Adyen N.V. – Still a FinTech Winner, Ignore the Short-Term Noise!
The market is focused on quarters — Adyen is focused on decades.
Just over a week ago, Adyen, a differentiated Dutch FinTech company, released its results for the first half of 2025. It’s safe to say investors weren’t thrilled with these, as Adyen shares on the Amsterdam Exchange (AEX) initially fell by over 20%. However, these ultimately ended the day down “just” 7-8%, as the initial response was a very obvious overreaction to isolated headline numbers.
Nevertheless, Adyen once again failed to meet investor expectations. The biggest issue? Primarily, much weaker-than-expected H1 payment volumes, which are expected to persist in the second half of the year, subsequently led to a lower revenue guidance from Adyen management. Obviously, that isn’t a good thing – in the basis, these results weren’t good enough to justify the premium Adyen trades at.
Yet, those selling Adyen shares on a less optimistic near-term outlook and an H1 miss are clearly missing the bigger picture and are oblivious to how this company operates.
You see, Adyen is a standout in many aspects, and management’s approach is another one. Adyen is managed almost more like a private, founder-led business than a typical public fintech.
From the beginning, the company has stressed that it is building for decades, not quarters. It is known for being unconcerned with short-term fluctuations in volumes, take-rates, or margins. They openly caution that certain quarters may look weaker if investments are front-loaded, or if macro conditions temporarily dampen growth, which is what we in large part saw in the first half of 2025.
The company is facing headwinds from macro concerns and the impact of U.S. tariffs and disrupted global trade, but under the hood, Adyen’s business is showing no weakness.
Yes, management could preserve growth amid near-term pressures by lowering costs and maintaining margins through slower hiring, but it won’t – management doesn’t care about short-term effects or how investors view the business. Instead, it is entirely focused on the future of the company. Not the next few quarters, but positioning itself ideally for the next 5, 10, or 20 years.
For example, Adyen management doesn’t hesitate to cut a large low-margin client at the cost of near-term volumes, but to position it better for the future by focusing on higher-quality revenues. Its shareholders don’t always appreciate this, but this is not a priority – management isn’t concerned with pleasing investors, in the slightest.
When Adyen announced in 2023 that it would accelerate hiring despite margin compression, the stock sold off heavily—but management stuck with the plan, stressing that it was necessary to capture long-term opportunities. They have also repeatedly said that they do not manage the business to meet quarterly consensus expectations and are wary of letting investor sentiment dictate strategy.
This is a founder-led business solely focused on building the best company for the decades ahead, at its best.
That is what any long-term oriented Adyen investor must love! I do. Adyen has been in my portfolio for years, and I heavily loaded up in October 2023, when shares sold off considerably on near-term numbers, which I found completely unjustified, given its fundamentals.
Today is no different.
Of course, eventually, the sell-off last week wasn’t as considerable as investors quickly realized we are just seeing the impact of near-term headwinds reflected in its numbers, but it still pushed Adyen shares to their lowest levels since the April Trump-induced sell-off, and these now trade 25% below a February 2025 high.
So, is this another opportunity to pick up shares of this great business at a discount, or should we wait for a larger pullback in this generally richly valued business?
That is the question I will answer today by going over the 1H25 numbers and developments, before updating my financial projections and target price.
But first, let me briefly outline what sets Adyen apart in the crowded and highly competitive FinTech industry.
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Adyen is truly fundamentally differentiated
The global FinTech industry is vast, fragmented, and fiercely competitive. Dozens of players—from legacy incumbents like Worldpay to disruptors such as Stripe, PayPal, and Square—are all vying to capture transaction volumes across digital commerce, point-of-sale, and platforms. Many rely on a patchwork of acquired systems, or compete in narrow niches, making it difficult to stand out in a market where payments are often treated as a commodity.
Founded in 2006, Adyen has carved out a distinctive position in this crowded FinTech landscape by building a single, integrated payments platform that handles the full transaction lifecycle entirely in-house, avoiding M&A and choosing instead to build capabilities organically.
Through this unique in-house and organic-first strategy, Adyen can offer merchants a platform with remarkable simplicity and exceptional global integration. Its architecture reduces complexity for clients, minimizes failure points, and creates significant operating leverage, since every incremental customer benefits from the same streamlined system.
Furthermore, through its technologically brilliant platform, Adyen has become not just a payments processor but an infrastructure provider that enables merchants to operate globally without having to deal with the patchwork of local processors, acquirers, and alternative payment methods. By offering one API integration across regions, currencies, and channels, the company becomes the connective tissue that allows retailers, platforms, and digital-native companies to scale internationally with minimal friction.
This is particularly powerful in a world where commerce is increasingly omnichannel—customers expect seamless experiences across in-store, mobile, and online channels, and Adyen is one of the few players that can deliver this cohesively. Adyen offers merchants one global solution that spans online, mobile, and in-store channels, which not only simplifies expansion for multinational clients but also yields richer data, higher authorization rates, and lower costs.
This all makes Adyen the perfect payments solution for large multinational enterprises operating across different channels.
Adyen’s platform is unique in its ability to provide this complete architecture, which truly is best-in-class. This is why it’s the trusted payments platform for giants like Uber, Microsoft, Spotify, Booking, Etsy, McDonald’s, L’Oreal, H&M, Meta, and Netflix, just to name a few.
Another factor differentiating Adyen is its focus on large enterprises and digital platforms (rather than chasing small merchants) that demand sophisticated, global solutions, perfectly aligning with Adyen’s strengths. These relationships tend to be sticky because switching costs are high: payments are mission-critical, and once a system is embedded across multiple geographies and touchpoints, the operational risks of changing providers become prohibitive. The result is high retention and long-term visibility on volumes.
Additionally, Adyen has always been heavily focused on an automation-heavy approach, which keeps incremental costs low, so as volume scales, operating leverage expands, leading to exceptional, growing profitability. Few competitors can match this balance of growth and profitability, particularly in a sector where many players either burn cash to chase volume or rely on acquisitions to patch gaps in their offering.
Taken together, Adyen’s strengths—its end-to-end integrated infrastructure, ability to unify online and offline payments globally, focus on large enterprises, and disciplined execution—make it a compelling investment case. In a crowded and noisy FinTech landscape, it differentiates itself not by chasing every niche or burning cash for growth, but by solving a fundamental problem at scale: simplifying global commerce for the world’s largest and most demanding merchants.
Adyen’s sweet spot—large, international merchants with complex omnichannel needs—is an area where competitors often struggle, giving it a defensible niche despite the competitive intensity of payments.
Finally, it is also worth pointing out that Adyen remains very much founder-led, with one of its co-founders, Pieter van der Does, continuing to serve as Co‑CEO. Since co-founding the company in 2006, van der Does has been at the helm, steering Adyen’s evolution from a startup into a global payments powerhouse. Additionally, he remains one of the largest shareholders, holding a roughly 3% stake in the company, which equates to approximately €1.3 billion of his own cash.
Quite a compelling business, no?
On that note, let’s delve into the H1 numbers!
Adyen delivers a mixed bag.
On August 14, Adyen released its results for the first half of 2025, and, as I mentioned, they didn’t quite meet expectations, which was primarily driven by outside factors, including:
Macro pressures → less consumer spending means fewer transactions on Adyen’s network.
A weak dollar → Adyen realizes a significant portion of revenue in dollars, so a weak dollar translates into currency headwinds.
U.S. tariffs and disrupted global trade are affecting Adyen’s merchants, particularly those in APAC, who are dealing with tariff-related headwinds that impact transaction volumes on Adyen’s network.
Each of these is a temporary factor outside of Adyen’s control that is impacting its results, but not damaging its business, which remains solid. Additionally, management notes that these tariff headwinds are also creating opportunities, as merchants seek to expand into new markets to circumvent tariffs. This is where Adyen's role becomes critical, indicating long-term business opportunities.
Looking beyond these headwinds, Adyen does continue to execute on its strategic priorities, and management is pleased with its progress here. Its main objective in 2025 was to expand its share of wallet with existing customers or to grow the size of the business that runs on Adyen. This is where it continues to execute strongly, thanks to its superior, simple, and complete platform.
Additionally, Adyen also continues to win new business, adding a good number of new logos in the first half of 2025. On this front, Adyen is seeing good strength, adding more new business so far in 2025 compared to recent years.
So, clearly, under the hood, it does continue to execute strongly, realizing wins in its existing customer base and by acquiring new volumes. Together, this remains a healthy dual growth driver, only held back by near-term external headwinds.
Excluding these headwinds, Adyen’s business momentum remains strong, according to management.
Nevertheless, reported volumes fell short of expectations due to these aforementioned headwinds that impacted a small subset of large customers. This resulted in a total processed volume of €649 billion, up 5% YoY on a reported basis and up 23% YoY when excluding a single large customer. It’s the latter number that I deem more representative.
This translated into H1 revenue of €1.09 billion, up 20% YoY or 21% on a constant currency basis, which actually was slightly ahead of consensus estimates. The lower volumes were offset by a higher take rate of 16.8%, up from 16.2% in 2H24 and ahead of consensus estimates, driven by the cancellation of a large low-volume contract.
Honestly, this isn’t all too bad, especially when we consider the headwinds Adyen faces right now.
Breaking down revenue growth by region, Adyen continued to see the strongest growth in its largest region, Europe, delivering revenue growth of 21%, just ahead of the 20% growth in North America. This was closely followed by 17% growth in LatAm and 15% growth in Asia, with the latter seeing some pressure from lower revenues due to tariffs.
Breaking revenue down by segment, Platforms continued to register the fastest growth, as expected. For reference, Platform refers to the payments Adyen processes on behalf of large digital platforms or marketplaces. Think of companies like eBay, Etsy, or Uber, where payments are collected from millions of end-users and then routed to individual sellers, drivers, or service providers. Adyen’s role here is to manage complex flows of funds across multiple parties, often across different geographies, currencies, and regulatory frameworks. This segment has been one of Adyen’s strongest growth drivers because digital platforms tend to scale quickly and generate very high transaction volumes.
In H1, Platform revenues grew by 55%, driven mainly by new SaaS platforms. Adyen now has 32 Platform customers contributing over €1 billion in volumes annually, up nicely YoY, as Adyen continues to rapidly grow in this complex market.
Still, Platforms only contribute 11% of revenue as of H1 2025.
Moving to Unified Commerce, these operations contributed 31% of H1 revenue and continued to grow by 31%, driven by continued strength in retailer volumes. Adyen also saw healthy volumes in newer verticals like food and beverage, hospitality, and entertainment, as Adyen continues to diversify its customer base in Unified Commerce.
For reference, Unified Commerce is Adyen’s omnichannel offering, where it connects online, in-app, and in-store transactions into a single system. Retailers like H&M, Inditex, or Nike use Adyen to accept payments both on their websites and at the checkout counter, while keeping a consolidated view of their customers across channels. The value here is not only operational efficiency but also richer data: merchants can recognize a customer whether they shop online or offline, which allows for loyalty integration, higher authorization rates, and more seamless consumer experiences. This segment differentiates Adyen strongly from peers like Stripe, which is mostly online-focused.
Finally, there is Digital. Digital is Adyen’s more “traditional” internet commerce business, serving companies that primarily operate online but aren’t multi-party platforms. These include subscription services, SaaS businesses, streaming platforms, and digital-first brands — Spotify or Netflix are examples. In this segment, Adyen handles straightforward payment processing and authorization across different regions and payment methods, leveraging its single global infrastructure.
This segment contributed 58% of H1 revenue and grew by 10% in the last six months. The slower growth here was driven by the slower growth in its APAC-headquartered online retailers.
Moving to the bottom-line results, Adyen continues to deliver healthy margin expansion thanks to growing operating leverage due to fundamental business model benefits.
EBITDA in H1 grew 28% YoY to €543.7 million, reflecting an EBITDA margin of 50%, up an excellent 400 bps YoY. Even as Adyen continues to heavily invest in its business and team, operating costs were up only 14% YoY in H1.
Finally, FCF conversion was 87% of EBITDA, translating into an FCF of roughly €470 million. This allowed Adyen to maintain a pristine balance sheet, holding $10 billion in cash and practically no debt.
In terms of financial health, Adyen remains brilliant, consistently delivering best-in-class margins and maintaining an excellent balance sheet with loads of liquidity.
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Outlook & Valuation
Adyen’s guidance was probably the biggest disappointment of the earnings report, leading to the initial 20%+ sell-off, as external pressures force management to cut FY25 expectations.
While underlying traction in wallet share growth and new logo wins in the first half is expected to remain in the second half, the combination with ongoing macro headwinds leads to management now guiding for a performance similar to H1 in H2. In contrast, it was previously guided to accelerate growth. In other words, this points to a 2 percentage point cut in revenue growth.
As for EBITDA, management is committed to its current rate of investments, but that should still leave room for continued EBITDA margin expansion in H2, which is inherent to its business model. However, due to slower top-line growth than previously expected, this margin expansion will be slower than we saw in 2024. This points to an EBITDA margin of between 52% and 53%, up 200-300 bps YoY (compared to 400 bps of margin growth in H1).
Now, while this is still relatively resilient guidance and underlying trends remain strong, all things considered, it does urge Wall Street and myself to cut FY25 projections, as top-line growth is coming in lighter than expected. At the same time, margin expansion remains strong, so I do maintain my FY25 EBITDA margin estimate.
Looking ahead to FY26 and beyond, Adyen management maintains its growth projections for FY26, still pointing to revenue growth of between 20% and 29%, pointing to likely accelerating growth in the next fiscal year as momentum persists and headwinds ease. Additionally, the EBITDA margin should remain above 50%.
This indicates confidence and reflects the fact that underlying fundamentals and strategic progress do remain strong, which is most important to Adyen investors. What we are seeing currently in 2025 is just short-term headwinds, no fundamental weakness. The investment thesis here isn’t breaking.
The company has a strong track record of market share gains and outpacing its underlying market, thanks to its superior platform and favorable strategic positioning. I don’t expect this to change in the years ahead. As headwinds should ease heading into 2026 and beyond, I expect growth to accelerate through 2028, as Adyen will continue to not only grow its share of wallet but also add merchants at a good clip.
As for my own projections through 2028, for this year, I have lowered both my revenue and EBITDA projections, even as I have raised my FY25 EBITDA margin estimate. I am now assuming H2 revenue growth similar to H1, in line with guidance, and a full-year EBITDA margin of 52%, resulting in an EBITDA growth of 27%.
Looking ahead to FY26, I expect top-line growth to accelerate strongly, as Adyen’s strategic progress pays off and some of its headwinds should ease at the very least. On top of this, I expect mild EBITDA margin expansion, allowing EBITDA to outgrow revenue.
Meanwhile, my FY27 and FY28 revenue guidance have remained essentially unchanged, while I have actually marginally raised my long-term EBITDA projection amid healthy margin progress, driven by Adyen’s excellent business model.
Ultimately, I remain very optimistic about Adyen’s long-term business potential and see no reason to turn more bearish on its longer-term growth prospects.
These estimates are reflected in the projections below.
So, what does all this mean for valuation? Are Adyen shares finally attractive again, trading 25% below their 2025 high?
Well, Adyen shares most certainly still aren’t cheap in any way, even after last week’s sell-off, in part driven by expectations for this year falling solidly as well. However, I will argue that shares have gotten much more appealing to long-term oriented investors looking through this near-term weakness.
For reference, Adyen shares now trade at 35x my FY25 EBITDA estimate and roughly 37x the current EPS consensus, which aren’t too demanding at all. Adjusting for forward growth, we get a 1.35x PEG, which is one of the lowest levels we have seen since its IPO.
In other words, especially when compared to historical multiples, Adyen shares look rather attractive. Yes, paying 35x EBITDA or 37x earnings is not cheap at all. However, we shouldn’t forget that Adyen is still one of the more exciting long-term FinTech investments, thanks to its unique positioning and brilliant platform, making it much deserving of a premium valuation – check out the outlook above, which can extend well into the next decade, considering the runway of growth here.
Ultimately, Adyen is still well worth its premium, and current levels represent good value.
Suppose we assume a 30x FY27 EBITDA multiple, which seems reasonable, I calculate an end-of-2027 target price of €1,945. From a current share price of €1435, after a slight recovery in recent days, this reflects potential annualized returns of roughly 13%.
This is not a bad risk-reward balance, especially considering the upside to both the used multiple and the EBITDA projection.
At the same time, I wouldn’t call current prices the ideal entry point after shares clawed back some of last week’s losses in recent days. Ideally, I would like to pick up Adyen shares at a share price below €1,370, which would meaningfully improve the risk-reward here.
Ultimately, I would say current prices offer good value to DCA. However, to load up on shares, I am aiming for slightly lower levels – I remain a little more cautious, especially amid an uncertain macro.
Rating: Hold
2027 Target Price: €1,945 → Accumulate below €1,370
Implied CAGR: ~13%
A really good European company, very good writing too