard and hundreds of local payment methods worldwide.
The practical result is that a company can take a card tap in a Tokyo store, an Apple Pay checkout on a London phone, and a subscription renewal in São Paulo, and see all of it as one shopper, in one dashboard, settled through one partner. Adyen calls this unified commerce - online, in-app and in-store payments tied together rather than reconciled after the fact.
Founded in 2006 by Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff, the company took its name from a Surinamese word meaning "to start over." The pair had already built and sold an earlier payments company, Bibit, and they wanted to rebuild the plumbing from scratch rather than bolt fixes onto legacy rails. That decision - to own the full technology stack rather than acquire it - is the through-line of everything Adyen has done since.
"The name Adyen means 'start over' in Surinamese - a nod to founders who rebuilt payments from scratch rather than patch the old rails."
Adyen sells to large enterprises, platforms and marketplaces rather than corner shops. Its published roster includes Uber, Spotify, eBay, Booking.com, Microsoft, McDonald's, Etsy, LinkedIn and Gap Inc. These are companies operating in dozens of currencies and countries at once - exactly the situation where a single-platform model pays off.
Global payments are a mess of local rules, fraud risk, failed transactions and fragmented data. Every extra vendor is another contract, another integration and another blind spot at reconciliation time. Adyen removes the seams: one integration, one settlement relationship, one view of every sale, with machine-learning fraud tools built into the flow rather than bolted on.
Illustrative - reported H2 2025 pretax income margin vs. typical peers
Owning the full stack means Adyen shares its margin with no gateway or third-party acquirer. Peer figures approximate, for illustration.
Adyen vs. the assembled-stack model
Single stack. Gateway, processing and acquiring are Adyen's own code, not a chain of vendors.
Direct scheme access. As a licensed acquiring bank it connects straight to Visa and Mastercard.
Land and expand. It wins a slice of a big merchant's volume, then earns more - no lock-in tricks.
Enterprise focus. Where rivals chase every SMB, Adyen concentrates on large, global merchants.
A single API and gateway for cards, wallets and hundreds of local payment methods worldwide.
As a licensed acquiring bank, Adyen connects merchants directly to the card schemes.
In-store terminals and software that unify physical and digital transactions on one platform.
Online, in-app and in-store payments tied into one shopper journey and one data set.
Data-driven business financing platforms can offer users based on historic payments data.
Create and issue branded physical and virtual payment cards to platform users.
Business bank accounts that let platform users hold funds and get instant access to money.
Machine-learning fraud prevention and revenue optimization built into the payment flow.
Adyen charges a processing fee per transaction plus a settlement fee tied to the payment method, rather than a blended percentage markup. Because it owns the whole stack, it keeps margin that competitors hand to intermediaries. Growth comes from "land and expand" - winning part of a large merchant's volume and increasing share over time - and, increasingly, from embedded financial products sold to platforms and marketplaces.
Adyen's edge is engineering discipline: a single global codebase, its own banking licenses, and a refusal to grow by acquisition. That vertical control lets it optimize authorization rates, route transactions intelligently, and roll out embedded finance - Capital, Issuing, Accounts - on the same rails that already move the money. The company summarizes its culture in the "Adyen Formula": move fast, launch and iterate, win as a team.
Where it fits: Adyen sits at the enterprise end of the payments market, competing with Stripe, PayPal's Braintree, Checkout.com, Fiserv, Worldpay and Block - but distinguished by being the bank, gateway and processor in one.
Van der Does and Schuijff start Adyen to rebuild payments as a single, unified platform.
Adyen introduces its acquiring platform and lands its first major enterprise merchant.
Index Ventures leads a Series A round to fuel international expansion.
In-store payments arrive; offices open in San Francisco, London and beyond.
General Atlantic and Temasek lead an investment among Europe's largest fintech rounds.
Adyen goes public on 13 June 2018 at roughly a €7 billion valuation.
Capital and Issuing extend Adyen beyond pure payment processing.
Embedded financial products for platforms and marketplaces take shape.
~$43B processed over Black Friday weekend; ~54% pretax margin in H2.
Full-year 2025 results highlight continued double-digit net revenue growth and momentum in the Platforms / embedded-finance segment.
Adyen processes a record ~$43 billion in volume over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.
H2 updates show Platforms net revenue up roughly 45-49% year over year, driven by SaaS and marketplace customers.
"Adyen" means "to start over" in Sranan Tongo (Surinamese) - the founders' second run at building a payments company.
It scaled to a multi-billion-euro IPO with a headcount smaller than a midsize hotel's staff.
The early engineering team worked out of an Amsterdam canal house and ate lunch together at one long table.
Adyen chose to build its own full technology stack rather than grow through acquisitions - unusual for a large fintech.