Adyen Aktie

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Adyen's H1 2026 Earnings Call. My name is Maggie O'Donnell from Investor Relations, and I will be hosting today's call.

With me today are Pieter, our Co-Founder and Co-CEO; and Hwa, our incoming Interim CFO. We're going to begin with playing the prepared remarks from Ingo and Hwa, then Pieter will say a few words. And finally, we will open it up for Q&A with Pieter and Hwa. [Operator Instructions]

With that, let's get started.

Hello, everyone. The beginning of 2026 was a strategically important half for Adyen. As commerce rapidly evolves, we're enabling more of the world's largest merchants to capture greater value across the entire commerce journey. We grow faster than our market. This consistent outperformance is driven by 2 engines. First, we're winning new and diverse customers. And second, we're deepening relationships and expanding our share of wallet with existing ones. Both reflect our ability to continuously deliver new value for our customers.

Our long-term relationships provide clear visibility into the durability of this growth. Merchants typically expand their share of wallet with Adyen from under 20% in years 3 to 7 to more than 40% after year 12. Even after more than a decade, customers like Uber, Microsoft, Spotify and Google continue to broaden their use of our platform. This sustained expansion gives us ultimate confidence in our resilience and ability to continue outperforming the market.

The strong momentum reflected in our H1 performance comes from our unchanged mission, solving complexity for our merchants. And the complexity is only increasing as commerce rapidly evolves. Competition for consumer attention is fiercer than ever. Workflows are shifting rapidly to AI and legacy infrastructure is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of modern digital commerce.

Our long-term strategy is built for exactly this shift, which is why more customers are looking to us as a stronger partner. Our North Star is to become the single trusted platform for the financial infrastructure on which global commerce runs. We started by building the world's most advanced payments processing stack. Now we're expanding that same engineering-first mindset to solve customer pain points before, at and after the transaction.

Our payments engine remains our foundation, and it continues to win share, but we're no longer just a payments company. We are the complete financial operating system for modern commerce from payments to loyalty, billing and intelligent money movement. You can see this focus in the high-impact milestones we delivered this half.

First, we completed the acquisitions of Talon.One and Orb, moving us deeper into our customers' technology stack and extending our platform well beyond payments. Talon.One brings market-leading promotions and loyalty capabilities into our single platform. Combined with our unique online and in-person transaction data, it allows merchants to finally deliver truly omnichannel loyalty at scale. For years, retailers have struggled to connect digital and physical customer experiences. By bringing loyalty natively into our architecture, merchants can recognize shoppers across channels and deliver personalized incentives in real time, deepening consumer engagement and making loyalty far more effective than stand-alone systems ever could.

Orb addresses another growing customer challenge. As AI transforms how software is built and consumed, usage-based billing is becoming the default pricing model for many businesses. Orb gives merchants the tools to automate metering, pricing and billing, while our payments infrastructure completes the revenue life cycle by connecting usage directly to settlement.

Together, this gives businesses a single system to launch flexible pricing models globally and at scale.

These acquisitions are an important part of our long-term strategy, serving as powerful drivers of our growth. They represent our fundamental long-term belief that in a complex world, the company that facilitates revenue optimization will deliver the most value. It also reflects how we invest selectively with discipline and where we see clear strategic logic.

Second, we introduced Adyen Agentic to solve a critical problem for our merchants, how to sell safely and efficiently in the emerging AI agent economy. Without the universal standard, merchants would need to build and maintain dozens of separate integrations just to keep their inventory, pricing and payments in sync. This creates massive operational cost and risk. Our product suite solves this. It acts as the universal translator that allows merchants to connect once to our platform and securely accept payments across all major agentic protocols, all while using the same unified fraud detection and compliance rails they trust today.

Third, we officially launched Intelligent Money Movement. For large enterprise merchants, complexity doesn't end at the point of payment. It often begins there. We help businesses automate global money movement on a single unified platform. Because this occurs natively on our own technical and banking infrastructure, capital flows dynamically and without the frictional delays of traditional banking rails. It allows us to move money completely end-to-end, unlocking unprecedented speed and treasury efficiency, so global businesses can simplify their most complex operations.

Taken together, these capabilities make Adyen a more strategic partner to our customers and strengthen our long-term growth opportunity.

The success of this strategy is directly reflected in our financial results this half. We delivered a strong half of 2026, with net revenue up 21% on a constant currency basis, driven by this ongoing platform expansion. Our scale is already immense. We are processing billions of transactions for thousands of global merchants. In the first half alone, we processed EUR 804 billion in volume.

To reiterate, we are winning in the market because we are building the complete financial operating system for modern commerce. As we look to the second half of 2026 and beyond, we will continue to execute with the same speed, discipline and engineering-first mindset that has brought us here. And we hold ourselves to the same standard with you, our shareholders, setting clear commitments and delivering against them consistently.

To speak more to our operational execution and financial performance, I'll now hand things over to our Interim CFO, Hwa Tsao. Hwa, over to you.

Hello, everyone. I'm Hwa Tsao, Adyen's incoming Interim CFO. For the past year, I've worked alongside the Management Board as the SVP of Group Finance, and I'm thrilled to step into this role at such a strategically important time for Adyen, marked by our recent acquisitions of Talon.One and Orb, the launch of Intelligent Money Movement and Adyen Agentic and so much more. My focus is on empowering our incredible team to serve our customers and continuing our history of financial discipline, while keeping our dialogue with our investors transparent and constructive.

Now let's turn to our financials, beginning with our top line results. Net revenue was EUR 1.3 billion in the first half, up 19% year-over-year or 21% on a constant currency basis with continued strong growth, in line with our communicated guidance.

The best way to understand Adyen's net revenue growth is through our building blocks: First, expanding share of wallet with existing customers. Second, ramping up previous year cohorts. Third, winning new merchants. And fourth, scaling our financial products. We drove roughly 2/3 of our growth by deepening relationships with our existing merchants, specifically those onboarded before 2025.

As Ingo highlighted, compounding revenue from established merchant cohorts is a valuable driver of our business. When our merchants expand, we grow with them. In addition, as we help them solve more challenges across products and geographies, we increase our share of their wallet. These levers, combined with volume-based tiered pricing, incentivize our merchants to consolidate more of their business onto our platform as they scale.

The remainder of our growth came from the ramp of our 2025 cohort, new customer wins in 2026 and the expansion of our financial products offering. These levers lay the foundation for the future as more recent wins scale and drive our continued growth for years to come. To support this expanding business, we added 249 net new joiners in the first half, bringing our total FTEs to 5,020 at the end of June. Our disciplined and targeted approach to hiring focused primarily on technical and go-to-market roles to drive our product road map and commercial momentum.

With this focus, we remain well on track for our full year goal of 550 to 650 net new hires. This measured pace of investment directly supported our strong profitability. EBITDA reached EUR 642 million for the first half, up 18% year-over-year for an EBITDA margin of 49%. Excluding onetime transaction costs, EBITDA margin landed at 50%, in line with H1 2025 and our previously communicated expectations.

CapEx was EUR 64 million or 5% of net revenue in the first half. The majority of our CapEx is related to data centers. Our core infrastructure operates on our own private cloud, which creates a commercial advantage and allows us to deliver operational efficiency as we scale.

Now I'd like to say a few words on our approach to capital allocation. We are in a high-growth phase and sustained efficient growth is our single highest priority. Everything we've done and everything we will do demonstrates this commitment. We put our capital to work where it drives the greatest long-term value.

In the first half of 2026, our strong balance sheet allowed us to invest in our team to drive innovation, strengthen our platform infrastructure to support global scale and execute targeted M&A to accelerate our road map and reach, as you saw with Talon.One and Orb. Looking ahead, we remain fully focused on capturing the massive opportunity in front of us.

Moving on to our outlook for the rest of the year. For net revenues, we now expect full year 2026 net revenue growth of 21% to 23% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This reflects a 1 percentage point contribution from the acquisitions for the full year or 2 percentage points of contribution in the second half. Our growth outlook for the underlying organic business is unchanged, and we expect the growth rate in the second half to be similar to the first half, excluding the impact of Talon.One and Orb.

On EBITDA, we expect our underlying 2026 EBITDA margin to remain in line with 2025. Including the 2 acquisitions, we expect a 1 percentage point dilution, leading full year EBITDA margin to land approximately 1 percentage point lower than 2025. We remain on track to achieve our 2028 objective of an EBITDA margin above 55%.

Finally, CapEx. Data center infrastructure that supports the growth of our platform accounts for the majority of our CapEx spend. We are proactively pulling investment from 2027 into H2 2026 to secure compute and storage availability and lock in price amid an unprecedented demand environment. As a result, we now expect CapEx of approximately 7% of net revenue for the full year. Through this active management, we expect CapEx to return towards historical levels post 2026.

In summary, we delivered a strong first half with 21% constant currency revenue growth and 50% underlying EBITDA margins. We continue to deepen our relationships with our existing merchants like Toast and win new customers like OpenAI, while expanding our platform through new product offerings and strategic acquisitions like Talon.One and Orb. We entered the second half of 2026 with high confidence in our position and our ability to capture the massive opportunity ahead.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. I want to add a few words to what Ingo and Hwa just said. When I started Adyen 20 years ago, the mission was simple: solve real complexity for our merchants. 20 years later, we are still doing exactly that, and we are really good at it.

Back then, merchant pain points were mostly around checkout. Today, global enterprises face challenges across their total financial operations. So we evolved. We didn't just build a payment engine. We built a platform that powers modern commerce end-to-end from customer loyalty to complex money movement. We went beyond payments.

Recently, we marked an exciting milestone with 2 acquisitions. And what's most important is that our identity hasn't changed. We have always evolved with our merchants' needs. We build great technology, eliminate friction and stay laser-focused on what our merchants need.

The positive response from those merchants to this direction, including the acquisitions, reinforces that we are the strategic partner they look for, for solving their most complex challenges. This is key to our success, and H1 has been another very positive half, and I'm excited for what's to come.

Looking forward to answering your questions, and I'll hand it over to you, Maggie.

Thank you, Pieter. We're going to move on to Q&A now. [Operator Instructions] So our first question comes from Andrew Schmidt at KeyBanc.

Maybe just on the platform evolution. Clearly, a lot of significant progress over the last 6 to 12 months towards this new financial operating system model. Maybe talk a little bit about what catalyzed the change. And then we think about further areas of expansion, some examples of places you go, there's clearly a lot of opportunity.

And then just one additional one, if I could squeeze in. As the platform expands, you have more opportunities to go after new clients and existing client expansion with the new capabilities. Maybe just talk about how the visibility of the business evolves as well.

Thanks, Andrew. I think, Pieter, you can take both of those questions.

All right. If you look at our platform evolution, we started 20 years ago with being very good at processing payments online. And then each so many years, we have added a lot of functionality. So if you look at that journey, which I see as a continuum, it brought us to where we are today. And in that expansion and looking at what our merchants need, you see that AI puts new challenges on them, which is for SaaS platform, meter billing, which is for merchants, how do I really cement my relationship with shoppers so to get -- such that, that brings loyalty top on the agenda. So that are our latest additions to the platform, Intelligent Money Movement, we have been working on that for longer. So I look at it as a continuum. What is new is that we did through acquisitions, but there's nothing new in the sense that we always evolve with our merchants.

And the second question on visibility into future areas of growth with customers.

As I talk about how we are very close to our merchants, how we partner with our merchants, we are in close contact. Our existing merchants continue to grow with us. New merchants are at the beginning of the journey. So that means that we don't have a road map for the next 5 years. It's that we stay agile and that we will develop everything what they need to take complexity around the payment away from them.

In the near term, I'll also add just for Talon and Orb, both of those have been extremely well received by our customer base. And Pieter, I know his phone has been ringing off the hook with some of the use cases we talked about as well as new ones that maybe we didn't even consider while we were going down that path. So there's a lot of opportunity even in the near term with these new capabilities.

Great. The next question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein.

Hwa, can you maybe talk about your revenue growth targets? I know the organic constant currency number is essentially the same. The second quarter was very strong. Looking into the second half, you have new client wins ramping up, you have benefit from strong 2025 cohorts. So how should we think about the likelihood of you coming in at different points of the range? And also any comments on Q3 versus 4Q?

And then, Pieter, it's very early days. But as you just closed the Talon.One and Orb acquisitions, maybe talk about what you're hearing from customers with respect to demand for loyalty, usage-based billing? And also how is the integration going from a cultural point of view?

Thanks, Harshita. So on the second half, as you said, our first half was a strong one. We landed right in the middle of the guide for the year at 21%. As we've stated before, we do expect performance to be similar. We continue to grow with our existing customers and add new wins along the way. And those dynamics we expect to continue as we go forward. The thing I will call out, the only real change, as you mentioned, is for the impact of the acquisitions. And those you will see impacting the second half as we push forward.

On the customer demand for those services, so I've been speaking to merchants this week. What's top of mind for them is how do I make sure that in an age of AI, I don't see a disintermediation. So loyalty is top of mind for them. I actually happen to also speak to a couple of merchants who were already on Talon.One and Adyen and who are really thrilled that now the services will be used together. AI on data is very strong, but the data is very important to have. And now with Orb, with Talon.One and with Adyen, the data set is just more sophisticated. So there's more we can do, and that's what they really appreciate.

Orb, if you look at AI native, that is billing and you see that, that opens up a market for us where we can land very mature companies. If you look at a company like OpenAI working for us, that is just for payments. So that is for payments of their consumers. But together with Orb, that also opens up the avenue to pick up more AI native companies earlier in their journey.

And the point on the integration of how the integration is going so far?

So I don't underestimate integrations. I've been part of -- I've sold a company to Worldpay. It was a very successful integration, but there were also lessons learned. And when we looked at the integration, we bought companies which are culturally aligned and which are in geographies close to our offices. Then still, what I think makes this integration easier is that this is an integration done for growth. So there are exciting integrations also for the companies. It's not about cost cutting. It's about making those products work together. That's what we are currently doing. We're actually slightly ahead of plan there, and there's a lot of excitement around it.

Great. The next question comes from Hannes Leitner from Jefferies.

I got also a couple of questions. Maybe the first one is just like a high level. You talked about -- or you dropped a lot of outstanding merchant wins and very fast ramp-ups. Maybe you can talk about like kind of like how is the playing field changing? Has this revisiting of contracts and expansion of contracts, the time shortened and you are clearly now able to scale much more? So a philosophical question to you, Pieter.

And then maybe just like one other thing is, I remember very well, you mentioned when you launched embedded finance product a couple of years or when you announced it, one of the items was that you will use your balance sheet. It hasn't really come through that you have scaled loans and financing. Yes, we understand that some of that hasn't really hit the, let's say, the threshold that you unleashed the rail guards. Maybe you can talk about that, what data points you expect to see? And how does this tie in to wins like the last platform win with the expansion with Toast, for example, is that a customer to target there in the long term?

Pieter, why don't you take the question on the landscape and then touch on embedded financial products and Hwa can answer the other question.

I think if you look at the landscape, there's no other company that can do everything that Adyen can do. And for large merchants, it's logical to move to us. And I think that, that position for us only gets stronger. So that's something what we see and continuously see.

If I move on to the question which, for example, you mentioned Toast, without talking about the services to an individual merchant, I can give some voiceover. What you see there that is a merchant which has already been working for us for a longer time and is now ramping up and giving us more share of market. That is a pattern that we typically see.

And on embedded financial products in general, how is that going?

Embedded financial products, they add about 1% contribution to this year. It's an important service for us because the choice for a platform to work with us, they want to know that they can also do those services with us. They don't always take them from the beginning. And the reason why we let talk about it this time is because there's so much to talk about it. So there's a wealth of information to share.

Okay. Great. The next question comes from Adam Frisch at Evercore.

Two questions for you. How does the pipeline look in terms of new merchant wins coming online? And how does that bode for near-term growth rates? And then the second question is with regard to the cash on your balance sheet, great call-out on the shareholder letter that there's a little under EUR 5 billion ex the merchant liabilities, et cetera. How much of that is needed for reserves for banking licenses? And how much is available to deploy in areas like M&A or if you do a buyback and stuff like that?

Pieter, do you want to start?

Yes. If you look at what is happening in our pipeline, Adyen is sort of a boring machine. We are constantly signing up new merchants, bringing them to life, getting some share of wallet. And over time, you see that we grow and that growth process takes on for years and years and years. And that engine is just running like it always was. So there's no deviation from earlier years.

Yes. And on the point about the actual cash, the reality is we don't just need it for regulatory reserves. We also have operational buffers. We keep a fair amount of cash on our balance sheet for credit ratings purposes. And ultimately, it also helps us fuel our growth. So I won't give an exact number, but I think the reality is the number that you see on the financials, the available cash or the excess cash is a small fraction of that amount.

I mean, if I'd like -- if I can add something to that. The reality is so that it's a fraction of a number that I've seen flying around. And if I look at the business, there is so much room for growth that we have a focus on building that growth, and that's the way how we create value. So I'm way more interested in that, and we need to have some room. And you see that we use that room this year. And we have always been -- we've never been dogmatic about that. It just happened to fall this year, but we want to have an open mind in the future and think about what's the best way to grow this business continuously at a high rate.

Great. The next question comes from Darrin Peller from Wolfe.

Let me just start off with a macro question. And then I just want to ask a quick margin question. But on the macro side, if you could just discuss what you're seeing in EMEA year-to-date spending patterns, especially amidst the Middle East conflict and then travel trends as well. And if you can give any color on what you're seeing even quarter-to-date through mid-August, that would be really helpful. And then just on the margin side, maybe just reiterate what gives you the conviction in reaching the 55% plus EBITDA margins by '28. Just what are the key levers to get there?

Pieter, do you want to take both of this?

All right. If you see what's happening in spending patterns, for us, we have less detail than you would think because we grow about 3x what the market grows. So that means that all our numbers are also a little bit changed because we get more share of wallet. And currently, we can absorb in our number the trends. If you look at why would we say 55%, it just -- that number is -- describe the business. If you grow the top line, then you know that you will get to a higher EBITDA. So that's why we grow to that number. And rather than a target, it's an outcome.

Okay. Great. The next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW.

I guess, Pieter, maybe you could talk a little bit about the OpenAI win. Obviously, it's a meaningful win. Some of your competitors have had some success in AI a little bit more than Adyen. I'm curious what the sales cycle was and what might be the nature of that relationship and then what the pipeline looks like for more in this space. And then secondly, just Hwa, if you don't mind expanding a little bit on the CapEx commentary. As we look to next year, I know you said it should normalize. But do you anticipate any additional pressure from some of the higher costs? Or can we even see a CapEx level that's lower next year as a result of this pull forward?

All right. I think it's good to point out on the OpenAI relationship that we work with them as an LLM as we do with all the parties. So that is to help our merchants. This is something else. This is to provide payments to them. And I don't talk that much about individual customers. What you see, it's a trend that the largest companies like to partner with Adyen. And I think that's a trend that you consistently see and that is there to continue.

Yes. So to be super clear, it is an agentic partner and also a customer. There's 2 parts to this relationship. And then, Hwa, on CapEx?

Yes. So on CapEx, what you saw in our increased guidance for this year is a deliberate decision. So we are pulling forward the spend. We're not going to provide an outlook right now for 2027. We'll do that in -- at the beginning of next year. But obviously, we're actively managing this, and we'll take opportunities. What you saw ultimately was we took -- we saw the opportunity to secure supply at a good price, and we took it, and you'll see us actively manage CapEx in the future.

To add to that, it's not the first time we're doing that. We did it during COVID as well in 2022, where we thought smart buying is the way to deal with the market dynamics. And also then you saw that after that, CapEx returned to historical levels.

Okay. Great. The next question comes from Pavan Daswani from Citi.

Maybe firstly, on Intelligent Money Movement. Could you touch on any learnings from early customer deployments? And stepping back, was the strategic ambition primarily solving a merchant treasury and liquidity problem? Or is it expanding Adyen's role beyond payment acceptance and into kind of broader money infrastructure?

And then secondly, a high-level one. Historically, Adyen has always been seen as a payments company, but with embedded finance, Intelligent Money Movement and our acquisitions such as Orb and Talon.One, you're increasingly moving to multiple layers of the commerce stack. Maybe looking out 5 years from now, should we still think of Adyen primarily as a payments company or a broader commerce infrastructure platform?

Great question. Do you want to actually start with the second question and then go to IMM after?

Let's look philosophically at what Adyen does. What we do is we do the transaction and we do everything around it, which is adjacent. We serve the merchant. So that is who we are selling to. And then all the complexity around the payments is for us quite a large area because of our banking licenses in multiple geographies because of how we are regulated, we can take a lot out of their hands. For example, if we see that money will come in, we can already provide the liquidity, but that is something for which you need a banking license. So more philosophically, do you see other services coming up? Yes, everything that is around the transaction, but it will always have -- be close to the transaction. I don't see unrelated services coming into scope very quickly.

And then on IMM, any early learnings from rolling this out with our customers?

There's an enormous need for it, and we have so much data around it that we are very well positioned. So these are further avenues for growth for the future, and we have so many of them that I'm quite excited about the position we're in.

Great. The next question comes from Justin Forsythe from UBS.

Pieter, welcome back to the hot seat. And Hwa, welcome as well. A couple of questions from my end. First, I wanted to hone in a little bit on Orb and the meter billing opportunity. Maybe you can talk about how it helps your go-to-market motion with SaaS platforms and AI companies and how important it is to buy rather than partner billing platforms as you had done in the past. Further, how important is it to have an established brand and go-to-market such as Orb to sell to native AI companies versus billing it from scratch?

And Pieter, if I'm not mistaken, this is something maybe you've considered doing internally, building a billing function. Why did you decide to not at that point in time? And why yes now to owning it?

And then Hwa, a financial question for you, maybe asked in a slightly different way, which is, I think we said around the 1Q that 1Q would be the slowest growth of the year. Is that something that we can reconfirm on an organic ex FX basis? And I guess that comment is mostly directed at the 3Q, but in general. And...

[Technical Difficulty]

I think we might have accidentally muted you, Justin. I'm so sorry, but we can answer these couple of -- the first couple of questions. Do you want to take the one on Orb first, Pieter?

How does Orb help us? You see that SaaS platforms become metered billing. And so that's an opportunity for us to help them there. It helps us with native AI companies, you see that there is so much pressure on them that all the resource goes to developing their products. So to combine billing and payments there is quite a logical step. So this opens up a part of the market for us, which is less logical to buy elements independently from each other. What we have done when we considered how to go about with billing, don't forget that Adyen, of course, has a billing -- we build billing because we build our own merchants. So that was one avenue we looked at.

Are we going to expand our own billing service to something? We were already partnering, and we also looked at acquiring. We also considered, you could also say, let's not build this service. I don't think that, that was the best option. And whereas we usually land on building it ourselves, it just happened that this time, we felt that it was better to use our resource somewhere else, and it was better to deploy our capital here to acquire it, shorter time to market and more focus on our other products. On the other hand, I don't underestimate integrations, but the products fit very, very well together. They're in San Francisco, in our office. So there are a lot of things going forward for it, why we decided to go differently this time.

And Hwa, on the quarter?

So Justin, we don't manage the business on a quarter-to-quarter. We provided a full year guide. And frankly, the business can be a little bit lumpy. What we said, and I'll reiterate is that we do expect the second half to be similar to the first half in terms of growth on an underlying basis, and we will see the impact of Talon.One and Orb as well.

Justin, you can e-mail us that last question that we cut off. Sorry about that. The next question comes from Rayna Kumar from OpCo.

[Audio Gap] Competitive pricing, like has pricing intensified over the last 6 months?

You were cut off at the beginning. I'm not sure what's going on. If you don't mind repeating that, that would be very helpful.

Could you comment on competitive pricing? Has it intensified over the last 6 months?

Pieter, do you want to take that one?

Yes, happy to take that question. I think that we have seen competition all over all the time, sometimes a bit more in one region than the other. But if you look at our data, you don't see it back in our data. Our existing merchants give us more and more volume and therefore, come to lower tiers, and that's the only explanation behind the take rate development. So it's for us, basically, business as usual.

Okay. Great. The next question comes from Fahed Kunwar from Redburn or Rothschild & Co.

My question was actually about -- just following up on the last question on EMEA and the U.S. digital net revenue growth. I mean, if I look at EMEA, the net revenue growth has slowed down. We were doing 26% a year and a bit ago, and now we're doing 15%, I think. How -- and obviously, in the U.S., we've had very, very strong growth. How much of -- just to get a sense of what's happening there, is it the same merchants maybe shifting some volume from Europe to the U.S.? Is digital net revenues in the -- or is the U.S. revenues growing because you're winning share there and perhaps losing some share of wallet in Europe? Is there something else that we don't understand? Also thinking about that EMEA kind of growth trend, where do you think that stabilizes? So any update on that would be great.

So I'll try to take the first question. In terms of the regional mix, I think you did identify something, which is the fact that we work with global merchants. Some of them are based in EMEA and they do shift and they sell into other markets. Similarly, U.S. markets, U.S.-based merchants will sell into other markets. And that's true for, frankly, all of our global merchants because we manage our customers more on a customer basis as opposed to a territory-wide basis. I do think U.S. strength also does reflect the fact that we have been investing in the U.S. specifically. You saw that over the last few years. And so that -- those investments are coming to bear fruit today.

As far as EMEA, we see it -- we don't really look at it from a stabilization perspective because it is a huge growth opportunity for us. We've been performing very well. And as I said, we work with Europe-based merchants and we sell around the world.

Okay. The next question comes from Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo.

Yes, I wanted to go deeper into some of the wallet share gains. I feel like that was a big theme in the shareholder letter. And it's the single biggest building block, obviously, in your medium-term guidance. So I'm wondering if the share gains have been increasingly concentrated in a certain region? Or are they more balanced across geographies? And are there any pockets of the business where you actually think that your share gains are accelerating maybe due to dynamic identification or other drivers? And then just my follow-up is on Adyen Agentic and just what has merchant receptiveness looked like so far, any material amount of revenue yet?

Hwa, do you want to take that first one and he can do the second?

So on the wallet share gains, I think the reality is that we have a very diversified base of customers. We mentioned that the top 300 make up 60% of revenue, and we're seeing wallet share gains across all of them. So I wouldn't point to any specific region because we see strength. Obviously, some are more mature than others. But over time, we do have broad-based growth, and we expect that to continue. And then, Pieter, on the Adyen Agentic.

So on the agentic, you have -- we launched a number of things to help merchants to publish on the LLMs and which is, in a way, similar to payment methods. We've always been very good to connecting the merchants to multiple payment methods and taking complexity out. Now we have the possibility to help merchants with publishing on multiple agentic protocols and take the complexity out. And then after the transaction, bring it back into their environment so that all their existing functionality works.

We went live with a number of merchants, as you saw in the shareholder letter, I'll point out Sézane, a predominantly online French fashion brand that was very early with us doing that. Then there's a lot of talk about machine-to-machine. We're also heavily investing in that. But don't forget that we service large merchants, and they also need a little bit guidance of us from what's there, what's real and what we provide now. So therefore, in the letter, we provide what we do now, but we're also ready for what will be happening a little bit later down the road.

All right. Great. The next question comes from Sandeep from JPMorgan.

My first question is regarding your 2 acquisitions, Talon.One and Orb. Historically, when Adyen releases new products, you have 3 to 5 customers that you trial the product with for quite a long time, after which you roll it out to the entire customer base. Is this the sort of strategy that you're adopting with these acquisitions regarding your existing customer base where you will try to cross-sell those products into? Or is there some different kind of strategy being adopted here? And associated with that, do you have some lead license assigned to the customers who are going to be using that? Secondly, my second question is regarding some of your older new products such as issuing, where we are on issuing at this point and how that is contributing to your revenue at this point?

Pieter, do you want to take the first one on go-to-market for the acquisitions? And then Hwa, maybe you can comment on financial products.

So when we announced the acquisition, there is -- there were more questions coming out of the woodworks than we anticipated. Why? That is because merchants are actively thinking about what is my strategy in -- when I'll be faced with more agentic. And it's top of mind for them, how do I make sure that I have the whole infrastructure in place to get as much traffic as I can directly. So how do I pull my merchant in? We've been speaking about merchants doing both online and in-store. They've been using their resource somewhere else than connecting that.

And the insights, it's all about the data, having all the data together of loyalty of payments, of billing. And on that, you can develop such strong products that, that's what excites our merchants. I've been speaking to merchants which wanted to get it and didn't have it. But also the last 2 merchants that I spoke to happened to be merchants, which were already using both Talon.One and Adyen. So we don't need to be tiptoeing around. This is a proven combination that works. But what we are doing is we're deepening the integration to make it more powerful. It's a growth acquisition. It's not an acquisition for cost cutting in those companies.

And Hwa, on the issuing and financial products contribution?

Yes. What I can say about issuing is we continue to see strong traction there. We're not going to break out specifics. But financial products, as we stated, we continue to expect it to add about 1 point of growth this year, and it remains really important for all of our customer segments.

The next question comes from Bryan Bergin at TD Cowen.

My first question is on customer penetration. So I appreciate the disclosure on the customer share of wallet as far as merchants often increasing from less than 20% in years 3 to 7 to more than 40% after 12 years. Can you frame where the kind of current customer base sits along that maturity curve as far as the rough mix of processing volume that comes from customers that have already reached the 40% plus share versus those that are in the earlier phases of penetration?

And then my follow-up question is on AI investment and usage. So understanding the increased CapEx for data infra here is being pulled forward. But from an OpEx standpoint, can you comment on how AI is impacting your cost structure and just speak to how AI usage may be contributing to your 55% plus EBITDA margin target by 2028?

Why don't we start on that second question, if you don't mind. Pieter, do you want to take that one?

Yes. The operational cost, the OpEx one, it is because we were -- we saw opportunity to lock in cost and supply. But it's not related to that our data users is suddenly different or our storage is suddenly different than it used to be in the past. It's the same typical compute and storage that we have, which grows with the business. But as it grows with the business, remember, we are on private cloud. So we have our own data centers, at least we are in colocations, but we are very happy with that choice. It's extremely efficient, more efficient than what our competitors run on. And we see that it resonates with merchants. There are merchants who prefer to be on a company which is independent.

Yes. Just a little more color on OpEx specifically. It is baked in. We are investing in AI tools. I think that might be another angle to the question. And so that is baked into our overall guidance that we've already put forward.

I think on the customer penetration point, I guess I'll start and then, Pieter, you can jump in. We have a really diversified base of customers. We have many merchants who have been with us for a long time, and we continue to add new cohorts along the way. So we are seeing concentration decline overall, and we do see significant room for expansion across the customer base with existing customers and new customers.

Perfect. The next question comes from Fred Boulan at Bank of America.

So two, please, two follow-ups. One is on the prior question on opportunities ahead. Where do you see the most exciting opportunities? And how do you define areas where you can remove complexity for your merchants as you discussed earlier? And then second, if you can come back on your capital allocation framework. As you stated, you have over EUR 4 billion in net cash available post M&A, but only a fraction is really available. On a multiyear view, absent significant M&A, could we see cash returns featuring in the mix? Or it's a bit too early to think about that?

Pieter, why don't you take both of those?

So what I'm excited about is we have large merchants, and we have a sophisticated account management team, which has deep relationship with those merchants. To get a credit card number to Visa, that is not the most challenging thing you could do in the payments industry. It's everything around it. So what I'm really excited about is that we have the relationships with those merchants, which we develop over time that we -- that they share with us what is needed and that we can use that as a basis to further develop our strategy. That's also what you see what we have done this year with our acquisitions. So that is what gives me the assurance that we're in a really good position.

Capital allocation, let me give you the philosophical answer because I think that's what you are asking. Currently, because it's a fraction of the number which has been flying around, it's just not so material, and I think the company should focus on growth and only growth. But in theory, if this company would be a company that accumulates a lot of cash, then of course, we should not be dogmatic about anything and that it could be on the agenda. But now consistent growth as we have delivered like the last 3 half year reports, always 21%, that's the sort of boring numbers which we should bring forward.

Great. The next question comes from Andrew Bauch from BMO.

I just want to take a step back and ask about the competitive landscape and what kind of differentiates today relative to recent history. Now historically, authorization rates and ease of integration were like the common talking points. But when you speak to merchants and prospective clients today, what are the primary aspects of the offering that would compel a decision to use Adyen or somebody else? And with that lens, should we expect more regular tuck-ins like we've seen so far this year to address any potential competitive gaps?

Do you want to take both of those, Pieter?

Yes. I wish for the first one, there was the golden bullet. It's different per merchant. For platforms, it can be mass onboarding and doing mass compliance, having -- being able to onboard millions of sellers or it can be the fact that we do both online and have terminals. It can be our geographical spread. It can be moving away from legacy to single providers, so just making things simpler. So it's really the breadth of our service that makes us win.

Of course, auth rates is something which I think we -- was really the card that we played in around 2011, and it will always be important. But we moved a little bit beyond that in the industry. And now other things are top of mind. Currently, what's top of mind is for merchants is how are you going to help us through the agentic threat for them.

And in terms of M&A, should they expect more acquisitions going forward? And is M&A how we beat the competition?

No, because we are -- we have constantly developed new products. So if you just hear me talking about the trends, most of those products, think financial service, Intelligent Money Movement, all those things we developed in-house. It's just that we always have for the core, we are always looking at building it ourselves. And for adjacent, we always have looked internally and externally, what is strategic to build yourself and what can you acquire. And it just happened that it never happened and that we always landed on internal. And now coincidentally, it happened twice in H1. But there is -- in the future, we still have an open mind to doing it, and it could be that we land internal and it could be differently. But we don't have a plan there to be an acquisition machine from now on.

Okay. Great. The next question comes from Ramsey El-Assal from Cantor Fitzgerald.

Some of your competitors very broadly defined, have built out branded consumer checkout wallets, I guess, for a smoother checkout experience. I'm thinking of like a Stripe Link or a Shop Pay. I know your long-term orientation has been to focus more relentlessly on the merchant stack, but could a consumer dimension to your strategy kind of emerge at some point?

Yes, that's a great question. Currently, we are focusing purely on the merchant and are not doing that, and it's appreciated by our merchants because if you look at which part of the market we operate, it's typically the large merchants, which consider their shoppers, their domain. And for example, in the past, if you look at why we won eBay, it's because eBay wanted to work with a partner that is only on the merchant side, and that is not signing up each consumer or seller also themselves. So you have different choices in this market, and that is great. This choice works well for us.

Great. The next question comes from Gus Gala from MCH.

Following up on the wallet share ramp curve, I was curious, could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing those ramps look like across the pillars, maybe deltas across those. And then as we think about Talon.One and Orb, how should we think about potentially that changing the wallet share ramps as you fold in those acquisitions?

Lastly, just tying it all together, I mean the revenue model is shifting more and more towards the pre and post auth over time, it will become a greater portion of the value we offer, right? As we think of, for instance, the pre-authorization transaction, is this going to be more comprised of a platform subscription fee, rev share on incremental conversion? Just help us think about that.

Great. Hwa, you want to take that first one? Pieter, the second one?

Yes. So share of wallet ramp tends to be similar actually across pillars, but platforms are typically -- they do take a little bit longer to ramp just given their own go-to-market motions and the fact that, as Pieter mentioned, sometimes they have many, many sub-merchants as we go forward.

Great. Pieter?

On the second one, we look at adding value for merchants, and we price for that. And we are -- so that means that -- look, we have large deals, and those deals have sophisticated pricing. And it doesn't -- that can be priced over different elements. And that's what we do.

All right. Next question comes from Craig Maurer from FT Partners.

I wanted to return to the OpenAI discussion for a moment. I just think it's important to understand whether you won their usage-based billing versus just their plain vanilla credit card payments. So whether you won their enterprise business or more their general subscription business. So we understand if this is still an opportunity to go after with Orb. And secondly, platforms -- platform take rate was somewhat weaker than we have been expecting. So any context there would be helpful.

Pieter, do you want to take that first one and Hwa, the second one?

On OpenAI, it's their payments. So it's the payments which their clients pay to them. and no forward-looking statements on that.

Yes. And on the platform take rates, I think that the way to think about it is platforms tend to be larger customers. And as we mentioned, our customers work on -- that we gain share of wallet with them, we grow with them, and we incentivize them to bring even more volume to our platform through volume -- through the tiered pricing model. So that's -- it's a natural result of platform scaling with us.

Great. We have time for one last question, and it's going to be with Nooshin from Deutsche Bank.

I just have also a follow-up on OpenAI. And I appreciate you can't discuss customer specifics. But when you are thinking about the bigger opportunities ahead and how you can expand your partnership and thinking about Orb, I'm just wondering, do you believe the platform is already capable of supporting businesses operating at OpenAI as a scale? Or is there still meaningful investment required before it can address the most demanding enterprise use cases? So I'm specifically asking about Orb and if it needs more investment in there. And when it comes to Adyen Agentic, is this also a part of OpenAI relationship or what you're thinking about in the future?

So what I think is that if the largest companies are very sophisticated in who they partner with and that they partner for payments with us. It's a trend that we have seen over the years and which is continuing. And that's how I also look at that relationship. The reason to work with Orb is that we can onboard AI native companies. So that is separate from that. What you see is that the AI native companies grow very fast and the billing sits in their infrastructure? So where we take that, you'll see that in the future. Did I answer all questions?

Just a little bit on agentic. Are we working with OpenAI on agentic?

On agentic. Yes. No, you have to look at agentic as in -- as comparable to payment methods that we can route the transaction to the different payment methods as needed. This is with agentic companies. If you have something on stock, you want to be able to publish it on agentic, and then you want to be able to publish it on multiple agentic protocols. And you can -- you could theoretically, as a merchant, connect to all those different protocols because remember, there's no standardization.

So you could implement all those different protocols or you could work with one supplier, Adyen. And in order to get the transaction back to you, you would have to implement all of that or you could again work with Adyen. And that's what we do with agentic. What is important for us and philosophically, we want merchant choice. And we want to be agnostic, and that's what we do now, and that's also what you see back when we talk about later, we'll talk about machine-to-machine. You'll see the same elements always coming back because that's philosophically close to us.

Great. With that, we are out of time. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Have a great day.

Good morning, everyone. I would like to welcome you all to this General Meeting of Shareholders of Adyen N.V. We're pleased to host the general meeting for you together with the Management Board and the Supervisory Board. And I would like to briefly introduce the Management Board and the Supervisory Board to you.

Management Board currently consists of 7 members: Pieter van der Does, Co-CEO and Co-Founder; Ingo Uytdehaage, Co-CEO; Roelant Prins, the CCO, Chief Commercial Officer; Mariette Swart, CRCO, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer; Brooke Nayden, CHRO HR Officer; Ethan Tandowsky, the CFO; and Tom Adams, the CTO, Chief Technology Officer. Pieter, Ingo, Ethan, Roelant and Mariette are pleased to join me here today.

The Supervisory Board currently consists of 5 members. My name is Piero Overmars. I'm the Chair of the Supervisory Board and of this General Meeting of Shareholders and responsible for the order of today's meeting. Adine Grate, Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee; Caoimhe Keogan, the Chair of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee; and Pamela Joseph and Steve van Wyk. Adine and Caoimhe are pleased to join me here today. In addition, I would like to extend a special welcome to Herna Verhagen. Herna's appointment as member of the Supervisory Board is on the agenda of today's meeting. I would also like to introduce Susan Derksen, Adyen's Company Secretary, who will act as the Secretary of the Meeting. Present at this meeting are also Adyen's current external auditor, PwC, and Adyen's proposed new auditor, EY.

One sec, please. Before we start with this Annual General Meeting, I would like to take a moment to touch upon the press release we published yesterday after close of trading, which you may have seen. In this press release, Adyen announced that Ethan Tandowsky, Adyen's Chief Financial Officer, has decided to step down from his role effective over 31, 2026. He will leave Adyen to pursue an external opportunity outside of fintech.

And I would like to give Ethan the floor for a brief statement. Please, Ethan.

Thank you, Piero. My time at Adyen has been incredibly rewarding. I'm proud of our shared achievements, the financial foundation we have built, and I'm absolutely confident in Adyen's future. As I make a personal decision to step outside of fintech to pursue a completely new path, my priority is ensuring a smooth transition and continued momentum over the coming months.

Okay. Thank you for that, Ethan. So the Adyen Supervisory Board will initiate a comprehensive search process to identify a successor. Adyen will provide updates on the search process in due time.

And now I would like to proceed with the agenda of this Annual General Meeting. Before we do so, I have a number of announcements and requests to make. I would kindly like to ask you to set your mobile phone, laptops, tablets and other media carriers to silent mode. The meeting will be held in English given the international nature of our company with English spoken as our corporate language. This meeting will be audio recorded for the purpose of preparing the report of the meeting, and the records and the report shall be published on the company's website after the meeting.

There was a possibility to submit questions prior to this general meeting. These questions, if relevant to the agenda, will be answered during this meeting at a specific agenda item. There will be various moments when you will be given the opportunity to ask questions relevant to the agenda points of this meeting, and I will ensure that the attendees will have the opportunity to ask these questions.

To allow all shareholders to raise their questions, please ask no more than three questions at a time. You will be allowed to ask additional questions once all other attendees have also been able to do so. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand, and we will come to you with a microphone and make sure you can speak and please introduce yourself again or when asking the question. This brings the opening of the meeting to a close, and we will now proceed to agenda item #2.

We now come to agenda item 2a, where the Management Board, Supervisory Board and external auditor will present their report for the past year. After the presentation of the Management Board, I will elaborate on the report of the Supervisory Board. Thereafter, our external auditor, [ Martijn Jansen ] from PwC will give an account of the 2025 audit in which PwC performed the audit of the company. After these reports have been presented, you will have the opportunity to submit your questions related to the presentations.

I will start by giving the floor to Pieter van der Does, Adyen's Founder and Co-CEO; and to Ethan Tandowsky, Adyen's CFO, for the report of the Management Board 2025. Pieter?

Thank you, Piero. Looking back on 2025, we are proud of the progress we made as we continued executing against our long-term vision. Our focus remained consistent throughout the year, building a financial technology platform that enables our customers to operate with greater efficiency, resilience and control as they scale globally.

As macroeconomic and geopolitical developments reshape parts of the global operating environment, many of our customers reassessed where and how they grow. Changes such as evolving U.S. tariff policies accelerated the need to enter new markets and diversify operations. Through our single platform and license infrastructure, we help customers adapt quickly, enabling them to access local payment rails, maintain consistent performance and scale into alternative regions without rebuilding their setup.

As AI continued to be a central topic across financial services, our customers were also engaged in understanding how it could improve their business. Our approach remains customer-focused. We apply AI where it delivers meaningful outcomes. By embedding intelligence directly into our infrastructure, we continue to strengthen how payment, risk and financial flows operate end-to-end. The scale of our data combined with our single stack and AI capabilities is enabling a new level of platform performance. A strong example of this is the evolution of dynamic identification as a foundational layer across our platform. Built on our single stack and banking infrastructure, it draws on trillions of interactions across commerce to make real-time decisions that balance security, conversion and customer experience with a greater precision.

This same foundation is reflected in Adyen Uplift, our AI optimization product suite. Following a successful pilot in 2024, 2025 marked the first year that Uplift operated at scale across broad customer base, delivering measurable value while continuing to improve as more transactions flow through the platform.

We also continued preparing for emerging models such as Agentic Commerce. While still in its early stages, we are helping shape the future of Agentic Commerce by collaborating with industry peers, AI companies, payment schemes, foundations and regulatory to promote open, interoperable and merchant-first standards.

As our platform grew, we kept investing in the people and infrastructure needed for long-term growth. In 2025, we focused on high-growth markets like the U.S. and regions such as APAC and LATAM, expanding our tech hubs and local teams to help business manage growing digital and regulatory demands.

In India, we continue to strengthen our local market position by integrating UPI to enable seamless real-time payments and going live on our own acquiring rails with Visa, Mastercard, Amex and RuPay. This makes us one of the first global fintechs directly connected to India's national card network. We also launched our cross-border license with a leading global software company while growing our Bengaluru hub from 15 to more than 60 employees across key functions.

In Japan, we made a strategic pivot towards the domestic payments market and successfully launched PayPay, further strengthening our local offering and regional presence. In the U.S., we expanded into a larger Chicago office to support continued growth and collaboration across teams in LATAM. We built momentum of Pix by launching Pix Recurring and Pix Open Finance capabilities, further strengthening our local payment offering in the region. Across every part of our business, our focus remains unchanged, building the needs to -- of our customers and helping them achieve their ambitions faster. We are excited about the path ahead and the strength of our position as we continue building towards becoming one of the world's leading fintech platforms.

With that, I'll hand it over to Ethan to discuss our 2025 results.

Thanks, Pieter. I will now elaborate on the financials of the year 2025. Net revenue was EUR 2.36 billion for the year, up 21% on a constant currency basis. Growth continued to be driven by expansion with existing customers, increasing unified commerce adoption and further diversification across regions and customer segments. Full year EBITDA was EUR 1.25 billion for 2025, up 26% year-on-year. EBITDA margin increased to 53% compared to 50% in 2024, supported by strong revenue growth, operational discipline and continued leverage from our single platform model. CapEx remained disciplined at 5% of net revenue for the full year. As in prior years, the majority of investments related to data center capacity, platform resilience and infrastructure expansion to support long-term growth.

Our capital allocation policy is centered on generating shareholder value in the form of growth. To achieve this, our policy is focused on the following priorities. First, we intend to maintain a strong balance sheet, which includes a strong liquidity position that supports our licensing structure and our relationship with our regulators. Second, we value our industry-leading A- credit rating with S&P as it is critical for the expansion of our embedded financial products suite. Lastly, we retain financial flexibility to act on organic or inorganic opportunities that may arise.

Next, we'd like to provide an update on our global team. So Pieter, back to you.

Thank you, Ethan. In 2025, we continued investing in people and expertise needed to support our long-term growth. Our teams expanded across key markets and continued focus on engineering, commercial and operational roles. As our business scales globally, we remain focused on preserving what makes Adyen unique: our culture, our one team mindset and our long-term approach to innovation. We believe our culture of trust, ownership and speed continues to be a key driver of impact for both our customers and our business. Looking ahead, we are excited about the opportunities in front of us and confident in the strength of our growing global team.

Now I'll hand it back to Ethan to speak about our ESG efforts.

Thanks, Pieter. In 2025, we continued strengthening our sustainability reporting in line with evolving regulatory requirements, including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, or CSRD and further refined our understanding of the topics most relevant to Adyen and our stakeholders. Our focus remains on building products and capabilities that help our merchants grow.

We develop solutions based on what merchants want and need, including enabling donation functionality through Adyen Giving. Adyen is cause agnostic. We provide the infrastructure that allows merchants and consumers to support the causes that they choose. In 2025, donations processed through Adyen Giving surpassed EUR 35 million, further amplified through our donation matching initiatives during the year.

As part of our long-term approach, we remain committed to building our business responsibly and sustainably. The choices we have made over the years continue to support steady growth, including 21% net revenue growth in 2025. We believe long-term success depends on empowering our teams to make decisions and investments that create lasting value for our merchants, our customers, shareholders and broader stakeholders in the years ahead.

Thank you for your time, and I'll now hand the floor back to the Chair.

Okay. Thanks, Ethan and Pieter, for your presentation. As a Supervisory Board Chair, I would like to give a brief explanation of our report. We have a clear duty from the point of view of regulations and Articles of Association in which supervision of the Management Board is paramount. For that purpose, we have set up the Audit and Risk Committee and the Nomination and Remuneration Committee.

The Audit and Risk Committee discusses the financial results of the company, financial and nonfinancial reporting procedures, risk and control systems, regulations and compliance. It also keeps in close contact with the external auditor and internal audit function. The external auditor focuses, among other things, on the inspection and audit of the annual accounts. The internal audit focuses on identifying possible areas for improvement in the organization from a reporting and control perspective.

The Nomination and Remuneration Committee looks at topics such as culture, remuneration policy, diversity, equity and inclusion, recruiting initiatives, talent management and leadership and succession of members of the Management Board and Supervisory Board.

I would like to inform you about the activities of our Supervisory Board in 2025. This has been presented in the Supervisory Board report of our annual report over 2025. I will not discuss it in its entirety, of course, but I would like to explain a number of the elements here. As a Supervisory Board, we are tasked with supervising the conduct and policies of the Management Board, guided by the interest of Adyen and its operations, taking into consideration the interest of Adyen's stakeholders and its focus on sustainable long-term value creation as is implemented in Adyen's strategy and culture.

The profile of the Supervisory Board is such that it is capable of assessing the broad outline of the overall policy of Adyen and of the most important risks incurred. The composition of the Supervisory Board is such that the members are able to act critically and independently of one another, the Management Board and of any other interest. It further allows the carrying out of all the Supervisory Board tasks, including staffing of committees.

In 2025, the Supervisory Board convened for 7 regular meetings, Audit and Risk Committee for 4 meetings and the Nomination and Remuneration Committee also 4 meetings. During the meetings, the Supervisory Board engaged in discussions about, among others, risk management, business performance, strategic updates and the development of the financials. The Supervisory Board also discussed topics related to strategic growth, regulatory affairs, ESG and material sustainability topics.

As a Supervisory Board, we have also spent time on Adyen's culture, hiring initiatives, diversity, investor relations and communications, product development, cyber risk, compliance, control frameworks, the preparation of the Investor Day held on 11th of November 2025 and the preparation of the annual meeting of today. So you can understand we have not been born in the last period of time.

Several deep dives and educational sessions on topics relevant to Adyen's business were held, including on digital resilience, cybersecurity, AI, data privacy, AML compliance and the supervisory continually discusses Adyen's sustainability strategy, the long-term strategy of the firm, compliance frameworks, enterprise risk, internal control frameworks, embedded financial products, sustainability reporting, internal and external reports, commercial pillars, focus areas and associated risks and review proposed annual and other financial reporting.

In our annual strategy sessions with the Management Board, we discussed Adyen's strategic direction, key growth drivers, focus areas, sustainability matters and related targets, tech challenges, the competitive landscape and the financial forecast. At the end of 2025, the Supervisory Board conducted an assessment to reflect on progress against '24's key themes, its 2025 focus areas and strategic actions for '26. These were some elements of our Board's activities in 2025. This brings us to the conclusion of the Supervisory Board report.

The next topic is PwC's explanation of the audit and the statement issues for the financial year 2025. Martijn?

Dear shareholders, my name is [ Martijn Jansen ] and I will contribute to this AGM in my capacity as external auditor of Adyen. I will speak about and I'm available to answer questions regarding the audit of the 2025 financial statements and our independent audit opinion rendered thereon and on our review opinion regarding the company's sustainability statements. For the scope, materiality and the activities we have undertaken, I kindly refer you to our reports. On March 5 this year, we issued an unqualified audit opinion regarding the financial statements. Additionally, we provided a positive review opinion on the sustainability statement or Adyen's CSRD report.

In our auditor's report on the financial statements, we've included a commentary on the approach, scope and our key audit matters. The two key audit matters in our opinion are the design and effectiveness of IT general controls and risk of overstatement of noninterest revenue. These key audit matters and our audit approach remain largely unchanged from last year. I invite you to read our report where we elaborate on our approach and the background and the work done on these key audit matters. Additionally, we have detailed our work regarding fraud risks and continuity.

Today, I would like to focus on a few aspects of the audit that were characteristics of the 2025 audit. Let me begin with the first key audit matter, the design and effectiveness of IT general controls. Adyen's IT systems, including the payment service platform remain of critical importance to the group's activities and the financial reporting, especially in the rapidly changing environment Adyen is operating in. Our audit approach included understanding, evaluating and testing the IT general controls of IT systems that are relevant to financial reporting. The focus areas included computer operations, access to programs and data, cybersecurity, backup and disaster recovery testing and incident management. We concluded that we could rely on these IT general controls of the group for the purposes of our audit.

The second key audit matter relates to the risk of overstatement of noninterest revenue. Noninterest revenue generated by the group includes processing fees, settlement fees, sales of goods and fees for other services related to process payments. These revenues are considered a key financial indicator of measuring management performance. We have tested relevant design and effectiveness of controls in areas such as standing data, maintenance and a 3-way match prior to settlement to or collection from merchant. In addition, we have performed some standard procedures, including subsequent receipt testing for receivables, obtaining banking confirmations and performing data analytical procedures on revenue transactions. We did not identify any material exceptions, and we found management revenue recognition in the financial statements to be supported by the available evidence.

For the sustainability statement, also known as the CSRD report, we have issued a review opinion. We've assessed how the company has determined and reassessed the material themes to be addressed in the report, the DMA and whether the report complies with the European sustainability reporting standards. Determining material themes is judgmental. Therefore, we paid specific attention to the process of identifying these themes, changes made to the 2024 report. And with the support of our experts, we've performed specific procedures to obtain sufficient information supporting our review opinion. Procedures we perform vary in nature, such as performing inquiries, analytical procedures, inspection of policy documents and detailed work.

I would like to leave it at that for now. Thank you for your attention, and I hand the floor back to the Chair.

Okay. Thank you, [ Martijn ] for this explanation. And we will now go to the questions related to the presentations. And we will start with the questions we've received ahead of the meeting and open the floor for further questions after that. I would also like to remind you that you can vote on all the agenda items during the meeting through -- for all the items throughout the meeting. And if you have any issues with the voting, please let our logistics staff help you.

I would like to start with giving the floor to VBDO for the questions shared ahead of the meeting. Mr. Naus, the floor is yours. I'm sorry about that.

Okay. Sure. Yes. So indeed, I have shared the questions already upfront to the meeting. My name is Luca Naus, and I'm here on behalf of the VBDO, so the Association of Investors for Sustainable Investment. I've shared three questions related to ESG. One question related to climate change. Can you maybe hold a bit low? Yes. Thanks. So yes, we have seen that Adyen has targets in place for the GHG emissions, which are aligned with the SBTi, so science-based targets. And that target reads that 80% of Adyen suppliers should have set those science-based targets by 2028, which we appreciate, but we also want to ask whether Adyen is willing to set the same target for the Scope 2, so for their own operations?

We have also shared a question about living wage. So we have seen that the concept of living wage and that concept has been aligned with the ILO definition has been implemented in the supplier code of conduct, which we also very much appreciate. But we want to ask if Adyen could elaborate a bit more on how you're planning to assess whether suppliers indeed adhere to that, yes, question of paying living wages and what kind of disclosures investors can expect on that in the next annual report?

And then the last question related to the CSRD. For the sake of transparency, the VBDO is kind of a recommendation, and we are wondering whether Adyen is willing to take it up. So to expand the stakeholder engagement overview a bit more and include more details on which stakeholders have been consulted about which topics, which insights have been derived from those engagements and how they have informed the sustainability strategy.

Thank you for your questions. Ms. Naus, I apologize for addressing you in the wrong way. So there's three questions. First on climate change, Ethan, if you can take that one. And Mariette, after that, you can take the question on living wage. And then Ethan, back to you on CSRD. Yes. So Ethan, the floor is yours.

Sure. Thanks for the questions. On the first question about SBTi, we're not formally seeking validation at this stage. Of course, our immediate focus is on moving towards the targets that we've set. So doing the work, which improves our performance and moves us in the direction of the targets that we've set. We will continue to assess especially how SBTi develops, how our own business develops, and we'll remain open to it, but we're not seeking formal validation at the moment.

Then the second question on living wage. Thanks for that question. Our supplier code of conduct sets the standard at which we want our suppliers and vendors to operate. We need -- we change the requirement of minimum wage to living wage. We got all of our vendors to sign that. So that's a good thing. We are now working together with the diligence platform to get all of the information in to see whether our vendors and suppliers actually adhere to that standard and apply with that standard. Based on the information, we can make an assessment whether an additional on-site audit is required. And on that, we can also determine whether additional disclosures for next year are necessary. We don't expect so, though. We expect the risk to be low because we are a technology firm but to be confirmed next year.

And I'll take the third question on stakeholder engagement. So we're -- we currently are not considering doing that. It's neither a regulatory requirement or something that we see with our peers. But of course, we'll continue to assess what is most relevant to our stakeholders. And if further disclosure is helpful over time, we'll, of course, consider what's best.

Okay. Thank you, Mariette and Ethan. I would now like to give the floor to [indiscernible] for their questions that you shared ahead of the meeting. Mr. Sobral the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. Good morning. My name is Manuel Sobral. I work for Robeco and I also speak on behalf of [indiscernible] Investment Management. Thank you for your presentation and the open discussions that we continue to have throughout the year. Thank you also to Mr. Piero Overmars for your service on the Supervisory Board since 2017, Mr. Ethan Tandowsky, who has been with the company since 2016, and best of luck to Ms. Herna Verhagen, who has been nominated as a new member of the Supervisory Board.

We have two questions on this agenda item. Firstly, we want to compliment Adyen for the advancements made in investor communications over the last year by accommodating some of the investor demands that have been shared on the topic. However, despite your progress, we continue to see room for improvement in how guidance is communicated and updated, and this appears to still be reflected in the stock price fluctuations of approximately 10% around earnings releases. We acknowledge that Adyen does not fully control market reactions. However, as an example, creating some cushion around guidance might help limit their severity. We think that for a quality company like Adyen, market reactions seem much more severe than with comparable companies. And we would like to ask you to comment on what steps, if any, management is planning to take to address this further.

My second question, we would like to congratulate Adyen on its acquisition of Talon.One. This is an exciting development. But given Adyen's strong focus on operating a single unified platform and the fact that this is your first acquisition, the time lines involved and the execution risks are particularly important. Could you share your expectations for the integration of the two companies and how you are preparing to manage potential risks that may arise from this process?

Okay. Thank you for your questions, Mr. Sobral. First, on guidance, Ethan, can you comment on that? And the second question on the integration risks and process, Ingo, you can take that one, right? Okay. Ethan, go ahead.

Yes, sure. First, on guidance. So first, we very much value transparent and open communication with our shareholders and feedback is always appreciated. So thanks for your question. As a business, we are running Adyen for the long term, and we strongly believe in the long-term path that Adyen is on. At the same time, we also understand that it's helpful to get a sense for where Adyen is going in the shorter term, which is why we've laid out our longer-term vision for the company back in November, but also are now in a setup where we share guidance on an annual basis. We hope that will be helpful also to investors going forward in understanding both the long-term path we're on, the decisions we make over that long-term horizon, but also in getting a sense for what any given year looks like. And we hope that this change in our guidance setup will be helpful to shareholders.

Yes. And on the Talon.One acquisition, of course, it's indeed our first acquisition that we've made as a company. We're very excited about it. I think it's a capability that we were looking for to succeed with unified commerce. We have defined a very clear integration plan in the company with several tracks to make sure that it becomes a successful integration. The best people, both on our end and on Talon.One end, are working on this. But we will do it phased. So one of the things that we want to make sure is that we keep the core operation separate in the first year to make sure that they can keep the speed as they have, working with their customers. And at the same time, that we make sure that we start to build what is basically demanded from our customers. So we will work jointly on go-to-market strategies and then start to integrate also the technical parts on API level to make sure that we have a successful offering.

By doing this phased approach, we also believe that we, from a risk management perspective, take a good approach, and we will track it closely. I'm personally involved in the integration, look after the successful approach to this. And yes, we're very excited that we are entering this new phase of the company.

Okay. Thank you, Ingo and Ethan. We have also received an extensive set of very detailed questions from Mr. Martensen who holds one single share in Adyen, which he purchased last year prior to the AGM. I would like to provide the meeting with some relevant context. As we noted last year at the AGM, Mr. Martensen is involved in a private dispute with a former Adyen employee. Adyen is not a party to this dispute. Last year, I shared that our internal and external counsel reviewed his claims and found no merit in any of them. Since then, our conclusion has been confirmed by external outcomes. Amsterdam District Court denied a motion initiated by Mr. Martensen to order preliminary witness examination of Adyen's officials on December 11, 2025, explicitly characterizing the endeavors of Mr. Martensen as a fishing expedition. Furthermore, regulators have been approached by Mr. Martensen and found no reason for follow-up on any of the allegations he made.

We are mindful of Adyen's responsibilities towards all stakeholders and will, at all times, act in the best interest of the company. Ahead of this meeting, Mr. Martensen shared a 45-page document with detailed questions for this meeting around various themes. To ensure we can cover all necessary ground today, and we have many decisions to put forward for your vote, we kindly ask that questions remain focused on the items up for discussion. We will not be addressing other matters or details that fall outside of the scope. Of course, Adyen cannot and will not disclose information of a commercially sensitive nature, information which is legally or tax confidential or if a compelling interest of the company otherwise opposes the provision of such information.

Given Mr. Martensen's long-standing approach towards Adyen reflected in the mentioned proceedings in the Netherlands, but also abroad, we consider it appropriate to exercise a degree of restraint in our responses. This also suits a proper course of this AGM.

I will now start with the questions of Mr. Martensen that we will provide a response to. In the interest of time, I have summarized these questions. The first question is for you, Ethan. Mr. Martensen asks about our perspective on the long-term decline of the take rate. How do you look at that?

Sure. So Adyen primarily reports our performance based on net revenue. Our pricing strategy is such that larger customers receive lower pricing through our pricing tiers and has employed that strategy over the years as Adyen has grown, leading to that effect.

Then the second question is for Adine, Chair of our Audit and Risk Committee. The Supervisory Board and Audit and Risk Committee have the responsibility of oversight of the integrity of financial reporting. Is the granularity of revenue reporting adequate in your view?

Going to put it on. Of course, we take this very seriously. And the Audit and Risk Committee has to form the oversight in accordance with the Dutch Governance Code and the Dutch Civil Code. And those duties include supervision of the integrity and adequacy of financial reporting and the effectiveness of the company's internal risk management and control systems. Based on this review, no issues requiring disclosures were identified.

Okay. Then the third question, Mr. Martensen asks what other revenues or there's not a big piece of other revenues, Ethan, why don't we disclose more what's in there?

Sure. So we provide our revenue disclosures that reflect the key business drivers for Adyen. Further disaggregation of the other services revenue is not deemed necessary to understand Adyen's performance and would not enhance the clarity or conciseness of Adyen's reporting, which appropriately focuses on the most material revenue streams in line with the purpose of the annual report.

Okay. Then next question is also for you, Ethan. Mr. Martensen asked about the geographical profit concentration. So what transfer pricing methodology do we use geographically?

Yes. So Adyen applies recognized transfer pricing methodologies in line with international standards with activities performed by entities or permanent establishments outside the Netherlands and the United States remunerated under the transactional net margin method. It's also referred to as the comparable profits method in accordance with the arm's length principle.

Okay. And on that same issue, Ethan Mr. Martensen asked about agreements with tax authorities on this issue.

Sure. Adyen maintains an ongoing dialogue with our relevant tax authorities, including through formal arrangements where appropriate. That's in line with our compliance obligations. In doing so, it observes applicable confidentiality requirements and does not disclose tax confidential information.

Okay. Next question is for [ Martijn ], our external auditor, PwC. Have you considered the issue of transfer pricing in the context of audit risk? And I know you like technical questions. Can you come here, please? So because the question is specifically directed about ISA 240, 315 and 701.

Thank you, Chair. I can confirm that transfer pricing is a complex and important topic. It was part of our audit planning procedures. We performed work in this area. We were supported by a technical specialists, and there were no indications that there was anything wrong with that. So the conclusion was that we concur.

Thank you. And then next one for Ethan as well. How much of the company profit is taxable under the innovation box?

Sure. As I'm sure you can understand, Adyen observes applicable confidentiality requirements and does not disclose tax confidential information.

And I will have a question for you again in a moment, [ Martijn ]. But first, so our segment reporting, Ethan, is that consistent with IFRS 8?

Yes. So we take a single segment presentation, and that reflects how the business is managed. It's a single fully integrated global platform, and that's consistent with IFRS 8.

Okay. Good. And then the final question for [ Martijn ]. What is your view on this segment reporting?

I think the segment reporting reflects the way the company is organized and is in line with the accounting standards. So I can confirm also there that we concur with the reporting on that.

Thank you very much. Then I now open the floor for other questions related to the annual report of 2025. Who may I give the floor? Mr. Martensen, I've already taken many of your questions. I will first allow other shareholders and then I will give you the floor. So there was a hand on the right-hand side of the room.

My name is [indiscernible]. I'm here on behalf of European Investors VEB. First of all, let me say some appreciation about our pre-AGM engagement. Very much appreciate that. I have a couple of questions, but I want to start with the press release from this morning. First, yes, it came as a surprise. It was unexpected. So first of all, can you tell why this was a surprise for you guys also?

Second question, if you look at the share price reaction and if I look at the sell-side reports that came out pretty quickly after the news, there was some confusion about whether this implied anything about Adyen's future, its guidance, et cetera. So I was wondering if whether you might have communicated differently on that part.

And then lastly, tied to this, I was looking at the remuneration report. And of course, I think many people will note that you're pretty conservative. I think that's very Dutch and very -- something that we would appreciate. At the other side of that, of course, is also the question whether the departure of Ethan has anything to do related to remuneration. And in line with that, if we look ahead in the search process for a new CFO, whether you think that will be an issue in the search process that you're pretty conservative in your remuneration?

Okay. Thank you for your questions. First, on the surprise, yes, we were surprised because as far as we're concerned, and I can also speak on my own behalf, there was no reason for Ethan to leave. There we have our fiduciary duties and the term expires at the end of a 4-year cycle and then to have this happen the day before the AGM is unfortunately, and it was a surprise. You can -- or maybe, Ethan, the question is, was there any other reason other than what was in the press release for you to leave the firm. So I think it's a good moment for you to just be very clear about that.

No, there's no other reason. It was a personal decision. I found my time at Adyen so rewarding. I'm completely convinced of the long-term path that Adyen is on and the strategy. So there was no other reason to speak of.

Okay. And then second element of your question was about the -- was there -- did we -- could have we communicated this better? I'm sure things can always be improved. But it's very clear that there's nothing in the firm that should be emphasized today. So maybe, Ingo, you can say something about the guidance.

Yes. So we have a guidance given for the year of 2026. We can reiterate that guidance. So there is no change in guidance as a result of this leave of Ethan. So this is a reiteration of all our financial objectives, so on net revenue, EBITDA and CapEx.

Okay. And your third question is about remuneration. Is it okay -- or I suggest we discuss the broader remuneration issue after these items when we are at the remuneration report. But maybe, Caoimhe, you can say a few words about the process and your thoughts on remuneration for the next step in the CFO search.

Yes, happy to. Yes, I mean, indeed, points noted about our historically conservative approach to remuneration. That is something that we recognize and something that you'll see us make step changes towards addressing. And we'll talk about that when we come on to the remuneration report for 2025. We do have a policy that has significant headroom in it that allows us, we believe, to attract best-in-class global talent. So your point is noted about the search for the CFO, but I sort of draw your attention to the example of our last Management Board appointment where we appointed a CTO that we recruited from sort of the tech industry in California. So we believe we have scope within our existing policy to find world-class talent, and that's exactly the approach we will take in this search.

Okay. Then there was -- there are a few answers, yes, please.

Mr. Chairman, [indiscernible] private investor from Amsterdam. I have 3 questions, of course. But first, let me congratulate you on the great results achieved last year and also on Q1 of this year. Maybe since this is my first appearance on this meeting, one first question on an element, which is not quite clear to me, and that concerns the verticals of Adyen. And I have came upon in your annual report, amongst others, finance, but also travel. Maybe you can give a brief description of the relevance of the various verticals, your prospects, et cetera, going forward? That's the first question.

Now the second question, which is of, well, more relevance to performance of last year and this year are your new models, including intelligent money movement. We've seen the great launch of the Adyen Uplift and of course, dynamic identification as the third one. Now I wonder, going forward, will the support from these new developments increase your profitability so far this year and next? Is there a visible acceleration because of these developments? Because I can understand your current clients are gradually moving towards these new developments. So that would make sense to expect that. So that's the second question.

And finally, Mr. Chairman, I'm not sure if this is the right moment to address that subject, but Mr. Tandowsky responded to that element in his contribution. It concerns capital allocation. And we've heard the Adyen representative stating that element briefly. But it's my opinion that the share price is substantially undervalued. Not only -- it's not only mine estimate, but I found out that about eight well-known analysts have share price targets with an average of EUR 1,500 plus, which translates into a discount of over 30%, which is substantial. In my opinion, that has everything to do with your too conservative capital allocation policy, which has been put forward to Mr. Tandowsky.

On the other hand, I found out during the analyst call that it seems to be that you're investigating a share buyback program would be appropriate. And my question would rather be why don't you just go for it? That's probably the best way to express it, and then we may have a further discussion probably at a later stage of the agenda.

Thank you, Mr. [indiscernible], for your questions. The first question is about the verticals. Maybe Ingo, you can elaborate on that, please.

Yes. So our traditional approach to the verticals is that we basically made a distinction between digital, unified commerce and platforms. That's also how we run the business. Of course, what you see is that in those verticals, there is more and more specialization in a different type of industries that we're active in. So think of retail, F&B, food and beverage, hospitality. So that's also more and more how we try to organize the team so that we have industry specialists to work with those different companies and make sure that we build the best offering. So that's also in the external reporting, we make the distinction between the verticals I just mentioned, so digital, unified commerce and platforms. In a way, how we're currently also working internally, we made more of a distribution in -- to the different industries to make sure that specialization is there.

Okay. And then on your second question about the new developments, Uplift, dynamic identification, intelligent money movements. Maybe, Pieter, you can elaborate on these products. And then Ethan, the question was, will these lead to an increase in our guidance for this year? And maybe you can take that part of the question after that.

I think the deployment of AI in building strong products, that's where the real value is, not in small optimizations, but building those products in a way that merchants really benefit. And I can also take the guidance question. I think that doesn't change our guidance. That's how we keep winning. So it's a necessary investment, but it's also an investment where I think we have a competitive advantage due to our infrastructure setup.

Yes. Why don't you go ahead, Mr. [indiscernible]. You have the mic, but I would prefer you keep the microphone in hand, Mr. [indiscernible], that's how we like to do it.

Fine, sorry. No, no problem. But the thing is a matter of acceleration because all three pretty new introductions to the market. And it does -- it should make sense that these take some time to get included in your total network. Now the thing is that these new innovations, which you made investment beforehand would take an acceleration in your profitability. Am I right? Or should it mean if you wouldn't have made these ones that you would come down pretty quickly on a much lower profitability? That's probably the sort of question I'm looking for.

Yes, go ahead.

In general, we expect our profitability profile to increase, right? We've given guidance that we expect to be above 55% by 2028. Now that's a combined assessment of all the products that we're offering to our customer base and how we expect to grow with our customers. When we build out products, it's typically not that the product is done and then it's sold, it's continuously invested in. And it's continuously invested in so that we continue to create differentiation within that product set for our customers. So a big part of why they work with Adyen is a subscription to innovation. It's the continued development of our platform that works in their favor. And so we'll continue to make investments. But if you look over the whole product suite, over the whole customer base, we do expect our profitability profile to increase over the coming years.

Okay. Then your third question was about capital allocation. In your view, we're too conservative. Ethan, I think you can also take this question.

Yes. So again, I think if I just reiterate what I shared earlier, we're very much focused on driving shareholder value where we think we can drive most shareholder value through growth. And having the strength of our balance sheet positions us to accelerate certain products like financial products. We do that through the strength of our credit rating, for instance. But also it gives us the opportunity to capitalize on opportunities that may arise. For instance, the Talon.One acquisition that we announced signing of is a good example of where we could leverage the strength of our balance sheet to work to bring something into our company that we think will add a lot of value for our customers, especially on the retail side. Of course, we continuously consider what other options are most relevant for us and will drive most shareholder value. We'll continue to do that, and that will remain our focus.

Okay. Then Mr. Martensen, yes, we -- let's first go to others [indiscernible] Sorry, what is the topic? On capital allocation. Now then we can stay here. Go ahead.

It depends on creating shareholder value, we fully agree. But looking at total shareholder return, which is a valuation of that end, we've seen negative results over the past few years. And that makes it adequate to look into more detail at capital allocation. Maybe Mr. Chairman, I would like to come back on this issue at the later stage in the agenda. Thank you.

Yes, that's fine. And we're, of course, always listening to suggestions from our shareholders. Then I know Mr. Martensen has raised his hand. Anyone else? Mr. [indiscernible] from [indiscernible]?

It's very nice. I'm having an assistant holding my microphone. Mr. Chairman, I have two questions or one question for Pricewaterhouse and one for the Board. When I analyze and read the annual report, it has 233 pages. But of those 233 pages, about 114 pages about sustainability and governance, which I think is fine. But then when I look at the financial review page, that's only half a page. My question is, would it be possible next year to expand a little bit the financial review from maybe half a page to two pages?

And my second question, that's to Pricewaterhouse. I mean you talked a lot about risk assessment of the company, but you didn't mention the segregation of client assets. Did you analyze that and review that as an auditor? Because I presume that's one of the key risks at Adyen that's done properly.

Okay. So first question about the balance in the report between sustainability on the one hand and financial review on the other, maybe, Ingo, you can take that one?

Yes. Thank you for your feedback. I think it needs a good observation that there might be a shifted balance to sustainability. Of course, we'll take your feedback into account and see if we can expand on the financial review next year. That is how I would look at it.

Okay, second question for PwC, Martijn?

Thank you for the question. I think it's a fair question. We performed actually quite a lot of work around the internal controls when it comes to cash streams and positions. And I mentioned, for example, the confirmations that we do to the existence of the asset is actually there. So hopefully, that's an answer to your question.

Okay. Then if all the shareholders have asked the question. And Mr. Martijn, you raise your hand again, you have further questions?

Usually 2 questions, and I appreciate the opportunity. As you addressed a court case. I just want to comment on that before. And it's correct. It was a procedural witness hearing regarding an IP matter that was launched in the Dutch court and it was not approved as a procedural, not on merit. But you also mentioned foreign courts and maybe you should have mentioned that there was the court order from federal court on the June 5, 2024, which was issued for what you call the 1782 discovery, which is yet ongoing because Adyen decided to object it. It's not clear yet. So let's see the outcome. But I think as a note to that, I think that was important.

My questions are quite straight forward. For 7 years in regards to the items 3a and 3b. For 7 years since the IPO, the wording of this charge was limited to matters disclosed to shareholders. So everything that was known. This year, that's been removed. It says all liabilities. And now considering the Chair of Audit and Risk left or his period exteded. And a few months ago, Ethan is leaving. The question is, will the Board confirm on the record that any discharge granted today to votes, which is done today will not be relied upon matters that are not known to this AGM and a reasonable appearance to this meeting before they vote. If not, if you would not do that, I would appreciate if you can clarify what is the legal basis or specific company interest.

My second question, if I may, directly. And you just reminded me about last year's AGM on the refusal and unrelated questions, and it was in the minutes and now we'll be in a minutes again. And it was stated that the material which was handed in was reviewed by auditors, forensic investigators and external councils. Since that day, I have carried out 3 forensic reports, Alvarez & Marsal, which is a relatively well-known forensic firm, the Vault law firms, [ cassette ] of Netherlands and a criminal lawyer of Wladimiroff, well-known memorandum has been formally served to the Board, PwC, EY and the incoming Chair. They were received because it was done by bailiff.

And my question is what happened next? Can the Supervisory Board [indiscernible] a document that there is a written reconciliation of the last year's down merit? And were they included in the PwC assessments this year and the Audit and Risk Committee when they reviewed? And the incoming chairs handover, basically, the materials which was served has that been reviewed. And is there, in that case, another forensic firm that you can mention name, date that actually have carried out a contradiction report to what I handed in. I think would say that -- I think that is everything for me.

Okay. So first, your comment on legal proceedings is noted. You have a question on the discharge. We will have that later on the agenda, and then we will address that point. As I mentioned, all allegations, all documents that you've handed in have been reviewed by our teams, have been discussed in the Audit Committee, have been reviewed by PwC and they have led to the way we've responded to your questions.

My statement from you was external counsel and forensic investigation. Was it just reviewed by your internal team, the one that...

I have not used those words today.

Np, I have it on the minutes from the last year. I can correct it. And I would like to leave it at that.

Okay. Any other questions?

[indiscernible] on behalf of VB. Two more questions, please. If you look at the current stock market valuation, of course, there's as -- if you read the press, there's a big valuation disconnect between Adyen and Stripe. I was wondering what your thoughts on that in terms of what can you do about it strategically? What can you do about operationally? What can you do in your communication? What can you do in any form to sort of bridge this gap or explain this gap or at least lower this gap?

Second question is also related to those competitors. If you look at the way there is a lot of potential around presenting this as Adyen having zero-sum battle with Stripe and companies like Checkout. But I think if you look at the long term, a lot of the story is still about wallet share gain. So can you give some more insight into the longevity of the wallet share gain against, for example, legacy players?

Yes. It is not our habit to talk about individual competitors. So maybe Ingo, you can say a few words about the competitive landscape and our wallet share gain developments going forward.

Yes, sure. So we're building the company for the long run. And I think since the start of the company, payments has always been very competitive, and that has not changed. Having great competition around us makes us products better. But I think most important is that we keep listening to our customers. And if you look at our share of wallet growth with our existing customers, it's still the most important part of our growth. That is the area that we focus on. And also based on the feedback from our customers, I'm very confident that this is the right trajectory for us.

On valuation differences, I find it hard to comment on that because I can only focus on our own company and making sure that we keep explaining how we're building the company for the long run, making the right investments, keep hiring the right people and more importantly, keep contracting the right customers and provide the value that we're looking or bringing to them. So that's how we look at the Management Board level at this topic.

[indiscernible], you have a follow-up question?

Yes. Then of course, I understand that you don't want to make that -- those calls about valuation, et cetera. Maybe just then indeed, looking at Adyen, if you look at, of course, you have this guidance for '26 at 20% to 22%. If you look at what is implied probably in the share prices [ that are there ] and look at all the sell-side reports, there's a lot of thinking that what might be implied in the share price is something like a low teen growth rate for the longer term. And I think that's not what you're looking for. If you look at the Investor Day, you're still talking about 20-plus growth. So my thing is a little bit how do you convince and how do you sort of get some credibility with investors on your more longer-term growth rate. I think that's very much what the market is not wanting to believe that -- and that also ties to the wallet share gain story.

Yes. Okay. Thank you. Ingo, can you also take this question?

Yes, sure. So in the past, we've worked with a guidance across multiple years. And I think the consistent feedback from investors was not helping to get better clarity on individual years. So that's exactly why we have switched this year to guidance specifically for 2026, which is indeed the guidance on revenues that you just indicated. At the same time, during Investor Day, we indicated that we expected the company will grow about 20% for the next coming years. So that gives also a view on how we internally look at our growth and of course, we -- our purpose of giving that indication is that analysts will take that into their models because they believe us.

Apparently, if there is a mismatch, the only way to convince people is to keep delivering. So that's our focus on. That's also what we do as a Management Board, making sure that we keep delivering on our results. And the first result that we're going to deliver is 2026. So all our focus is on building the business for this year.

Okay. Thank you. If there are no further questions, then there's -- I realize there's one aspect of Mr. Martijn's question that I haven't properly answered, which is you've asked if PwC has reviewed. And maybe, Martijn, you can still comment on that?

Thank you for the question. Indeed, we've received a large volume of communications and as an independent auditor, we have a responsibility to take all that information into account. So what we do is we perform inquiries, we ask the company for their position and we perform our independent testing and where needed, we are supported by a specialist as you can read in our opinion. This includes also forensic specialists. Based on the work performed for the 2025 and your report, there was no indication that there was an issue with the financial statements nor did we modify our opinion for this aspect?

Okay. Thank you for that clarification. If there are no further questions, then I would like to proceed to the next item on the agenda, which is Item 2b is a proposal to adopt the financial statements 2025, which PwC has issued an unqualified auditor's opinion. This is also the first voting item on the agenda of today's meeting. Before we open the voting, and I would like to inform you that there are 22,688,771 votes validly represented at this meeting. This represents 71.90% of the company's share capital and includes the votes that were cast electronically. This means that valid resolutions can be adopted at this meeting. As of now, you can vote on all agenda items at any time during the meeting. You can vote on your device as of this moment.

I will remind you throughout the meeting that you can vote on all of the agenda items, and we'll let you know when the voting will close just before the end of the meeting. After the voting has closed, we will share the voting results at this meeting. Please raise your hand if you have any difficulties with the voting. Now are there any questions about these agenda items?

Okay. Then if there are no further questions, we proceed to agenda item 2c, which is the proposal to advice on the remuneration report, which is an advisory vote item only. We will now provide an explanation on the remuneration report. I would like to give the floor to Caoimhe Keogan, our Chair of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee to provide an explanation. Caoimhe?

Thank you, Piero. So the remuneration report over the financial year 2025 has been prepared in accordance with Dutch law and is available on Adyen's website as part of the annual report. It explains how the remuneration policies for the Management Board and Supervisory Board were executed for 2025. I'd like to share a few highlights on the content of the report. We continue with our approach of not awarding variable remuneration to our Management Board members in 2025. Therefore, the remuneration consists of base salary and share-based compensation with no variable remuneration. We believe the current remuneration approach for our Management Board mitigates short-term orientation and contribute to the long-term performance of Adyen.

Regarding the base salaries, the Supervisory Board reviews Management Board compensation on an annual basis to make adjustments in line with our long-term remuneration philosophy and our policy. Under our current Management Board remuneration policy, we aim for total remuneration to not be positioned above the median of our tailored peer group. Because of remuneration of all Management Board members remain significantly below the median of the benchmark base salaries for the Management Board members were increased in 2025 and have been reviewed again in 2026.

These GAAP adjustments are made to better align the remuneration with the peer group and are in line with the remuneration policy applicable to the Management Board, which was adopted by the general meeting in 2023. The general meeting has an advisory vote on the 2025 remuneration report.

Thank you, Caoimhe. I would like to invite you to commit -- to submit any questions pertaining the 2025 remuneration report if you have any. Please, Mr. [indiscernible].

We have 2 questions on this proposal. First one, we believe that the current remuneration policy has merit, but we see further opportunity to strengthen incentives around performance. Does the Supervisory Board have any plans to place more emphasis on performance-based or share-based variable compensation for all members of the Management Board. And here, I want to clarify that we don't necessarily mean just short term but also for long-term objectives?

And then my second question, in light of recent compensation trends in the United States. And given Adyen's footprint in that market, we are concerned about potential pressure to move towards higher pay levels and more aggressive incentive structures that have become increasingly more common there. How is the Supervisory Board approaching this dynamic and safeguarding against the shift in this direction?

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much for these questions. Caoimhe, if you can take both. So first, are we considering variable compensation, short term or long term? And secondly, how do we look at the pressure -- the upward pressure on compensation, especially in the U.S. Caoimhe?

Yes. Thank you for both these questions. Yes. So on the first one, I appreciate your comments about the merit of the current policy. As I noted, the current remuneration policy is very much geared around long-term performance and value creation of Adyen, all members of our Management Board received share-based compensation as part of their remuneration package. And as such, we believe their interests are, therefore, aligned with the shareholder experience, which is a key tenant of building for the long term.

In terms of amending our remuneration policies, we're coming up for that renewal cycle. So we will be bringing in the 2027 AGM, a refreshed remuneration policy ahead of proposing those policies, we will, of course, engage to major shareholders, proxy advisers. So I'm looking forward to that conversation towards the end of this year in preparation for next year's AGM. So we'll take your feedback, and we will all have that opportunity for further discussion on appropriate Management Board remuneration then.

On the second point about compensation trends. It's important that we do acknowledge that Adyen is a global fintech business. And as per my previous comments, we do compete in a global talent market looking for world-class talent to build this company. What we have is a tailored benchmark of peers that we use. And I think that is our main way of ensuring that we get the right balance. So ensuring that we do benchmark against AEX companies against European-based companies, but we do also have an element of global peers in that benchmark, and we think that's the right balance.

And it's a key way in which we ensure that, that upward pressure is managed is that we do actually restrict the number of North American peers in that benchmark, so to fewer than 40% of that benchmark. And again, as demonstrated in our 2025 annual report, the remuneration of the Management Board remains well below the meeting median of the benchmark, and we do reserve the right. We think it's appropriate that we make adjustments as needed and to ensure that Management Board remuneration does remain competitive.

Okay. Are there -- thanks for that answer, Caoimhe. Is there any other question about remuneration report? Then we will now proceed to the next agenda item. Please also again be reminded that you can vote on all items throughout the meeting. We would now like to move to the next item on the agenda, with the explanation of the dividend policy, which is item 2d. This is a discussion item, not a voting item. Pursuant to the dividend policy as published on Adyen's website. Earnings are used to support and finance Adyen's growth strategy, as Ethan has elaborated on earlier on.

In the future, the Management Board may assess the relevance of paying dividends in light of its strategy to grow the company through investments in its people, processes and systems. And I would like to invite you to submit any questions on this agenda item. Mr. Berger?

A clear question. Do you consider to start paying dividends?

Okay. This is a question for the Management Board. Ethan, while we have you at the table still. Please take one.

We consider all of the options that are right from a capital allocation perspective. So a dividend is one of the options that we will always consider. We're again focused very much on driving growth. That's where our first priorities are. But of course, we consider all options in terms of optimal capital allocation decisions.

Let me continue because it puzzles me a little bit, Mr. Chairman. When looking at your operational report and performance, you are working on new products which are aiming to help your clients to manage money more efficiently. And that's, of course, a great task and a great effort, but what you fail to do is manage your own capital position in a way that you're, in my opinion, extremely over capitalized. And in that respect, it's probably the right moment to switch to annual report Page #157, where it gives you consolidated statement of comprehensive income.

And it tells us that from all your net income for the company, some 20% is made of finance income, which means, of course, that derives completely from your banking status and the fact that you're processing your clients' payments traffic. Now looking at distributing total earnings true to shareholders and stakeholders, it seems that you continuously deploy 100% to growth of the company, which is probably not different from when you're a private company. But the thing is that today, looking at a shareholders' position and our return to total shareholder return has become increasingly negative, which is in contrast with the great performance of the company, which strikes me as odd.

And as I mentioned during my first part of my questions, to now it appears that there's a discount of over 30%, which I think is material. Our total share price return is a combination of share price appreciation, dividend income and probably the additional result of share buybacks, if you agree with that sort of sum up of capital allocation proceeds. Now with that big deviation, it comes to mind, isn't their room either to start paying dividends because I'm of a strong opinion that all the elements you mentioned in order to be able to continue providing the company the sufficient means to divide your strategy, and I'm the first to adhere to that because I agree. But then there is still ample room to start up a share buyback, which would be preferred because it also applies to issuing new shares when relevant.

If I'm right, Mr. Chairman, the acquisition of Talon.One will go along that the selling shareholders will also become a shareholder in Adyen. Now it may happen that these will be paid issuing new shares. If possible, that will be one of the possibilities. But if these shares are undervalued, it would mean a dilution of earnings per share growth, and that's what's currently the risk which comes with holding on to a capital allocation policy, which in my view, is inadequate, and maybe you can comment on that.

Well, I think you've made your point that you think we are too conservative. I would like to make a few comments before asking Ingo to comment. First, we are a bank. So we have quite some regulatory capital requirements. So it's not like all the capital that's there is available for anything else. Secondly, we've spoken about the importance of the credit rating. Ethan has already mentioned that. We do need capital for that. We need capital for growth of the company, which you've also acknowledged. And then there's also inorganic opportunities like the Talon.One that we've discussed. But let me conclude and then I'll hand over to Ingo, that you think that we are too conservative. Of course, we are not commenting on the share price. The share price is for the shareholders to decide on. But we note what's going on, and we've noted your comments, and maybe, Ingo, you would like to say a few more words.

So we're still in a high-growth mode and investing in the business. And I think that is very important starting point. And with a fast-changing world, we want to make sure that we have the room to maneuver. That's also one of the reasons why we've recently acquired Talon.One, which is an investment that we could make because we have the capability to invest. And I think that is a very important starting point for us as a Management Board.

First to look at, okay, how can we organically grow the company? Are there any adjacent areas like Talon.One where we can expand. And then of course, it's always the question like what can we do in addition to that, to make sure that we have the right capital allocation approach. But we think that our current approach is the right one, and we will continue to evaluate that going forward.

Okay. Thank you. You have a new thought or are you going to reiterate? Final remarks. Please go ahead, Mr. [indiscernible].

Just the one observation that total shareholder return has been negative for some time, and that's a clear disparity with the view expressed by the company, which aims at growing the company's value. So that would, in my modest opinion urge for a closer look at the opportunities available within your structure because I'm not asking to move up to too risky ratios, which may endanger your freedom to move and make acquisitions like Talon.One. But there is in mind, not only in mine, but other investors and probably also potential investors in action who won't buy the companies because they see this is an inadequate capital allocation policy, which keeps down the share price.

And if that goes along with remuneration policies, which are linked to too low valuation, that may harm in the end, the growth of the company. And that's my concern and it can easily be adopted because like you do for your own clients, look at your capital structure, can it be made more efficient. And that's my pledge. And I would invite you, maybe as we have next year, another discussion and see how we going forward. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you for your questions, your observations and your plea, and we'll note. Mr. [indiscernible]?

Two small questions. One is how much is your regulatory capital at the moment? And the second question is, if you meet your targets for 2028, my calculations, you will have about EUR 13 billion of net cash on your balance sheet, which will create about 40% of your market cap. Would you say that, that's too much? Or do you think that's still considered? Do you think that's appropriate?

Okay. First question also Ethan, maybe you can take both on regulatory capital. And secondly, are we going to accumulate cash forever is, in fact, your question. We understand your question, Thank you.

Yes. So we disclosed to our Pillar 3 reporting, the levels of regulatory capital, which are required. We have sufficient headroom compared to those regulatory ratios, but it is important for us with our relationships with our regulators, indeed, that we are sufficiently capitalized and that also on a go-forward basis, they see that there is capacity for us to stay capitalized. That's the first.

On the second question, I didn't quite catch it.

If we -- in the speed with which we accumulate capital now, we will have a lot of own cash on the balance sheet in the next couple of years.

Yes. So certainly, we are cash generative as a business. So we will continue to build cash. We will continue to look at what the optimal options are, right? First, investments are in growth. That's where focus is. But we'll continue to consider other options because over time, the goal is not to accumulate as much cash as we possibly can. It's to make the right decisions for growing the business and for shareholder returns over time.

Okay, if there are no -- yes, there is one more question, Mr. [indiscernible].

Back to some comments Ethan made on the call in terms of saying that they consider share buybacks. Is that really that consideration is tied to the fact that you cannot say more tied to the regulations tied to the Dutch Central Bank having to give this permission and that this process might take 4 months to say so? Is this really something that is sort of keeping you away from being more clear in your communication around this? Is that the problem to say so?

Ethan?

Sure. I think we always have a responsibility to consider what the right options are for the business. And that's something that we take responsibility for and continuously consider. Process-wise, there are steps we need to follow given the regulated environment that we are in. So there is a regulatory process to follow if we would take certain decisions related to capital allocation, for instance, for Talon.One, there are processes we also need to follow, which is what we are doing now. So there are processes that need to be followed given our regulatory landscape. But the considerations, those are continuous for us as a management team. We have a responsibility to do what's right from a capital allocation perspective.

Okay. If it's okay, we -- and no further questions, then we go on to agenda Item 3a, which is a proposal to discharge the Management Board members from liability of the financial year 2025. This is a voting item. It's proposed to discharge the Management Board from liability for the financial year 2025. And maybe this is a good moment for us to comment on Mr. Martensen's questions about what the discharge is specifically about. Maybe our Company Secretary, Suze can answer this question.

Of course. So although the wording is slightly different than last year's agenda, the scope of the discharge has not changed. So also to reiterate what Piero said, the discharge for liability is for the financial year 2025 as appears from the annual report and the materials have been made available to the general meeting before the adoption of the financial statements for 2025. And as last, for the avoidance of doubt, but I think he will pass on after for the Supervisory Board, this also includes the members, Joep van Beurden and Delfin Rueda Arroyo, whose terms expired in January 2026.

Okay. Mr. [indiscernible]?

Just to understand this correctly and to have it on the minutes it's not slightly. It's been consistent for 7 years, exact wordings in annual. And this year is basically taking off. It's changed completely. It's not slightly, it's changed. I mean it's in the document, and it's also my questions. So just a follow-up. So are you -- on the record saying that everything that is not known to the AGM, the shareholders at this point of time the shareholders. At this point of time, when they vote for 3a are not included in this, is that a yes?

I think that's the case, yes. Okay. Any other questions about discharge for the Management Board. Then agenda item 3b, proposed to discharge Supervisory Board from liability for the financial year 2025. Any questions here? As I said, you can vote at any time, and I announce when the voting will be closed. And thank you Suze for your answers. If there are no further questions, we will now proceed to the next agenda item, which I would like to give the floor to Caoimhe, which is number 4, the proposed to remuneration of the Supervisory Board. Caoimhe, go ahead.

Thank you, Piero. The next item on the agenda is the proposal to amend the remuneration of the Supervisory Board, in line with the current Supervisory Board remuneration policy as adopted by the General Meeting in 2023. It is now proposed to make certain changes to the remuneration payable to members of the Supervisory Board. Adyen Supervisory Board fees were last changed in 2024. Since then, market percentiles have increased in our peer group on average, 10% to 15%. It's now proposed to change the remuneration of the Supervisory Board to improve market positioning towards the median of the peer group and strengthen Adyen's ability to attract and secure top-tier talent in an evolving market.

As you can see on the slide presented, we've outlined the current fees against the market median alongside the proposed fees. The proposed fees move towards, but remain below the median of our peer group for each position held. This change is intended to be future-proof, meaning it's designed to hold for multiple years against market movements. If agreed, these changes will enter into force from 1st of January 2026.

Thank you, Caoimhe. Are there any questions about this proposal? If there are no questions, then we will proceed to the next item on the agenda, which is Item 5a, proposal to reappoint Pieter van der Does as a Management Board member. Pieter, Co-Founder of Adyen in 2006. Under his leadership, Adyen has evolved from an Amsterdam-based start-up into a global financial infrastructure. It is now proposed by the Supervisory Board to reappoint Pieter as his current 4-year term will expire in June '26. If reappointed, his new 4-year term will run until the end of the 2030 General Meeting.

If there are no hands raised, I will proceed 5b proposal to reappoint rural Roelant Prins as a Management Board member. It's also a voting item. As a Managing Director of Adyen. Roelant is the Chief Commercial Officer, overseeing Adyen's global commercial strategy and revenue operations. Roelant joint Adyen in 2009 and played a key role in building the company's commercial engine. If reappointed, Roelant's new 4-year term will run until the end of the 2030 General Meeting.

I would now like to ask any questions related to both appointments. If no questions, then we will proceed. Then we go to the end item 6a, which is the proposal to appoint Herna Verhagen, a Supervisory Board member. I would like to give the floor to Caoimhe as the Chair of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee for this agenda item.

Thank you, Piero. So the Supervisory Board nominated Herna Verhagen for appointment as a Supervisory Board member. It's proposed to the general meeting to appoint Herna effective per the date of this general meeting for a 4-year term until the end of the 2030 General Meeting. Herna brings more than 30 years' experience in executive and nonexecutive leadership roles. Herna is a member of the Supervisory Board at Royal Philips N.V., where she acts as Chair of the Remuneration Committee and member of the Audit Committee.

Previously, she has served as the Chief Executive Officer of PostNL for over a decade until 2025. She held the Supervisory Board position at ING Groep N.V. until April 2026. And there, she acted as Chair of the Remuneration Committee, member of the Nomination and Governance Committee and member of the Risk Committee. Before these roles, Herna held various supervisory positions across listed international companies.

The selection and nomination process supported by an external executive search firm was conducted with great care and clear objectives to identify a seasoned Chair, successor capable of guiding the Supervisory Board through the complexities of a high-growth global fintech company.

As a Supervisory Board, we sought a highly experienced nonexecutive profile with deep understanding of both financial services and the technology landscape. The Supervisory Board has nominated Herna Verhagen in view of her extensive experience across various relevant industries. Her appointment leverages for a comprehensive knowledge of strategy, people and culture, risk management, reporting, audit, regulatory compliance, Investor Relations and corporate governance at listed companies.

The Supervisory Board intentionally sought a nonexecutive candidate and someone with close proximity to Amsterdam to maintain the frequent informal and in-person interactions with the Management Board that have proven highly effective in the past. As CEO, Herna developed strong market leadership while navigating regulatory complexity. She scaled her organization internationally across markets in Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. And she led the transformation of the tech stack by evolving a physical post business into a technology firm, all whilst managing a large global e-customer but -- e-commerce customer base that, in many ways, overlaps without Adyen's customer base.

And with over 15 years of supervisory experience in the financial services and the tech industry, we believe her track record is a distinct strength and we're very confident that Adyen will benefit from her broad knowledge and judgment as Adyen continues to scale.

Herna's proposed appointment as Supervisory Board member and Chair-elect has been formally approved by the Dutch Central Bank. Herna's remuneration shall be in accordance with the company's Supervisory Board remuneration policy. Upon her appointment, Herna will become a member of both the Audit and Risk Committee and the Nomination and Remuneration Committee. She will take over from Piero Overmars as Chair of the Supervisory Board upon the expiry of his current term at the end of this year. And the overlapping period will be used for an extensive handover.

Okay. Thanks for that introduction, Caoimhe. Herna, may I ask you to say a few words?

Of course. Thank you, Piero. Thank you, Caoimhe. Dear shareholders, it's a privilege to be nominated to join the Adyen's Supervisory Board, and I'm looking forward to closely work, of course, with the Management Board and with the Supervisory Board. I will do my utmost to support Adyen, its Board and of course, its people to further scale the unique platform this company has and deliver real value for its merchants globally, continuing their success going forward. The Adyen people I met so far, and it's quite a few, showed me that their loyalty to Adyen, their unique culture and also their creativity and knowledge further underpins my confidence. I finally would like to say that I'm looking forward to eventually succeed Piero as Chair of Adyen Supervisory Board. And of course, as said by Caoimhe, that will happen after a thorough handover process. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Herna. I would like to add that I'm looking forward to the upcoming transition phase as we manage the handover of the Chair role Herna. Are there any questions about the appointment for Herna? If there are no questions, I would like -- again, I've been asked in my script to remind you every time that you can still vote but I know you, by now, know that. So then we will proceed to the next agenda Item 7a, which is the authorization to issue shares or grant rights to acquire shares.

Next item on the agenda is the renewal of the mandate of the Management Board for the issuance of shares up to a maximum of 10% of the share capital with the approval of the Supervisory Board. This mandate is in line with market practice and corresponds with the authorization yearly granted by our general meeting.

Agenda 7b is the authorization to restrict or exclude preemptive rights linked to the -- to 7A with the approval of the Supervisory Board to -- sorry, let me be precise, to authorize the Management Board with the approval of Supervisory Board to restrict or exclude preemptive rights that will be issued on the basis of the previous authorization. And 7c is authorization to acquire own shares.

The next authorization on the agenda is the renewal of the existing mandates to the Management Board to buy back shares under conditions detailed in explanatory notes to the agenda as published on Adyen's website. And 7d, which is proposed to cancel shares in case of share buyback on the basis of the previous authorization, it is proposed at the general meeting approves that such shares may be canceled by the Management Board with the approval of the Supervisory Board to the extent such shares are not used to cover obligations under employee equity plans.

I'd now like to invite you to submit any questions about these authorizations. If there are no questions, then we will proceed to the next item, which is the last agenda item on today's agenda. And after this, I will announce that we will close the vote.

So agenda Item 8a is the proposal to reappoint PwC as external auditor for the financial year '26. So that's the last reappointment and also 8b, which is the proposal to reappoint PwC as external auditor to provide assurance on the sustainability statement for the year '26. Are there any questions about these proposed reappointments for PwC?

No, then we will proceed to the next item and this is the near to final voting item on the agenda. Please note that this is your final opportunity to vote. We will be closing the voting after next agenda item, which is the proposal8c on the agenda to appoint EY as the external auditor for the financial year '27.

The next item on agenda is proposed appointment of EY. I would like to give the floor to Adine Grate, our Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee to introduce this agenda item, Adine.

Thank you, Piero. PwC will reach its 10th year acting as Adyen's auditor when they complete their audit work for finance year '26. Because of the mandatory rotation rules, Adyen needs to transition to a new firm after. To make sure we have a smooth and timely decision, the Audit and Risk Committee kicked off this selection process in 2024 and put together a dedicated selection committee to guide this effort. This committee included a share of the Audit and Risk Committee at the time Delfin, Adyen's Chief Financial Officer; the Senior Vice President of Group Finance and representatives from key teams.

I'd like to share some color on how that process works. The committee started by inviting the 3 other big 4 firms, along with on second-tier order firm to participate. Ultimately, 2 big 4 firms moved forward in the selection process. The committee did a very thorough review of the proposals and held formal presentation rounds, where both firms walk the team through their audit approach and introduced their teams. The committee evaluated the audit firms against a few key criteria, the strength of the proposal lead partner and audit team, the culture fit with Adyen and how competitive and well-structured their fees were. After evaluating everything and verifying their independence, the selection committee concluded that E&Y was the clear choice. They demonstrated the highest level of qualification, diligence and overall alignment with what Adyen needs as we continue to grow. You can also find more details on the full selection procedure in the explanatory notes for today's agenda, which are published on the website.

On the basis of the advisodry Selection Committee, the Audit and Risk Committee recommended the Supervisory Board to nominate E&Y as Adyen's new external auditor for the financial year 2027. That recommendation has been followed by the Supervisory Board. Therefore, it's now proposed to the Annual General Meeting to formally appoint E&Y as Adyen's new external auditors for the financial year 2027.

Thank you, Adine. Are there any questions about this? [indiscernible], you can go ahead. Sorry. Yes, sorry, you were first. [indiscernible] go ahead. And please introduce yourself.

Private investor. I just had a question about the app because I cannot for vote for this. Okay. I tried twice to vote for PwC and not to vote for EY.

Okay. The logistics team will help you there. So please have a look. And in the meantime, with the microphone, Mr. Martensen has a question on this as well.

Has EY completed the engagement acceptance?

The answer is yes. Do other shareholders have the same issue with the voting on 8b? Yes? Okay, others have the same issue. Okay. Who can help us out here. So I don't have the box in my head. I can't see what the problem is. Can so Mr. [indiscernible], can you help us out.

Explain's to the room what the issue is and how we will solve it.

[indiscernible].

Thanks for the suggestions. Let's see if that's okay.

It's just the way it's shown on the devices. It's correct in the system. So 8b is only [indiscernible].

Is it okay from a procedural perspective to vote by hand? Of course, but then that's additional votes in the room. That's complicated. So let's -- we can do the hand voting as you suggest. So may I ask the people to the shareholders to raise their hand if they are in favor of the appointment of EY as the external auditor to provide assurance. Let me see to do the accounts for 2027. The shareholders in favor?

[Voting]

Shareholders against?

[Voting]

Shareholders abstaining?

[Voting]

Okay. And then the 8d proposed to appoint EY as the external auditor to provide assurance on the sustainability statement for the financial year '27. The shareholders in favor, please raise your hand.

[Voting]

Shareholders against?

[Voting]

No votes against and abstaining -- also no votes. Okay. Thank you very much. Are there any other questions? As this was the last voting item on the agenda. The closing votes will be shown on the screen in a minute.

Are there any other matters, any one of the shareholders would like to raise? If not -- yes, please wait for the microphone.

Maybe one small nuance on what Adine said. He said we were the auditor for 10 years. We've been the auditor longer, but the regime to be there for a maximum of 10 years started to count in 2017 when the company obtained the banking license. So that's when the 10 year start counting and our last year will be 2026.

Okay. Thank you very much for that clarification, Martijn. Yes, we will now show the final voting results on the screen. When the voting is closed. I will not go through all the numbers in detail because it will take a while, but as you can see, I'm pleased to inform you that all the agenda items have been adopted with the required majority of votes. So I am very happy that all our proposed appointments for Pieter Roelant, Herna, have been approved. I'm personally very happy about that. I'm happy about it on behalf of my colleagues in the Supervisory Board to have such fantastic people on board in our firm.

And with that, the voting procedure I'd done. I would like to thank all of you for your participation and contribution to this general meeting. And I would like to proceed to the closing of the meeting. I declare the meeting closed at 10:52 hours. Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Adyen's Q1 2026 Business Update Call. My name is Maggie O'Donnell, and I will be hosting today's call.

We will begin today by playing the prepared remarks that were available on the IR site earlier today. We will first hear from Ingo; and because we have Ethan with us here today, we will hear from him live directly. We will then move on to the Q&A with Ethan.

[Operator Instructions] With that, let's get started.

Hello. I'm Ingo Uytdehaage, Co-CEO of Adyen. The first quarter was a strong start to the year for Adyen with net revenue up 20% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. What we are seeing across our customer base reinforces a structural shift in where value is created in payments. Historically, most of the value in payments are at a point of authorization, improving acceptance rates, optimizing routing and managing costs. Today, more of that value is moving outside of the payment moment. Before payment is made, our customers are making increasingly complex decisions around which transactions to allow through, how to balance conversion on risk and how to shape the outcome. After the payment, they are managing how funds move across markets, entities and time. In most organizations, these steps are still handled across separate systems, creating duplication, higher cost and less control. As a result, our customers are asking us to take on a broader role, not just as a payment processor, but as a platform that helps them manage these decisions in one place. We are expanding our role across the transaction life cycle, influencing decisions before the payments and enabling more efficient money movement after it.

The reason for this is straightforward. We have always been focused on the biggest drivers of value in this transaction, conversion, fraud and cost. But by the time the transaction reaches authorization, much of the outcome has already been set. You can still optimize, but you are working within a fixed set of inputs. Now if you move early in the flow, that changes. You can decide which transaction to allow through, how to balance conversion against risk and increasingly how to shape the transaction itself. That is where the largest improvements in performance comes from and why we are moving up the funnel. You can already see this in products like Adyen Uplift, where improvements are driven by decisions made before the payment itself. But it's also very much connected to the acquisition of Talon.One, which we announced a few weeks ago. This is a direct extension of the same idea, and one we are very excited about.

A consistent challenge our customers face isn't recognizing a shopper, but acting on that insight in real time. Today, promotions, pricing and incentives are often managed separately from the transaction itself, disconnecting decisions that directly impact conversion and revenue. By bringing Talon.One into the platform, we can connect those elements directly. A merchant can recognize a customer and immediately apply a relevant incentive or pricing decision within the same interaction before the payment is completed. That allows them to influence outcomes early in the flow where the impact is highest. What makes this particularly compelling is that it connects identity directly to action, using insight to shape the transaction itself in real time. The key enabler of this is identity. Customers need a continuous understanding of who the customer is across interactions. That is what allows them to make consistent decisions on conversion, risk and personalization across channels and in real time. Over time, this expands what we are optimizing for. Most payment systems still focus on improving individual transactions. What we are increasingly helping customers do is balance those outcomes more effectively and factor in longer-term value, moving from optimizing transaction in isolation to improving overall economics.

Additionally, we are seeing a similar shift after the payment. For many customers, the bigger challenge is no longer accepting payments, but managing what happens next across markets and entities. Today, that's often handled across multiple banks and systems, creating inefficiencies and limiting visibility. With Intelligent Money Movement, we are bringing these flows together in one system, allowing customers to manage funds more actively, reduce operational complexity and gain better control over how and when money moves. We are actively investing to expand the platform across these areas. We are building a pace supported by improvements in tooling and the use of AI. Much of this work sits deeper in the stack, less feasible, but critical to operating reliably at scale.

AI is accelerating how we build, but our advantage is where we apply it. Anyone can use AI, but not everyone can apply it to real money at scale within a regulated system. Our global banking licenses and single platform architecture are key to that, allowing us to bring new capabilities to customers in a consistent and scalable way without adding complexity.

Finally, on agentic commerce. There's a lot of progress at the interface level, but in practice, most flows still do not work reliably when connected to enterprise systems. As frontier AI models increasingly shape how products are discovered, evaluated and selected, we are helping merchants to standardize the way they connect 3 things: identity; data; and decisioning, because as transactions move earlier in the flow and happen without direct user interaction, the ability to combine these 3 things becomes critical. And that's also where Talon.One comes in, enabling merchants to directly influence what is shown and sold by applying pricing, promotions and incentives in real time even as those interactions become more automated. We are investing in the protocols and infrastructure needed to support this. As transactions become more distributed across agents and platforms, consistent identity and interoperability are key to making these models work in practice. We do not expect a material impact from this in the next 8 to 12 months, but we do expect it to become increasingly relevant beyond that. So when you step back, the direction is clear. We are expanding our role from optimizing payments to helping customers optimize the full economics of their transactions, making better decisions before the payments, shaping outcomes during it and managing money more efficiently after it. That is where we see the largest opportunity and where we continue to invest.

With that, I will hand it over to Ethan to walk through the results in more detail.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. We are off to a strong start to the year with performance well in line with our expectations, driven by strong execution and the resilience of our diversified customer base.

Net revenue for the first quarter reached EUR 620.8 million, representing 16% year-over-year growth or 20% on a constant currency basis. Processed volume was EUR 382 billion, up 21%. This performance relies on 2 distinct drivers: gaining wallet share with our existing merchants and the strength of new customer cohorts.

In terms of pillar performance, Digital net revenue reached EUR 349.6 million, up 13% year-over-year on a constant currency basis and accelerating from the prior period. This is driven by continued share of wallet gains as we've deepened partnerships with some of our largest content and subscriptions customers. APAC-based online retail merchants continue to present a slight headwind, which we expect to ease in the second quarter.

Unified Commerce net revenue reached EUR 196.2 million, up 28% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, driven primarily by strength in luxury and small-format retail. In the quarter, we saw a less pronounced shift in customers between Digital and Unified Commerce compared to the second half of last year. We continue to execute on our strategy to expand share of wallet across channels over time.

Platforms net revenue grew to EUR 75 million, reflecting a 40% increase year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Growth was driven by our expansion across the vertical SaaS businesses that we work with, with particular momentum in the financial services and food and beverage verticals as well as the growing adoption of our embedded financial products.

Now on the team. We continue to invest in our long-term growth. We added 88 net new FTEs in the quarter, a majority of whom are in our tech and commercial teams in North America. Our hiring plans remain the same for the year, and we continue to expect to add 550 to 650 net new hires in 2026.

Turning to our outlook. Given our strong start to the year and resilient performance from our merchants, we are reiterating our full year 2026 guidance. We continue to expect net revenue growth between 20% and 22% on a constant currency basis. We also reiterate our expectation for the 2026 EBITDA margin to remain broadly in line with 2025. Similar to prior years, we expect our EBITDA margin to be higher in H2 than in H1. We also continue to expect capital expenditures to be up to 5% of net revenue. This guidance remains unchanged by our recently announced acquisition of Talon.One. Given the expected closing time line in the second half of the year, we do not expect the transaction to have a material impact on our 2026 financials. We will provide more information on the expected financial impact once the deal is complete. This is an example of where we can use our financial strength to help drive growth in the business. Our strong capital position gives us financial flexibility and a range of options to drive further growth in shareholder value.

To summarize, we're off to a strong start of the year, we continue to see healthy growth across our customer base, which has proven resilient in an uncertain macroeconomic environment. We are well positioned to execute our strategy and to deliver on our long-term growth ambitions.

Okay. Great. Thanks, Ethan. We will now move on to the Q&A segment of the call. [Operator Instructions]

So our first question today comes from the line of Josh Levin from Autonomous.

Two questions from me. I just want to ask a bit about the Talon.One acquisition. What is the defensible advantage of Adyen plus Talon.One that, say, Stripe or Checkout.coms plus the loyalty acquisition could not replicate over a 12- to 18-month integration cycle? Is it a single stack authorization? A data network effect from running both sides of the transaction, something else? Where exactly is the moat?

And then the second question on AI. And you talked about it, how you're deploying AI and risk and fraud decisioning. Can you quantify the chargeback or fraud rate improvement you've achieved in the last 12 months? And is this generating a measurable improvement in authorization rates that's allowing you to compete better, to win or retain enterprise merchants?

Thanks, Josh. Let me start with the question on Talon.One. I think where we see a big advantage is connecting our ability to identify shoppers and really understand that identity with their ability to then personalize a promotion or a loyalty program and take action around that. Where we see a big advantage in our position together is that we have a true Unified Commerce offering. So we not only see digital transactions where it's often easier to identify a shopper, but we also see the in-person transactions and are able to identify those shoppers based on their card data. That's where we think we have a big advantage, especially because we do that on a single stack, meaning that, that in-person transaction, that online transaction happens on our single platform. And we feel like that's the big advantage that we're doubling down on, right? That's been helping us be successful in Unified Commerce over the years, and that same advantage is where we think if we bring our capabilities and theirs together, we'll really be able to create a very differentiated solution for our Unified Commerce customers, especially in retail.

As for the second question on AI and the benefits in fraud. In recent years, we have changed from a more static rule system for fraud to a more machine learning AI-based system. That's really improved the performance of our capabilities. And I think it's hard to quantify exactly the impact in the way that you frame it. But I think one of the good data points I can give is that we're seeing the vast majority of customers who sign up with us choose to use our Protect offering, so our fraud offering from day 1. So our customers are seeing the advantages of leveraging these capabilities to help protect against fraud in their own payments ecosystem. And I think that's a good proof point to the quality of the offering.

Great. Thank you for your questions, Josh. The next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW.

I was wondering if you could just, Ethan, talk about whether or not you see -- you saw any changes in spending behavior as described by some in the space? I know that the volume numbers came in a little bit better. But anything to parse out underneath that, that sort of might be concerning or anything like that? And then as we look at the outlook, is there any weakness sort of built or baked into that, given all the geopolitical stuff?

And then maybe just a second question. I'll ask 2 upfront. I know you guys spent a lot of time, Ingo did, talking about agentic commerce. How is and how Adyen is going to sort of play a critical role? And I'm sure you've seen what the networks have sort of outlined in terms of what they want to do in terms of their protocols. So I'm just curious if what the networks are thinking about doing versus what you guys are thinking about doing or at odds with each other? Or do you think that it's complementary and sort of how it plays into the economics of your business?

Sure. So let's start with what we're seeing on consumer spend. Of course, there's been a lot of discussion about it over the last few months. So it's something that we've looked into closely. We've looked at it across verticals. We looked across it -- at it across regions. We haven't seen that there's been a change in consumer spending behavior with our customers on our platform with the data set that we have. And so that's also as we looked at it over recent weeks and months. So we haven't seen a real change that's noticeable thus far.

In terms of our outlook and what's built into our numbers, I'll maybe start again at how we described it in February when we shared this guide, at least for our revenue growth for the year, which was that a big part of our growth, right, it comes from expanding market share, and that comes from growing share of wallet with our existing customers that comes from ramping up new customers. But there is a portion of our growth which comes from the organic growth of our own customer base. We call that the market volume growth. And the way we thought about market volume growth as part of our guidance is that we had an expectation that given the macroeconomic uncertainty we were seeing that it would be in the low end of the range that we had previously talked about when we talked about the building blocks. That's consistent with what we saw in practice last year in 2025 when we also saw macroeconomic impacts, especially around tariffs and the APAC-based retailers we talked about last year. So we've taken that same assumption into this year. And that's what we continue to expect for the rest of the year. We're tracking well in line with our expectations. And so we've, of course, reconfirmed our view for 2026 broadly.

To your last question on agentic, our approach is very much that we see this fragmentation, right? It's the networks. It's the frontier models. It's other players in the space who are building out protocols, and we see that, that's leading to a fragmented environment. That's complexity. That's something that we can help solve for with our customers, ensure that those protocols are built in a way that serves our merchants. And so our view is very much to be agnostic to support the protocols, which are relevant to our customers and to build together with them. So we don't see it as at odds with our strategy.

The next question comes from Justin Forsythe from UBS.

So a couple, if I don't mind here. Firstly, I just wanted to confirm the phasing. I believe in the past, you said that 1Q would be your expected lowest growth quarter of the year due to the impact of the de minimis merchants, the APAC merchants flowing through and then being lapped in the beginning of May. Can you confirm that that's still true? And then also, I believe 3Q was expected to be lower growth in 4Q as it relates to the comparisons. Could you just maybe confirm that phasing for us?

And a follow-up question on Talon.One. So very simply, the name of the game in payments often has been shopping cart conversion, which I believe is on average, and this obviously varies, but around 20%, give or take. Do you have an idea of how much Talon.One uplifts your shopping cart conversion of an average merchant?

Sure. So first on cadence, what we've shared and what we will continue to share is that our view is that H1 and H2 look relatively similar in terms of their growth levels. Within the first half, we did call out that we expected Q1 to be lower than Q2. That's indeed, to your point, because of the easing of the comparable in Q2 related to those APAC-based retailers. And that continues to be our expectation. And then we expect the second half growth to be similar to the first half.

In terms of the question on Talon.One's uplift on shopper -- shopping cart conversion, I don't have a precise number to share, but what I would say is that, that's very specific to Digital, right, to e-commerce transactions. And that's where we do expect we can certainly add value to our business, to our customers. That's where Talon.One has been very successful in adding value with their customer base. But where we also see a major opportunity when we work together, when we come together as a company is that we can also influence and impact the in-person piece, which remember is the much bigger part of transactions for most retailers. And so if we can ultimately identify who's shopping in store and help them optimize for the lifetime value of that shopper more broadly, whether that's all in store, partly online, we think that's where there's going to be a really big impact for our customers and also as we expand to markets where we're less penetrated like domestic in U.S., U.K. or newer verticals like everyday retail. And I think that combination, that true Unified Commerce experience is where we'll create a big part of the value.

Got it. That's crystal clear. And just, you know, you're not going to share any view on the 3Q versus 4Q comments then, I presume?

No. We try to stay away from guiding on the quarter. We wanted to share where relevant, which we felt like for Q1, it was important to share our phasing through the first half. Through the rest of the year, we don't expect anything material that we want to share.

Thank you, Justin. The next question comes from Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo.

So I just wanted to start on the competitive environment and the pricing backdrop. Ethan, if you can just give us your latest views there? Any changes along those lines? I mean it did look like Digital revenue grew a little slower than volume in the quarter, but I'm sure that could have been a function of mix as well. So that's really the first question.

And then my second question is just coming back on agentic. I know last quarter, you mentioned some shifting merchant priorities, moving towards asking Adyen to help with agentic initiatives. Can you maybe just give some examples of the types of work you're doing with merchants now as they prepare for agentic?

Sure. So let's start on the competitive and the pricing dynamic. I wouldn't say there's anything specific to call out that we've seen so far this year different to what we've seen over the last few. In general, take rate mix is most -- our take rate is mostly a function of the mix. Larger customers are typically priced lower. We highlighted in this business update that we're expanding some of our partnerships with some of the largest customers or businesses that we work with, and that expansion with large customers has the biggest influence on take rate mix. There's nothing specific in the pricing landscape itself that's driving that change.

And on agentic, in terms of merchant priorities, I'd highlight a couple. One is they're seeing this fragmentation with the protocols, and they're trying to get a grasp of what do they build towards, how do they solve for the complexity that exists if there is this fragmented landscape, and how do we ensure amongst those protocols that merchant interests are front and center as they build out those protocols. That's one.

Second thing I'd call out is that while there's very little actual agentic commerce payments transactions flowing through just with agents today, there is a lot of discovery already happening, right, product discovery. So where we're also spending a good amount of time with our customers is how do we ensure that their product catalog, that their product data feeds are available on these LLMs, on these [ services ] so that they can be discovered. And then everything beyond that can happen post that discovery moment. But they're very much first focused on making sure that product catalog is discoverable.

And maybe the last thing that I'd mention, which is connected in many ways to how the protocols are being developed is that trust is so important in this setup. In agentic commerce, it will be so important to understand what is a legitimate transaction and what is a fraudulent transaction. And it looks very different than it looks previously in other forms of e-commerce in the past. And so just ensuring that we are building towards protocols, which will help create that trust in this ecosystem is a big area we spend time on, both with merchants but also with those who are working on developing the protocols.

The next question comes from Fred Boulan at Bank of America.

Two questions. Firstly, to follow up on the competition question. We've had one of your competitors announcing a reading list of products, conference last week. Any specific areas looking at your own capability set where you're thinking to just kind of step up product investment to remain a leader in innovation?

And second, this morning, you mentioned a strong capital position, giving you possibility to drive further growth, shareholder value. Can you elaborate and share your framework to evaluate external growth as cash return, any specific cash position you want to retain you think is optimal to achieve your long-term goals?

Sure. First, on competitive landscape. I would say we're very much focused on how we can differentiate our offering and create value for our customers, right? One of the good examples of it recently is the acquisition of Talon.One, we think for retailers, especially, but also more broadly in Unified Commerce, we'll really be able to differentiate and create value. We also launched in the first quarter our Intelligent Money Movement offering. We think that, that will really help enterprises manage end-to-end money movement as well. And there's a lot of areas we're continuing to focus beyond that on driving product innovation and differentiation. So we're very much focused on building for our customer base, solving their biggest needs, thinking about those needs, not only over the short term, but truly over the long term as well. And that's how we think about building out our product road map. So we're really excited by the products that we're building, by the value we'll be able to create for merchants as we not only move from just payments but also move up funnel, as Ingo mentioned, and also post payments to the optimization that happens around financial products. So those are all areas we're excited about and building against.

In terms of the framework to evaluate capital decisions, I would say it looks very much similar to what we shared back in November, which is we think that the biggest shareholder value will be driven by growth. Still, first and foremost, we're focused on driving that growth organically. But we've always looked opportunistically at if there were inorganic opportunities as well. Of course, this is the first time we've taken action or at least gotten to the point of signing agreement. We're really excited by the potential, again, of what Talon.One brings to us as we bring our offerings together, but we continue to have that focus, first and foremost, on growth. So there's no shift in terms of our preference for focusing on organic growth. That continues to be our focus. But we will also be opportunistic if there are further opportunities on the inorganic side. There's no strategic shift here, but that hasn't changed. And then if we look at broader options around capital allocation, we feel that we have, in general, the flexibility, even after this transaction, given the strength of our financial position to still have the freedom to look at what the right options are at the right moment. And so we'll continue to consider what makes most sense for our business. First and foremost, focusing on driving growth and therefore, shareholder value.

Great. Thank you, Fred. The next question comes from Ramsey El-Assal from Cantor Fitzgerald.

I wanted to ask about the sales force, and you mentioned adding 88 hires in the quarter. It was a little less than we expected just given the 550 to 650 planned hires. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the cadence of the hiring and also how that might read through to the cadence of margins as we move through the year?

Sure. I think you're right in your assessment that it's lower than what we would expect in future quarters, given our hiring plan for the year hasn't changed. It's by no means a target. It's our expectation around how we think we'll grow the team. Again, that expectation hasn't changed, but hiring is much less science than it is an art. And so you'll see variability from quarter-to-quarter in the number of net people that joined the team.

In terms of what it means for EBITDA margins and the cadence there, it has relatively limited effect on EBITDA margins quarter-by-quarter because mostly the new hires are a small fraction of the total employee population. And so it has relatively limited impact. So I wouldn't take too much consideration into the pace of hiring into your EBITDA margin cadence. I would add though that historically and also what we expect for this year is that we'll see higher EBITDA margins in the second half than we'll see in the first half, that's just connected to some of the costs that we have -- that occurred in the first half, but also the size of the revenues in the second half compared to the first.

Great. The next question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein.

Ingo, I want to revisit stablecoins. I know you've not seen demand from enterprise customers, which makes complete sense. But as you grow your Intelligent Money Movement business, are you seeing a bit more conversations around stablecoins, for example, in payout in emerging markets.

And then my second question, I also want to ask about your opportunity with AI-native customers. Are there some capabilities, for example, usage-based billing that you're looking to build before you address this exponentially growing vertical?

Thanks, Harshita. You've got me today. So I'll take these questions. First on stablecoins. Certainly, there's a use case around global payouts related to stablecoins. And as part of our Intelligent Money Movement offering, payouts are our core offering. We've been very focused on delivering, especially in our core markets, a really strong payout solution. We've done that through our own banking licenses, through direct connectivity to often real-time rails in some of our biggest markets. But there is the potential that over time as we want to expand our payouts offering into more markets, especially more long tail markets that stablecoins could support there. So we'll continue to consider what's most relevant and what best supports and helps our customers over time and we'll build accordingly.

In terms of what capabilities for AI native customers, I think we have a very strong offering, especially as these customers grow to significant enterprise scale. That's typically where you see the complexity around the global payment needs, right? So local payment methods, but also acquiring capabilities in many markets, so that kind of local positioning, but then on a global scale. You see that there's often a need as they grow to have multiple partners in multiple geographies. That's pretty common of what we've seen enterprises grow into over the years. And I think we'll continue to see that also in this segment.

In terms of capabilities, you mentioned billing specifically. Billing is an area where we've partnered with, we've partnered with others who offer those capabilities over the years. Of course, because it is very adjacent to payments, it's something that we've looked at strategically and gone the partnership route. And we'll continue to look at how we can best solve these kind of challenges for our customers.

Thank you, Harshita. The next question comes from Adam Frisch at Evercore.

Dovetailing a little bit from a prior question on the outlook. I think as we move past the first quarter that's seasonally slower and now almost halfway through the year, assuming the visibility on the [ yearly ]1 increases and build some confidence. So is there anything, Ethan, because this execution for the rest of the year, I just think is so critical for the stock. Is there anything in the remainder of the year, some convergence, ramp-ups, wallet share gains, et cetera, where you could see a potential surprise either higher or lower?

And then on capital allocation, don't shoot me for asking a more pointed question. I know you're -- he just asked it a couple of questions ago. But can I ask you a more pointed one about buybacks and where your thought process is on buybacks?

Sure. So first on the outlook, of course, there's still a lot of execution to go in the year. So we're very much focused on the opportunities ahead of us on expanding share of wallet with our existing base, ramping up our new customers, adding new ones in the pipeline. We're very much focused on that execution. From my perspective, the way Adyen has been trending so far this year has gone very well. It's well in line with what we were expecting coming into this year. And there's nothing that's come up through the course of these few months that gives me any reason to think differently. Of course, we will continue to focus on that execution, and we'll share updates as we go throughout the year. But I feel like we're in a very solid and strong position to execute on the plans that we had coming into this year.

In terms of capital allocation and my thoughts on buybacks, it's something that we consider. Our first focus, as I mentioned, is delivering growth, and we think that, that adds the most shareholder value. At the same time, we also need to consider if other options make sense. So it's something that we'll continue to consider moving forward.

Okay. The next question comes from Andrew Schmidt at KeyBanc.

I wanted to ask about travel. It's obviously been a focal point of the Visa and Mastercard prints in the quarter-to-date metrics. Can you just talk about sort of Adyen's exposure? I know there's some OTA exposure there and any observations? And then maybe just a higher-level question, subset of agentic, but more on machine payments, some questions about ability to participate there in terms of traditional network transactions given the micro payment angle. Maybe you could just talk about if there's an opportunity for Adyen with machine payments specifically as it relates to micro payments?

Sure. Let me start on travel. Travel for us is essentially 3 verticals. It's airlines, it's OTAs, as you referenced and it's hospitality. So think of hotels primarily. When we look at our growth thus far this year in travel, we see a strong performance. It's again, well in line with our expectations. We also don't see real change over the last couple of months. So it continues to perform well. That's on an aggregated basis because, of course, in pockets, you see different trends, right? For instance, in airlines, if you're -- if you have exposure to Middle East hubs, that's been negatively impacted over the last couple of months. But conversely, we see some of our APAC-based airlines seeing positive benefits, so to say, as some of the international travel that previously went through the Middle East is now going through APAC. And I think that's a good example of the type of diversification that we've generally seen, not only across the platform, across our full customer base, but also when you look into travel specifically. We have customers across each of the regions, but we also work with many of the largest players in these verticals, and they often have quite a diversified exposure, whether that's across regions, across types of transactions. And so we haven't seen much shift there at all in travel.

In terms of your question on agentic and machine initiated payments. We've joined a few initiatives that you've seen us post about over the last month or 2, really focused on how we can also help enable these -- this new version of how payments may exist. And there's absolutely an opportunity to use our infrastructure to support and help customers as these means of paying change. So we are -- yes, we're working on it. What we feel we're positioned, and we'll see how it plays out. But we certainly can help.

The next one comes from Sandeep Deshpande from JPMorgan.

My question is regarding your cost structure here. You've said that your margins are flattish from last year. Can you talk about these new products that you're building and what kind of revenue they have produced in the first quarter or in the past couple of quarters in terms of where your revenue growth is coming there as well as the kind of revenue growth you expect? And what time frame we should expect to see these new products driving revenue growth for Adyen? And I have a quick follow-up.

Sure. So maybe the two that I would highlight is maybe, one, embedded financial products, financial products more broadly, which is, of course, a core focus for us. We talked in November that we expect that to be about 1% of additional growth. We're seeing somewhere near there so far this year. We'll continue to, of course, very much focus on financial products. It's still a very important part of our strategy. We see it as core to our offering, and we're continuing to focus on financial products. The other one I'd just directly comment on is the acquisition of Talon.One. Maybe just to reiterate, we don't expect a material financial impact given the timing of expected closing for this year, but we do expect 1% to 2% of additional growth in 2027. The rest is kind of built in and baked into the broader revenue discussions that we've been having.

Great. Sandeep, I'm sorry, it auto mutes sometimes. So you can send us your follow-up question. The next question comes from Bryan Bergin from TD Cowen.

So 2 for me. The first one, just on geographies. So can you just talk about what you saw in Europe versus North American margins independent of the APAC-based impact? Just really more interested in the underlying trends in 1Q and any variation noted in the geos through April?

And then the second question, just on the Talon.One, a clarification on the impact. Can you just expand here on that margin dilution that you flagged for 2027? I know it's very early to be talking about '27, but I just want to confirm the base that you're talking about, whether it's the 2026 EBITDA margin level that we should be thinking about flying that dilution on or some assumption of organic EBITDA margin expansion in '27 that would be a higher base than '26 to apply that dilution assumption to?

Sure. So first on geographies, I'll keep it specific to what we're seeing around consumer spend because I think that's the reference of the question, which is that we're not seeing impacts on the various regions, right? So we've taken a look at both the regional cut and the vertical cut. And to date, whether we look at that over the last few weeks or months, we haven't seen that there's been an impact that we can see in those regions.

In terms of the Talon.One margin question, our view is that '26 is not impacted due to timing and still that we will be above 55% EBITDA margin in 2028. In terms of the progress towards that EBITDA margin. We will share more, of course, as we get to 2027. What we did want to share is that compared to the base case, it would be 1% lower. And we'll, of course, get a better view of hiring plans and how we want to grow, how we expect the business to grow and how we'll grow the team, which will have the biggest impact there. But our view is still very much in line that 2028, we think we'll be above 55%. This year will remain flat. And next year, we'll see a 1% dilution to whatever that base case will be and we'll, of course, share that as we get close to the year.

The next question comes from Hannes Leitner from Jefferies.

Yes. I have a question on Unified Commerce. I mean the -- yes, it is still volatile in terms of the KPIs, and you should look at it on a 12-months rolling basis. But it seems still that you do a great job of expanding share of wallet gains. So when you look at any of the KPIs per volume or net revenue, they all point northwards. But then in terms of KPIs adding merchants, it feels that you have kind of panned out to a certain 12-month rolling basis. So maybe you can just talk how do you think there is the net hires, specifically in Unified Commerce to give that boost, also Talon.One should maybe add there some and maybe along the lines here, thinking about the growth regions, Japan, India and Mexico along with Brazil.

Yes, sure. So maybe let's start on the secondary questions on are you hiring, where are we focused on. Of course, we're hiring for Unified Commerce. That's a part of where we're hiring. It continues to be an important focus area for us. So yes, we're growing at the teams, whether that's commercial or on the tech side. We're continuing to expand the teams working on Unified Commerce. Talon.One certainly helps us in this area. We think that we can strongly differentiate for customers when we put our capabilities together, especially in retail, right? And I mentioned it earlier on the call, but it's not only adding value to our existing customers, but it also, in our view, helps us expand to a broader set of retailers whether that's domestic in large markets or everyday retail vertical where we're underrepresented today.

And then India and Japan. Japan is certainly a market that we're very much focused on Unified Commerce. India, we're focused on Digital only at the moment. We may, at some point, also expand into Unified Commerce. But Japan is more the focus of those 2 on the Unified Commerce side.

Then let me come back to the first question you asked, which is the difference between how some of the KPIs are developing and how the act -- overall business is developing. I think what you've seen us do over the last -- a little while is we focused especially on the largest part of the enterprise segment within Unified Commerce. And that means we're going after very, very large merchants in this space. There's still a lot to win on the new business side, and there's a lot of share of wallet to gain on the existing side. So I'd say we're much more focused on the size of the opportunities than on the number of customers by themselves at this point.

Great. Thank you, Hannes. We have time for just one more question, and that is going to come from Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs.

Great. Ethan, I had 2 quick ones. Number one, Ethan, you said that you haven't seen any sort of change in consumer spending behavior among your customers or on your platform. You also called a lot out around sort of wallet share gains. I know it's early in the year. You talked about the shifting priorities. So is it fair to say that perhaps your visibility on some of those wallet share gains is better and allows you to be somewhat -- offset the macro?

And secondly, I know you also mentioned some new cohorts ramping and last year was a very strong cohort. Any initial thoughts on how the kind of 2026 cohort is shaping up?

Sure. So I think you asked a very important question, which is the connection between kind of the market volume growth or the macro impacted organic growth of our customers and wallet share gains. In our view, they're mixed, right? So we see growth on our platform with our existing customers coming from both of those areas. So we don't always have exactly precise data of which part is organic versus wallet share gains. We do mapped them out separately. And what I would say on wallet share gains is that is a big part of how we think about the opportunity in any given year, and that's trending nicely for us so far this year. We're off to a strong start. We've been able to expand with our customers where we thought we would be able to expand and grow with them and we're seeing nice traction there. So I'm very pleased with what we're seeing on our ability to win more share of wallet with our existing base, and deliver that at an execution level that we would expect.

In terms of your second question on the 2026 cohort, it is very early in the year. So it's difficult to give very clear responses or directional responses. But all I would share is that the 2026 cohort is continuing to trend positively, similar to what we saw over the last year. We're still seeing strong performance out of new business so far this year. It is very early. We'll need to continue to, of course, track that over time. But we're off to a good start there as well.

Great. Thank you, Mo. That's all the time that we have today. So thank you everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. And if you have any further questions, please reach out to the Investor Relations team. Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. My name is Isaac Lima, and I'm on the Investor Relations team here at Adyen. Today, we will be discussing Adyen's acquisition of Talon.One. As this is an M&A-focused call, we will not be commenting on current trading or our quarterly results beyond the brief update that Ethan will provide later.

With me on the call today are Ingo Uytdehaage, our Co-CEO; and Ethan Tandowsky, our CFO. Before we begin, let me remind you that some statements we make today will be forward-looking. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Furthermore, the transaction we are discussing is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, and there is no guarantee as to if or when it will be completed.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Ingo.

Thanks, Isaac. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today, we are announcing the acquisition of Talon.One, a move that represents a natural evolution of our platform and a direct response to our merchant needs and priorities in a rapidly changing commerce landscape. Talon.One is a leading customer engagement platform and incentives engine headquartered in Berlin. Since its founding in 2015, Talon.One has quickly become a critical partner for over 300 global merchants, including names like Nordstrom and H&M. Their API-first platform powers enterprise loyalty management, personalized promotions and incentive optimization.

This acquisition builds on our Unified Commerce strategy, a core part of our focus for years. For many merchants, turning data into action in real time remains a significant challenge, and this move is designed to solve it. I want to outline the 3 reasons why it's relevant to us. First, we combine our identity capabilities with the SKU data and promotion capabilities of Talon.One. Retailers can now implement real-time price decisioning in each channel, online, in-store, but also in an agentic world. This does not yet exist, and it's hard to replicate if you don't own a full stack like we will together with Talon.One. We can offer this both to our existing and Talon.One's customers.

Second, we move from providing insights to real-time actions and from focusing on payments to revenue management or customer lifetime value optimization. And lastly, with this combination, we are ready for new verticals where this differentiation is crucial like everyday retail and for domestic retailers in large domestic markets like the U.S. and the U.K. This also leads to a new added value that we can provide.

Talon.One's growth has been remarkable with ARR growing at around 30% to 40% annually over the past years. The team has a high-growth mindset, is entrepreneurial and shares a very strong cultural fit with Adyen. Importantly, Talon.One's merchant base overlaps meaningfully with Adyen's supporting seamless integration and scale. We are investing to address emerging models like Agentic Commerce, where decisions are made much earlier in the shopping journey.

The combination of Adyen and Talon.One positions us to address a long-standing and pivotal customer need. With a combined offering, we empower our merchants to influence what is shown and sold to each of their customers, ensuring they remain in control of the relationship across every channel.

Now I will pass over to Ethan to go through some financial details on the transaction.

Thanks, Ingo. As Ingo highlighted, the acquisition of Talon.One is a significant step to advance our long-term strategy to help merchants succeed across sales channels by delivering a truly unified experience. Turning to the transaction itself. We've entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 100% of Talon.One shares for a total consideration of EUR 750 million, financed with our available cash. As part of the agreement, Talon.One's co-founders will reinvest a meaningful portion of their proceeds into newly issued Adyen ordinary shares, ensuring deep long-term alignment with limited dilutive impact.

We expect the transaction to take up to 5 months to close as it is subject to regulatory approvals from the Dutch Central Bank. Talon.One has achieved remarkable success and is on track to generate approximately EUR 60 million in ARR by the end of this year. Now regarding the impact on our financials. Given the anticipated timing of the transaction close and the relative scale of our business, we do not expect a material impact on our 2026 net revenue or EBITDA. We will share more details on the full year impact as we approach the close of the transaction.

Looking ahead, we do expect this acquisition to be supportive of our net revenue growth over time. In 2027, we anticipate 1 to 2 percentage points of incremental growth from Talon.One. In terms of margins, we anticipate a modest margin dilution of approximately 1 percentage point versus our stand-alone expectation in 2027 as we integrate and invest in scaling our new customer engagement and loyalty offering. Despite this near-term increase in costs, our 2028 target for EBITDA margin above 55% remains unchanged.

I also want to provide a brief update on our current business momentum separate from this transaction. We are off to a strong start to the year. In the first quarter, we saw net revenue growth of 20% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, which was well in line with our expectations. We are reiterating our full year 2026 guidance of 20% to 22% net revenue growth on a constant currency basis and our expectation for the 2026 EBITDA margin to remain broadly in line with 2025.

To be explicit, we are not adjusting our expectations for the year due to this transaction for the reasons mentioned earlier. Our underlying business remains strong, driven by continued expansion within our existing merchant base and steady new wins. We will provide the full breakdown of our Q1 results, including net revenue and processed volume by pillar during our scheduled update on May 6. We will not be providing further commentary on Q1 performance today and look forward to addressing those questions then.

Finally, a word on capital allocation. This acquisition is directly aligned with our capital allocation approach. While organic growth remains our primary engine, this deal demonstrates our readiness to act decisively with M&A when we find a technology and team that significantly broadens our offering and creates clear long-term value. We are incredibly excited about the value this will unlock for our merchants and our long-term growth trajectory.

Separately, even with this transaction, we maintain the flexibility for a range of capital allocation decisions. We are focused on leveraging our strong balance sheet to drive shareholder value.

Now I'm going to turn it back to Ingo to quickly summarize the key strategic takeaways and why we are so excited about this opportunity.

Yes. So to recap the reasons that we're so excited about joining forces with Talon.One. First, we combine our identity capabilities with the data and promotion capabilities of Talon.One, enabling retailers to implement real-time price decisioning across channels, including Agentic Commerce. Second, we move beyond just optimizing payments and can actively manage our merchants revenue and customer lifetime value. Third, we unlock critical new verticals and regions. It positions us to win on everyday retail and with major domestic brands, accelerating our ability to gain market share.

With that, Ethan and I are happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Andrew Schmidt from KeyBanc.

Congrats on this acquisition that helps you move up the stack. So just maybe some clarification on build versus buy. This does seem like a little bit of a different capability set. But if you could talk about that a little bit. And then maybe just the Adyen platform, a hallmark of the Adyen platform has always been sort of the single organic nature of the tech stack. And obviously, this is a bolt-on. But maybe if you could talk about how you maintain that tech stack advantage while doing this acquisition and potentially more, that would be great.

Thanks, Andrew. So indeed, if we look into new areas, we always ask ourselves the question, are we going to build or are we going to buy? And this is the first time that we did an acquisition. And the reason why we've done that is because it's not just about the technology. It's also about the inroads into different teams. Talon.One has great relationships with marketing teams of enterprise merchants, and that's really in line with the area that we want to play. Next to that, they're enterprise focused. And I think that is also very helpful in our proposition to merchants.

So it's that combination of knowledge on loyalty, the inroads to customers, the different revenue pool that they unlock through the marketing revenue pool that they typically address that makes us to do this acquisition, and that's why we buy instead of build here.

Then if you think about our tech stack, of course, we did technical diligence on the architecture of Talon.One. And we think that it's very good in line with what we have built so far. Of course, we look if we're going to integrate the product also into our platform to see how we can further improve this. But of course, it's not an additional payments platform. I think we have always been very keen to making sure that we keep a single payment stack. That's still the case. We now expand our capabilities, and we will make sure that the technical architecture will be aligned over the future.

The next question comes from Justin Forsythe from UBS.

Congrats on the quarter and an interesting foray into M&A here. So a couple of questions from my end, if you don't mind. Just can you help me understand a little bit how you plan to monetize the solution going forward. So does it have tie-ins to the way that you monetize loyalty today? How does Talon.One monetize their solution today. And you can walk maybe a little bit through the synergy expectation going forward on the revenue side. I would imagine, yes, of course, you get the uplift of the 1 to 2 points next year in '27, as you mentioned, Ethan, but how do you think about the longer-term synergy opportunity there?

And then just a follow-on here. I think one question might be, you have this Unified tech stack. One of your advantages is supposed to be data. I fully appreciate and understand that SKU level data is not something that merchant acquirers typically have access to. And so that will make you unique on the merchant acquiring proposition. But could you maybe talk then about the tie-ins to agentic and what that means for your proposition in the future. Meaning I imagine merchants, and you said this before, are quite nervous about loyalty going forward with agentic commerce and the shifts in distribution channels. So maybe you could just walk us through both of those.

Yes. So I think to your first question, Justin, on monetization. I think at the moment, nothing changes. So we'll continue to follow the joint strategies that both of our businesses have for our existing customers. Today, how Talon.One monetizes is typically a platform fee. So essentially a subscription that they charge to their customer as well as some components of usage-based. As we think that this will drive significant value, both for our existing customers and as we expand into newer markets, like we mentioned domestic retail, we talked about everyday retail. We'll follow the same approach we always have, which is creating differentiation, creating value for our customers and monetizing accordingly.

In terms of your question on how we think about synergy expectations going forward, certainly, we see this acquisition as very strategic. We think that this will be very supportive to driving growth in our Unified Commerce segment over time. The way we plan to integrate this acquisition is ultimately to fully integrate it. And because of that, we'll look at a joint proposition like I just mentioned. I share the more near-term expectations because that's also how we plan to guide the market going forward as we started with in February. We'll give an annual view each year as we develop. And over time, we don't expect to report on this separately. We expect that we'll drive that integration together as a team and work to drive value for our customers.

And let me answer the question on how this also works with agentic commerce space. How we look at it is that, of course, what we have built over time is the dynamic identification layer, which enables us to basically detect who is transacting. If you combine that with the SKU level data of Talon.One, we are in a position that we are also really well prepared for agentic commerce because what is relevant in agentic commerce, that's also what we've heard based on the interviews with all our merchants is that we get a way to publish the product catalog of our merchants. And this is exactly the SKU level data that Talon.One owns.

So making that available together with our capability of identifying consumers through this dynamic identification layer brings us in a perfect position to provide agentic commerce to our merchants. And this is what we are already building right now on the Adyen side and with the SKU level data on the Talon.One side, it will be even better, and that's why we're so excited about this.

Next question comes from Craig Maurer from FT Partners.

I was curious if you could discuss how much overlap there might be in terms of brands and merchants between the 2 businesses? And how much of this represented a lead gen opportunity for Adyen versus just an opportunity to extend the identity layer and connect both sides with existing customers.

Yes. So there's about 60 customers that we have an overlap in out of the 300 in total. So of course, the first thing we will do is work with customers that we both have to see how we can quickly make the improvements that we think is possible right now with this combined stack. And then, of course, the Talon.One team has then access to the customers we have and vice versa. So that's a huge opportunity for both of us, so for the new company.

Next question comes from Klaus Gala from MCH.

So the differentiation seems to be owning the prepayment decisioning. So the thesis here, what it sounds like is consolidate the marketing, tech and promotion stack into your infrastructure. I'm just trying to understand, there's a range of loyalty vendors already, Salesforce, Adobe that have deep merchant relationships. Can you help us think about the wedge that helps you bypass those relationships where there are long-term marketing contracts.

I think what we believe is not out there is the capability to do this in the Unified Commerce space. So specifically in-store, a lot of retailers still struggle to connect the consumer with the right promotion. And what you also can see that Talon.One has a lot of technical integrations with all kind of commerce players. This is the real question that retailers have. So how do I recognize the customer in-store and then how can I actionize it? And we believe that there are no other players that can do this in the way that we can do this combined. So that's why we're so excited about it.

Next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW.

I'm curious if we should look at this deal as a strategy pivot and that Adyen might now do more bolt-on deals here? And if so, sort of what areas are you looking at to expand your capabilities. And then Ingo, that last example that you gave in terms of Talon.One and sort of what they're able to do with the assets you have, could you just bring that to life a little bit for us. Like we go to Nike and I go to the Nike store and basically, I get a customized offer there. Maybe you could just explain that a little bit more for me.

Yes, sure. So this is not a strategy pivot. So what we see that this is basically the next step in Unified Commerce. And we see that a lot of retailers have difficulties bringing loyalty into action. And then we ask ourselves, okay, what is the best way to get here. And that's how we landed on Talon.One. We still have an organic growth strategy, and we have no imminent plans right now to do that differently. Then on your question for examples to bring it to life. Indeed, if you're in a store and you, for instance, tap your card, we know exactly who you are if you have registered with that merchant. We can then, for instance, give a promotion that we immediately load into the cash register, for instance, give you a discount or with that data, we can later on send you a more detailed promotion offer.

So for instance, I'm wearing a light blue shirt right now that I bought for full price in October. There is a dark blue shirt available end of sale in Overstock. And you know exactly who has bought that shirt also in store and can send them a targeted e-mail with an offer to this customer. These are the kind of use cases that retailers are looking for and that we together can offer to our customers.

Next question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein.

So Ethan, maybe can you refresh us on kind of the capital allocation framework. I know you commented on that earlier. It looks like there's a little bit more openness to doing tuck-ins, but you also have a lot of cash on your balance sheet. So maybe talk about also shareholder returns via buybacks or dividends, especially also considering how much cash you generate in a year.

Yes, sure. Happy to. So as we've shared previously, our primary focus is on driving growth. And primarily, that's through organic means as it always has been. That remains still the case today. So we're very much focused on driving organic growth through continuing to invest in the business as we've done. As growth is also the clearest way that we can drive shareholder value, we've also had an openness to looking at also inorganic means of doing so. Of course, we haven't done that to date until today, where, of course, we're very excited to see this acquisition get to signing and to bring in Talon.One.

We saw this as a great opportunity to add capabilities, to add a talented team, to add deep expertise, all the things that Ingo mentioned earlier. And that will help us continue to drive growth over time. So we're still very much focused on driving growth in general. That focus, though, it doesn't preclude us from having further financial flexibility for a range of different capital allocation decisions because even with this transaction, we feel that we are in a strong financial position. Of course, there's a number of considerations. We shared the regulatory approval process that we will now follow with the Dutch Central Bank. That also applies to a number of different capital allocation options that we also have, but we'll continue to focus on delivering what's best for our business and delivering shareholder value over time. I think we remain flexible even following this transaction.

The next question comes from Adam Frisch from Evercore.

Congrats on the acquisition. I think it makes a lot of sense. But you've been -- some people, not everyone, have kind of talked about your agentic strategy. I think this one kind of lands really, really well to kind of refute some of the concerns that some people may have had. It sounds like what you're doing is using your processing engine that you already have with merchants that love and trust you and you're almost forming like a consumer aspect to that network without having to own a consumer business through Talon.One so you can match up consumers and preferences and loyalty with your processing platform that obviously has lower fraud and chargebacks and higher approval rates and all that.

Is that the right way to think about this as a very slick way to form a dual-sided network for merchants and consumers where merchants are trusting you with their catalog data to do agentic the right way where they're not disintermediated from their customers. Is that the right way to think about this?

Well, of course, agentic is one of the applications that we see, but it's not the only reason why we're doing it. So I think, first and foremost, retailers today still struggle to combine actions on in-store and online transactions. And I think that's what, first and foremost, we want to achieve here. Then, of course, on the agentic play side, you're right. It's very important for retailers to continue to have a relationship with the consumer behind the agent.

And of course, by recognizing consumers and by recognizing agents, we are capable of capturing this and making sure that retailers continue to have this connection and build indeed on the trust that we have with our customers. So in that sense, it's certainly going to help us in the agentic play. But it's not the main reason why we're doing this acquisition. It further helps us to position us there, but also the problems that retailers still have in store need to be solved first.

Got it. And just a clarification on Harshita's question. Ethan, does this mean that share buybacks are still something that's on the table for you to consider in the future at a future date?

Yes. We still think that we have a strong balance sheet and flexibility given our financial position and our cash generation. So it's certainly among the options that we are considering.

Next question comes from Darrin Peller from Wolfe Research.

This is Paul Obrecht on for Darrin. Ingo, in addition to loyalty and incentives, what are other areas in the Unified Commerce landscape that Adyen perhaps doesn't necessarily address today, but could in the future to expand its value proposition?

That's a fair question. I think for now, we focus on this loyalty. And I think you need to see it slightly broader. It's not just loyalty, it's the way how we help retailers to optimize their revenues. That's what we're going to build together with Talon.One. And because we can do this together really well, I don't expect that we need to do any additional acquisitions now.

Next question comes from Hannes Leitner from Jefferies.

Congrats to the first acquisition. Can you maybe help us understand how this should basically feed back into a higher share of wallet. And should we expect now Unified Commerce to kind of break out of the roughly 30% year-over-year growth you have been doing. Or is this rather more to be seen as a revenue driver to supercharge Talon who seems to have been still in funding mode. And then maybe just a clarification for Ethan on the guidance part for this year, given you have said that this is separate and so we should expect this coming then on top and you report both separately clearly because of IFRS rules.

Yes. So let me start with the first part on essentially how you should think about this in terms of the building blocks. I think that's the first question that you outlined. There's a couple of ways. One is that these are offerings that we believe we will be able to monetize both with our existing customers, whether those are joint existing customers today, existing customers of Adyen or existing customers of Talon.One. And so there will be an additional monetization component on the current volumes that we have.

There is, of course, also the opportunity when you provide more value to gain more share of wallet with our existing customers. So there's some part of that. But the biggest opportunity we see is one that will play out over a few years, which is we also think that this expands our offering into newer verticals and parts of the market that we're underrepresented in today. Think about everyday retail as a vertical. Think about domestic markets, right, in large domestic markets, there's often pretty sizable significant enterprise-level domestic retailers. So we think we can win a bigger part of that market as well by combining our offerings. That I would look at as new wins that will play out over time.

If I just come back once more to the pricing part, I think if you think about where we are today, we are often selling into payments teams, to finance teams. What this really opens up is another revenue pool that's often managed by marketing teams. And so if you put that together with the current monetization strategy we have, we think that given the value we can create as a joint company, we'll be able to access that as well.

As to your point around if we will expect UC to break out, I think in the end, it still will take us some time to close the deal. Then we'll work together on building a solution. We'll first focus on our joint customers. We'll move more broadly into the existing customers that either one of us have. And then, of course, expand into newer markets. This will take some time to play out. So I wouldn't expect it to change overnight, but I think we're really, really excited by the potential here to drive value, to expand our offering, to expand into markets we're not yet in and to truly drive value that way.

In terms of guidance for the year, so indeed, the guidance number that we've reiterated for this year is not including this transaction. We expect that this transaction will close in the second half, so closer to the end of the year. And given the relative size compared to our business, we haven't incorporated it in, but you should read our existing guidance as a continuation of the guidance that we shared a few months back.

Next question comes from Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs.

Congrats on a milestone moment for the company. My question was just from what you sort of described in the payments industry, the sort of value-added services to use a kind of broader phrase, has always been very difficult to sort of monetize. And often, when you think of the kind of core payment offering, you've talked about the sort of take rate or the tiered pricing model. How should we then think about sort of this acquisition in the context of sort of that take rate evolution? I know you're focusing more and more on net revenue growth. I know embedded financial services is one of those services that you're looking to kind of monetize. And in the end, is this really going to be able to be monetized? Or is the bigger play here that just sort of really accelerates kind of the pace of the share gains as you further enhance kind of the moat of your offering, particularly around Unified Commerce.

Yes, sure. So I think if I go back to the previous question, I think what you see here is that we're moving into a different revenue pool, again, one that's managed by marketing. If you can create value for customers across their broader revenues and not just optimizations within their payments flow, that is a significant opportunity to create value for our customers. And again, because it is a separate revenue pool, we think we will monetize it separately. Now as we bring this product offering together, we'll ensure that our monetization strategy follows the value we create, and that value may look different in different segments of the market. That's a strategy that we've employed historically, and we've employed it well historically. So we'll continue to focus on how we deliver that value and then how we monetize it accordingly. We think that we're in a good position to monetize both products.

Next question comes from Frederic Boulan from Bank of America.

Two quick ones. First of all, in terms of go-to-market, can you clarify to what degree decision-making on payments and on the solution like Talon.One overlap? And second, on the financial side, can you clarify how many shares Adyen is issuing to Talon.One founders in the process.

Yes. So the good thing here is that if you look at who the payment decision-makers are, they are different than decision-making makers for loyalty solutions. We typically talk to financial teams, payment teams, CFOs. For loyalty, you typically talk to the marketing teams. So that's a huge opportunity to get also broader attachment to companies. And I can't disclose now how many shares we're issuing. I will come back on that later.

Yes. I would just mention on that piece that what was really important through this is that we aligned incentives also with Talon.One and with their founders. So we set this up in a way where this is a meaningful contribution for them. But on the broader shareholdings for Adyen, this is an immaterial amount.

Next one comes from Pavan Daswani from Citibank.

I've got a couple as well. Firstly, just expanding on the rationale. Do you see this deal as providing a competitive position advantage as well? Or is it mainly about the cross-sell opportunity in new verticals over time? And then secondly, I appreciate the color on the increment to 2027. But could you talk through the integration process after the deal is completed at the end of the year? What are the next steps? And how quickly can it be fully integrated into Adyen's platform?

So it is absolutely a competitive advantage. We think that if you want to be successful in retail, you need to crack this. And we've tried to build this with retailers over the years, but I think it's very -- we noticed that it's very difficult for retailers to do it themselves. That's also why Talon.One is so successful in why they've grown so fast given the number of years that they are active. And that's why we believe that if we combine the businesses, we really get to a competitive advantage, which is hard to follow for others if you don't combine these data.

Then the integration process will start once we get the approval from the Central Bank. We don't want to rush the integration because there's a lot of speed also in the Talon.One business. So they certainly will be -- or operate stand-alone, and we will make sure that we align on the go-to-market teams first. Then, of course, also on the tech and product side, make sure that we make the changes that are needed and then integrate it slowly over time. We're not going to rush it. We want to keep the momentum that they have in the business. We want to keep the momentum that we have in our business.

Next question comes from us Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank.

I also have 2. So I appreciate the commentary on the build versus buy. I was also wondering like what can Adyen do on their ownership that it couldn't possibly do via partnership. And then can you also comment on how international is Talon.One really. So of course, Adyen is global, and I'm wondering basically these promotions and loyalty, if they are often market specific or not and how portable is these products across geographies and how much of the growth case depends on international rollout through Adyen's footprint?

Yes, it's a good question around why we can't do this via partnership. We believe that the best product is built if you fully integrate it. And that's what we have seen also with other partnerships in the past, also with other parts of the ecosystem. And if you do integrations, they typically deteriorate over time and you don't get to also the latest product innovations that we bring. And that's why we've chosen here to go for an acquisition instead of a commercial partnership.

Also, and that ties really nicely to your second question, Talon.One is a very global company. They have a presence in the same markets as we have, have a lot of traction in the U.S. market, which is our fastest-growing market. So that is one of the reasons why I'm so excited.

We're now going to take one last question. This question comes from Sven Merkt from Barclays.

Can you be a bit more specific about the time line before you will be in a position to fully realize the vision for the combined businesses? And once you fully integrate it, Talon, will it be available only to Adyen merchant? Or will you continue to also work with non-Adyen customers?

So we expect approvals from the Dutch Central Bank within the next 5 months. Of course, we try to accelerate this, but that's sort of the time line you need to think of. And then we will start with the commercial go-to-market strategy together. I think if you look at how we completely integrate the business, that's more a multiple year project for the reasons that I mentioned earlier that we want to make sure that we keep the speed as independent businesses and only make the connections where it basically improves the go-to-market motion or the integration on the product side.

I think it's very important to say that Talon.One works with other partners, and we want to respect those partnership relationships. So for now, there will be no changes to non-Adyen customers. I think that's very clear.

Thank you very much, Ingo and Ethan. This concludes today's call. Thanks also to everyone who joined us today.

Okay. Perfect. My name is Adam Wood. I look after the Software and Payments on Europe for Morgan Stanley. I'm very, very pleased to welcome Ethan Tandowsky, the CFO of Adyen. Ethan. Thank you so much for joining us in San Francisco.

Yes, thanks for hosting me.

It's an absolute pleasure. So let's get started. I wanted to start off on the core of Adyen's business historically, the acquiring business. And your story has been very much about the benefits of the single platform that gives you this structural advantage against a lot of the legacy players in the industry enabling you to innovate more quickly lever machine learning, AI and so on. You had an Investor Day back in November of last year where you talked about the conditions of this and how it's been evolving. Could you maybe just start us off by outlining the 3 layers of that core foundation. And then maybe specifically, the behavior-based identity layer, how those things set you apart from a lot of the traditional competitors in payments?

Yes, sure. So indeed, we laid out our 3 foundational layers we talked about them. They're essentially how we deliver value to our customers and how we plan to continue to deliver value to our customers. So indeed, the first is the single platform that means that if you process an in-person payment in Brazil or an online payment in Malaysia or in the U.S., it's all over 1 single tech stack. And that means that the pace at which we can build out new innovation, but also roll it out to our customers around the world is typically faster than what we see from others.

The second thing is that we've added licenses on top of that. So it started with acquiring licenses, licenses from Visa, Mastercard, for instance, all around the world. But over time, it also developed into banking licenses. So we've added banking licenses in the U.K., the U.S. and Europe. And that means we can be end-to-end between our merchants and our customers and ourselves, which means that the data lineage, the availability of the data that we see on these transactions is end-to-end and completely available to us.

And the third thing, which is what we talked about newly for our Capital Markets Day in November was what we call dynamic identification. It's essentially that the world is changing rapidly around us and financial services, financial infrastructure is built a lot on static checks. So you check that somebody is who they say they are at a moment in time. And then things change, things develop and what we see is that because we have such strong data set, we can actually look at the data we have and understand behavioral patterns, which can inform the choice that we take on that individual transaction.

So let me give an example. Because we process transactions online and in person, we may know that you went to Starbucks this morning to get a coffee, which means you're much more likely to be who you say you are, if you're using the same card to buy a sweater tonight versus if we haven't seen you use a card in person in months, it may be more likely that that's still in credential, for instance. So we can use it to better solve for fraud. We can use it to better solve things like refund policy abuse we talked about. So for example, that 2% of customers may lead to 50% of refunds for some of our customers, how do we help them design policy to reduce that cost.

So a lot of the behavioral patterns that are also changing and developing with the advancements of technology today with AI, we can help solve through these behavioral patterns that we see in our data set. And that's where we've had a big focus on rolling out products to our customers over the past years. But also if we look forward, how we think we can build differentiated products for them.

And how -- I guess an important note, you talked about there's obviously fraud and authentication that are key in that. But I guess as well, how you can route payments becomes differentiated if you've got evidence of how that's worked before. Is that also a factor and can that help how you serve customers and how your pricing and so on can evolve given how your route?

Yes. So there's a lot to optimize in payments. There are a lot of dimensions, right? There's how do you increase revenues? How do you make sure more transactions get approved? How do you do that without increasing fraud because fraud has a big cost. Within payments costs alone, there's also a lot of components to it and different payment methods have different cost components. They have different performance capabilities, right?

Here in the U.S., we represent about 5% to 10% typically of our customers' payments cost. So how can we help optimize for instance, debit transactions to go to alternative payment rails like STAR, XL or NICE or Pulse versus Visa, Mastercard. They have different cost components, different performance levels. So all of those are optimizations we can make in real time and we can make them because we understand the shopper deeply because we've seen that multiple times on the platform. We know the behaviors that are expected and unexpected and we can help our own customers and balance for those trade-offs.

That makes a lot of sense. I guess one of the big kind of fundamental debates I have with investors around this is, to the extent all that works out and you've got this differentiated platform, that becomes a lot more valuable if payments continues to become more complicated. So could you just maybe talk a little bit around how do you see the market evolving? Do you see more complexity coming in? Do you see any moves that we have more commoditization? How do you see that playing out?

In general, the trend we've seen is more complexity, right? First, it was more payment methods, we still see that. But I think maybe a helpful example is, again, we're in the U.S., let's take the U.S. market, right? U.S. market was very much focused on Visa, Mastercard, MX, a bit of Discover. If you had that, you could process basically all payments. Now you see the debit networks playing a bigger role. You see a Buy Now Pay Later. You see a Cash App pay or Venmo pay, you see Klarna. You see Pay by Bank. So there's more payment methods.

There's also regulatory complexity that's evolved and adapted over the years and customers need support with that. There's the complexity of people want to interact with the brand across channels in a seamless way. So they want to be able to buy something online and return it in store. They want to get loyalty points across transactions that they do in store and online. There's a number of unified commerce needs that have made this more complex as well.

Within that, there are certain parts which get easier over time or they get less differentiated, right? And for us, it's important is that we're continuously innovating because what we'll be differentiating in 5 years or in 2 years, it will be different than what differentiates today and what differentiated 5 years ago. And so the fact that we've built everything on that single tech stack, that single global platform also allows that pace of innovation to continue to be leading compared to our competitors.

If you take a development that we expect to play out over the next years of agentic commerce, for instance, that increases complexity because fraud becomes more challenging, authenticating a user becomes more challenging. How do you ensure that more payment methods are available? How do you ensure that the merchant interacts with their customers still in the same way they are used to on their website or in their store. And it relies on a lot of the things that we've built over the past years, but it will only increase complexity for our customers. That's where we think we can differentiate. .

So I definitely want to come back to the whole agentic commerce side of things. But maybe just to kind of finish off and round this up, I think one of the key products you've had around all about technology, you've mentioned is the Adyen Uplift product. Could you maybe just give some examples of how that exactly has benefited merchants in terms of how they're transacting, what -- some specific numbers on that product and the benefits.

Yes, sure. So Uplift is essentially our product capabilities, which help our customers balance their performance across multiple metrics, like I mentioned before. So you could always approve more transactions. But if you approve more transactions and get more fraud, you will not save money, you'll not increase revenues -- so you always need to balance the choices that you take. You could also only push customers to the lowest cost payment method. But in your checkout page, you'll lose conversion, you'll have people dropping off.

So all of these choices need to be made in balance, and that's how we've rolled out our Uplift suite. Again, coming back to the same example I said before, let's take the U.S. debit networks. They're typically cheaper than if you use a Visa or Mastercard rail. But I think what's interesting about what we've seen in the work that we've done with our customers is we can reduce payments costs, but we can also increase authorization rates. So we can do both. So we don't need to make the trade-off necessarily.

We can make the choice on each of their transaction about which route makes most sense for that transaction, what's most likely to be successful, and we can make those optimizations in real time. We've seen that in a number of different areas, right? It's not that you have to sacrifice one for the other. We can balance them across multiple metrics.

The other thing that we've seen is that we've been rolling out our Protect functionality. We've had it for many years, but we've improved the product over, let's say, 2, 3 years ago. And when we combine it with the full Uplift suite, so the optimization, not just on fraud, but on many metrics, we see that there's a lot of benefit to be had from our customers, and we see 2/3 of our customers signing up for it when they come to Adyen's new customers, which is a much higher rate than the existing customer part of the business and the level at which they're adopting that product.

So I think we're seeing real traction, a real need for this optimization across multiple parts of the payments funnel and again, comes back to your point around complexity. It's complex when you need to manage each of these metrics, not in isolation but in combination.

And to your point around that Protect product and fraud, we've seen in online, in particular, merchants split up a little bit who they've used for different parts of the payment process. Do you feel now that having a suite and being able to address these in a unified manner is actually becoming more differentiated and that's how merchants are looking to go?

Yes. I think what I find important is that these products work better together than separate. Still, we can provide some of them separate, especially the more up-funnel parts of the payment flow like the fraud tooling, for instance, but they work better when they work together. And I think that's the value again of the single platform of having the data set that we have of being able to make real-time optimizations across multiple metrics.

It sounds straightforward, but if you think about what it takes, it takes one database, essentially to be able to make that optimization in a millisecond across multiple metrics. And so many of our competitors have built that across many back-end systems and are unable to replicate the speed, which is required to make that judgment in a millisecond, which allows us to differentiate.

So it's that combination of huge data volumes but having to take that learning and apply it almost instantly to be able to make decisions for customers.

And dynamically, that we make a different decision today than we made 7 days ago or that we made 2 months ago. That requires that real-time capability.

So that makes a lot of sense. I mean, one of the other things that's been interesting to me is seeing how the unified commerce piece is now starting to grow more quickly, and you're seeing what we're originally digital customers are basically just online customers now transact with you and work with you both in online, but also in the offline space. You called this out last year we've seen that continue, could you just talk a little bit around what the benefits are of merchants being able to work with you in both of those areas?

Yes, sure. So there's back office improvements, right? Like you got 1 payout across multiple channels. You have 1 integration, you get 1 set of reporting, tech teams also can manage the integration seamlessly across multiple channels. You can roll out payment methods across multiple channels at once, right? So there's a lot of like back office benefits to working with a single provider. You can also improve the customer experience.

So I mentioned buy online, return in store. There's a lot of -- or the opposite, right, you're in the store they have the products you want, but it's in the wrong size. So you need it fulfilled from their e-commerce warehouse to your house. Those flows can be implemented for a better customer experience. And then the third thing and I find this piece is really important as well is that you understand your customer better if you understand how they transact with you across multiple channels. And sometimes payments data is the best data to do that.

They don't know who their customer is at each channel, especially in person. And sometimes payments data is the only data they have to actually identify who that person was, that was in their shop. And then you can use that customer profile, the data set on how that customer is interacting with your business to make loyalty decisions, for instance, to give promotions, to understand shopper behaviors and decide where you're going to open a new shop or how you're going to think about your refund policy to the earlier example I had.

So there's a number of kind of improvements you can make even at the -- almost at the marketing level to be able to better understand your consumer, your -- shopping preferences of your customer if you've got an integrated data set.

Right. That makes sense. The other thing that's interesting is, obviously, the online payments world already is a huge addressable market for you, and you're relatively small even in that journey. But if we go into offline and the in-store world, is kind of another multiplier effect of what the opportunity is. I guess there's two things I'd like to dig into. The first one is it looks as if in store, you've gone kind of vertical by vertical. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how that works.

And then the other debate I have a lot with investors is, okay, this is a gigantic market opportunity, but is all of it addressable by you because there's going to be more commodity use cases, maybe people paying very, very low levels to Walmart or Tesco's or however you want to pick. And so how much of that do you think is addressable by you over time?

Yes. It's a good question because a lot of the verticals or businesses we work with today, I think we would have thought the same 5, 10 years ago. I think we had a great example of we won Starbucks. We talked about it in our last shareholder letter that we won Starbucks in a few markets in Europe. I think that's a customer we've been trying to go after for the last 5 to 10 years, thinking I don't know if we'll ever win Starbucks, but eventually, they also see like the strategic importance of payments is evolving and changing and the needs of consumers are evolving and changing, and there's the ability to kind of meet these needs.

Same in the U.S. I think when we started in the U.S., we always thought we'd help U.S. companies go abroad. That's where we could differentiate for them. And for all the reasons I mentioned earlier about the U.S. becoming more complex, we've been able to win here in a way where U.S. is now mid- to high 20s percent of our business.

So I think the trend over the years has been more and more verticals have seen payments become strategic. On the in-person side, that started with luxury retailers, right? Luxury retailers, they do everything for the customer experience. So that included payments. So they were the first to kind of move towards this frictionless improved payments experience in person. But then consumers saw that there were some first movers in broader retail and others wanted to compete also that way.

So now we've had quite a lot of success in retail in general, beyond the luxury providers and in H&M or Zuora, for instance. Then we saw that move to hospitality and food and beverage. So hotels, restaurants, especially quick service restaurants. We've had a lot of success in and they're all seeing the benefit of unifying their payments technology to give that consumer that seamless experience and to better understand the consumer.

So over time, we've added more verticals, not necessarily because we've developed something special for them. But I'd say the bigger change is they've seen the strategic importance of payments increase and they see it as an important solve for their customer base. And I think that trend will just continue over time to more and more verticals.

Will there be small -- will there be pockets of the market which are more commoditized? Yes. there will be. But I think the trend in general is that there's much more strategic importance being paid on payments, the complexity is rising. And we're still a very small fraction of the overall market, right, at about 5% of the total market. So there's a lot of room to grow in the space we're in.

And I guess there's also a lot of discussion around pricing because your take rate is actually not high relative to others, but that's because you process for very large merchants. As you've had this experience of going vertical and more opened up, how has that pricing evolved? Have you felt we've been able to maintain, we normally hear is a price premium that you would charge merchants. Has that been sustainable as those markets have opened up?

Yes. Mostly, we see the difference between customers in size. So how much volume they bring, and we provide tiered pricing. So that's where we typically see differentiation. Of course, if you do like 99% in person and 1% e-commerce, the value we can create for you across channels is going to be less.

So there's some difference in the types of business and how much value, how much strategic importance there is within payments. But in general, we've been able to price these similarly based on size, to previous verticals we worked with. Again, to the point of them seeing the strategic importance of payments more than us forcing it upon them.

That makes sense. Maybe turning to platforms. I mean this has been a pretty big success story for Adyen. You've had incredible growth. Could you just talk a little bit about what the strategy is here? What type of platforms are we talking about? How broad has the product set become? .

This is a good point also on which part of the market is -- are we exposed to -- because previously, we didn't have a small business strategy, right? We were exclusively focused on enterprise. So there was a segment of the market that we weren't going after. And what we saw as we started to go a bit down market was this what we call platforms. This platform's model was really starting to grow pretty significantly, and it started in the U.S., and it's come to Europe as well, which is you provide software to help your customer manage their business. Often, this is vertical based.

So maybe you provide software to help your customers manage their dental practice or maybe a restaurant or maybe veterinarian clinic or kids theme parks. It's very vertical-focused, right? And they provide software to help manage that business. They know your needs in and out. And what they've now been doing is they've been embedding payments into that. So now you can get software from us to manage your business, but you can also get payments from me. And if you think about all those examples I gave, they're both online and in person. So it fits really well to our unified commerce proposition.

And then over time, they have also heard from their customers we struggle to get financial services in a way that we would like, financial products. So maybe now they're also going to say, you can get a bank account for me. You can get a card to manage your corporate expenses. You can get a short-term loan when your oven breaks or when you want to open your second store or whatever the case may be. And those are all products we can provide because we have the licenses to provide them, again, with the banking licenses I mentioned earlier, but we can also provide them the technology in 1 single place with 1 partner, and these products work well off of each other, right?

So we can make a short-term loan decision based on -- we know your sales history because we know your payments volumes. We can collect every day part of that loan throughout the cycle because we have access to your payouts every day. So the ease and simplicity of being able to provide these products, but also to have them benefit from one another and bring that connectivity where it's better to work with one provider than multiple has been a big advantage for us to grow this part of the business.

It's our fastest-growing part of our business, still smallest because it's the newest. But if I look in both our existing customer growth and when I look out into new business into pipeline, this has certainly begun to become a much bigger part of our business over time.

And how would you think about the competition in this space? Because it feels like everything we've talked about so far around complexity and data and licenses and all the things that you highlight as differentiated. It feels like these all come together in platforms. How do you see the competitive landscape there? How is that playing out?

It's very complex, again, to your point, right, like it's multiple channels. It's complex because we need to onboard all of these sub merchants. We need to pay out all of these submerchants. We need to provide more products, so also financial products. So this is where you see that there is significant complexity. And that also means that there's less number of competitors in this space. There's less that can provide that kind of end-to-end service. And so it's still competitive.

Payments is a very competitive market in general. But there's less number of competitors that can actually bring these capabilities to these customers.

So you mentioned agentic commerce perform. I think we definitely need to get into that and start talking about it. It feels like there's been like a little bit of a press release battle here that maybe some of the competition have been out there more aggressively marketing what's happening. You may have been a little bit quieter and that's led from investors I speak to concern? Are you right at the forefront of what's happening. Could you talk about what you're doing around agentic commerce? What partnerships you have? And again, how exciting you see that as an opportunity for Adient over the next few years?

Yes. Let me start with what we're doing already, which is that we have transactions live on the platform. We're working with open AI with Google, with Visa, with Mastercard to develop protocols. And I think the position that we can take is we have the largest enterprises in the world on our platform, and we can help provide that perspective of what merchants, especially enterprise merchants are looking for in an agentic commerce framework or world, and we can provide that input to help these companies develop protocols that will work for the industry. So that's on one side.

What we hear from customers is a couple of things. One, there's an opportunity to have a new sales channel to acquire customers in a new way and to provide them services. What they find as a potential risk is that they worry about being disintermediated. They worry about the complexity to manage multiple different LLMs. They manage the complexity of even making their product catalog available to these various LLMs as well. And that's something that we are really well positioned to help them with.

So we can help streamline like we do with payment methods like we do with sales channels, the complexity it would take to integrate to each of these. And we can solve the pain points, which exist in agentic commerce, which look very similar to the things we've already solved for, which is right, there is already small volumes, but higher fraud. There will be higher fraud. There will be questions on authenticating users, right? Is that person who say they are, but also did they give that instruction that you're executing now.

How do you tokenize that information? So how do you make sure that we're using secure payments credentials? How do we make sure that multiple payment methods are available so that the payment method behaviors that a human would use is also being replicated on the agent side. And those are all things that we've historically been very good at that connects well to our uplift suite, but that also connect to the unified commerce proposition of being able to work with one provider across multiple sales channels. And so our customers are very excited to work with us in this space as this develops.

On the other hand, it's just very early. The reality looks very different than the promise and the promise is really exciting, but that's what we -- that's what we are working on together with our customers.

Do you feel -- I mean, when merchants think about, okay, there's a big change, okay, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but over the next few years, there's going to be a big change in the market. Does that start to change that thought process around maybe we've got some legacy providers. They've done an okay job with what's happened so far. But it starts to change their thought process around who we want to work for within the next 3 to 5 years. .

Yes. But -- so I think the question is, if you look at our existing customers, who do they want to talk to of their -- our large existing enterprise customers have multiple providers. That's the model and payments at the largest scale, large enterprise digital customers. That's what they do. The question is, who do they look to when something innovative or change happens? Do they -- who do they think about, which partners do they think about to work with? And that's where -- I mean we mentioned it, but we've had well over 100 in-depth customer interviews on this specific topic because we want to understand from them their needs, but also they want to understand how we can help them with their worries or with their opportunities. And I think that's the thing that I find important, right?

We're building a business we think can get to much bigger scale. We have a multiyear growth path ahead of us that we're really excited about. For me, what's really relevant is on the important priorities of our customers, do they want to work with us. And I think agentic commerce is a very clear example I've seen in just over the last months, where there's a real desire to work together on this change that's coming to the market with us, which also gives me the confidence of the ability to deliver growth together with them over the coming years.

Maybe just talking about that kind of midterm to long-term growth algorithm. You talked about around 20% at the Capital Markets [indiscernible] what you think not just kind of 3 years, but actually mid- to long term, the business could grant. Could you maybe, first of all, just talk around what the building blocks are to get Adyen growing at 20%?

Yes, sure. So if you actually look at our growth over the last few years, it's been pretty consistent. We grew 22%, 23%, 21%. And now this year, we forecast between '20 and '22. So it's actually been quite steady. And if you look at what drives that growth, which is also how we look into the future is part of our growth comes from the growth of our customers, right? We're a usage-based model. So as our customers grow, we also grow with them.

We sized that at like high single-digit percentage of growth. So just by working together with our customers, that's the growth we get from working together. The second piece is we gain share of wallet. So we may work with the customer, but what's the proportion of payments that we actually do with them as that percentage goes up, of course, we also get growth. If you combine that organic growth, market volume growth with the wallet share gains, they grow with us, and we also give them some pricing discounts to incentivize that behavior. So we see some impact from pricing that's in there.

That's the biggest part of our growth in any given year, right? So if I think about, hey, what is our guidance for this year. And the biggest piece that makes up the growth that we think for now, that's growth with our existing base. But if you look forward, it's important that we're adding new customers. In any given year, it's low single digits part of our growth. The new customers we onboard in that year. But in the year after, we see that they start to ramp up quite significantly. And for instance, in 2025, we saw our strongest cohort yet on the new business side.

So our growth will come from how fast our customers grow, how capable we are in winning share from them in that year. But it will also be supported by the growth we're seeing with new business, especially if you look out 2 or 3 years on those cohorts. And then the last piece that we added in is that we're starting to branch out beyond payments into financial products. We've sized it at around 1% of our -- as an addition to our growth over the next couple of years. That's really as we get into issuing as we get into capital as we get into bank accounts. We think that will be small, but still supportive to our growth over the coming years. And then I would expect that it is a bigger part of our growth algorithm if we're talking again in a few years.

So maybe just to come back to the short term. I think it's fair to say people were disappointed by the guidance you gave for this year, 20% to 22% where at the Capital Markets Day, it had still been in the low to mid-20s. I think you mentioned strong new customer cohort in '25. Chinese merchants -- sorry, the Chinese metro selling into as maybe getting a little bit better. So it was a surprise that, that came down as much as it did. Is there any -- and I appreciate you're probably bored it being asked this question, but is there anything you can help us with in terms of what changed in that interim? And maybe more importantly, was there any bigger change in your view of how Adyen is going to grow in the midterm that drove that change? Or was it more of a short-term calculation? .

Yes. So there's no change in our view of our longer-term growth path at all. I feel very confident in our ability to continue to gain share and drive the growth that we expect. I look at certain signals we find really important to that assessment, which is how able are we to win new business, right? Every sales deal we're in is a buying decision, you get real-time feedback continuously, and that base looks quite similar to our existing business. So I look to our new cohort. I look to NPS. I think NPS, we shared a graph of at our Investor Day as well, continues to be really, I think, leading class for enterprise B2B business. And that's an important indicator about how do our customers look at us as a partner, but also as a future innovator and a party to work with over time.

What will change from every year to the next is a small move up or down a point or two in either direction in what specific opportunities will we work on with our customers in that year, right? And a couple of examples are -- you mentioned an APAC retailer. I think it was just as an indicative example is, I think '23, we did U.S. with them, '24, we did Europe, '25 was more complicated with the macroeconomic situation, focus more on Latin America. Each year, we are building share of wallet with them. But the size of the revenue opportunity assigned to each of those was different. And you have to imagine that we're much less concentrated as a business today than we were 5 years ago.

So when you add up all of those opportunities, each year will look slightly different based on the size of the opportunities that you are going to work on with your customer. And we get visibility into specifically those opportunities for the next year as they go through their planning processes, which is typically at the end of each year, which is why we've moved to this kind of annual guidance view where around beginning of each year, we'll give a view on what we expect the growth of next year -- of that year to look like based on those conversations.

And each year, we'll look just a little bit different, but the overall growth path will be very steady because we feel we're really well positioned to continue to gain share in the markets that we're in and over time to build out more products to serve these customers.

So I could ask one final one. You mentioned before, the growth has actually been pretty consistent over the last 3 years. Your guidance, which you just is going to be pretty consistent again this year. The share price hasn't been consistent. It's been volatile. I could feel there's a bit of frustration, maybe particularly in go on the conference call around how we're reacting to your results. Is there something that we're missing in terms of that you'd like us to understand about the business that the visibility consistency that you have that's not being reflected in terms of how the share price is moving and how investors are thinking about Adyen?

Yes. I wouldn't say frustration because I'm with you all like I would wish that would be different, too. That's also on us to make sure that we communicate well. I think the thing that maybe I experience differently is that I see the signals in the business, if I look at the things I mentioned earlier that give me a lot of confidence that the 5% market share that we have now will look very different in a few years. And I find that really exciting. I find that as somebody that's operating in the business, something really exciting to build.

There's so much potential to help our customers, to grow with our customers, to add new businesses, to add new products, and it's less helpful that there's volatility in the share price. So it's not a frustration. It's just something that I think we need to continue to work on to make sure that we communicate well because I think that consistency and performance, that consistency of the opportunity is what I've seen over the years. And there's not a big move from one quarter to the next in the excitement or the opportunity available to us that's reflected by it. And I think that's just more the perspective that we want to share.

That's really helpful. Thank you. And I remember I should have read the disclosure at the beginning. So four-point disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com for research disclosures. And if you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. But Ethan, thank you so much for doing that. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Adyen's H2 2025 Earnings Call. My name is Isaac, and I'll be facilitating a short discussion on our business progress and financial results with our Co-CEO, Ingo; and our CFO, Ethan. After that, my colleague, Maggie, will host the Q&A section. [Operator Instructions] With that, let's get started.

Now Ingo, what are some of the highlights of the second half of the year? And how would you reflect on our execution and the momentum in the business right now?

Yes. Thanks, Isaac. I look back at a very solid second half of the year. And if I look where we are in the execution of our long-term plans, I'm very pleased. And I would like to highlight a few things.

So first of all, the continued growth with our existing merchants. Take Uber as an example that we also highlighted in our shareholder letter. They continue to grow with us and also launch new products like kiosk.

At the same time, we also launched with new customers like Starbucks, a company that we would love to work with for a long, long time, and we finally got on our platform. And I'm really pleased to see how they've rolled out very quickly with us in Europe. At the same time, we continue to invest also in new markets.

If you think about the fact that we launched in Japan a few years ago, we're now seeing a lot of traction also with the domestic merchants in Japan. That's a very important next phase of our growth there because we always start with international merchants going into a country and then the domestic phase is the next phase of our journey. And we are now there, and that's very, very promising.

Very similar to India, also a country where we've been active for a couple of years. And there, we see now a lot of interest from the big international customers that we have on our platform to also launch with us in India.

So that's all very exciting, and that gives me also a lot of strong view on how we're going to grow in the next couple of years. So I'm also very looking forward to that next phase of our growth as a company.

Clear. Thanks, Ingo. Ethan, could you maybe help us connect all of that to our financial performance in this period?

Yes, absolutely. Let's start with net revenue. So net revenue in the second half on a constant currency basis grew 21%, very consistent growth with what we saw in the first half of the year. On a reported basis, growth was a bit lower given the headwinds that we're seeing with the U.S. dollar.

If you look at where that growth comes from, it's again driven by our building blocks. And the biggest part of our growth in any given year comes from the growth with our existing customers. We continue to gain share of wallet with those customers, whether that's broadening markets or products or sales channels, and we grow alongside them as well.

We also saw that the cohort of new customers we added to the platform in 2025 was a very strong one. We're seeing strong demand from new customers across each of our pillars. And I think that shows the strength of the growth that we're seeing to date.

If you then look at EBITDA, EBITDA grew 23% in the second half and EBITDA margin was 55% for the second half. We're continuing to make investments in our team as we grow the team to go after the opportunity that we see on the revenue side over multiple years.

But we're also being smart about where we invest and how we automate, and we're very focused on making sure that we scale our process, whether that's leveraging AI or growing processes and scaling them along the way as we've always done to make sure that the operating leverage inherent to our business model continues to show through.

On the CapEx side, we also had around 5% of CapEx as a percentage of net revenue in the second half, very consistent with what we've seen over the course of the year.

Great. That's clear. Thank you. And in addition to that, could you help us understand what financial performance look like across our pillars? And maybe if you have some stories to share with us of what's going on in the pillars?

Yes, sure. Let's start with Digital, our largest pillar. So Digital continues to have consistent strong growth coming from a range of verticals, right? It's our largest pillar. So there's a number of verticals we serve within the Digital pillar, but we're continuing to see real strength, especially in delivery and mobility and also content and subscription.

We're also seeing that we're able to employ our expand -- land and expand model within our Digital customers. And sometimes, again, like I said, that's to new markets, but sometimes it's also new sales channels. And as we add in-person payments with some of our customers, we also see some of our customers move into the Unified Commerce pillar, something that's just a reflection of the execution of the strategy we're employing.

If you think about Unified Commerce then, we're also seeing real strength within our Unified Commerce pillar. And that's across a number of verticals, right? It's retail, it's food and beverage, it's hospitality.

If you talk food and beverage, then one of the biggest food and beverage companies in the world, Starbucks that Ingo mentioned, is one we're very proud of and that we talked about in this letter. We started working with a licensee of theirs, Alsea in Mexico. And through that relationship, really built a relationship directly with Starbucks as well and now have rolled out a lot of stores in Europe where we service them directly.

If you connect that then to why we win in Platforms, which is our third pillar, you see that a lot of the benefit and value we can provide to customers is again because we have that in-person offering and online, right? And a number of our platforms are providing services both in person and online. And because we can help them unify that, we're able to deliver a significant value to them and help them grow their businesses.

They're also able to come to us beyond payments, right? And the offering on the embedded financial product side is a reason that they're future-proofing their business and able to scale into more revenue streams over time. So Platforms continues to be our fastest-growing pillar, and we're seeing very, very strong traction there.

Clear. Clearly, there's a lot going on across all 3 pillars. Thanks, Ethan. Now back to you, Ingo. Back in November, we had our Investor Day here in Amsterdam. And then you introduced the third layer of our foundation, Dynamic Identification. Could you give us a short update on what's been going on with Dynamic Identification since then?

Yes, sure. So Dynamic Identification is our way of applying AI to the large data set that we have. So we have trillions of interactions on our platform that we see, and it helps us to build better products on top of this foundational layer, and that's why it's so important to us.

Two products that I'd like to highlight that we've been working on in the past couple of months to make our offering, our value offering to customers even more important. The first one is Personalize and Personalize is part of Uplift, so the product suite that helps to increase conversion for our merchants, and Personalize helps to select a better payment method relevant for the consumer that is at the checkout.

It is better because it helps to increase conversion, but it also is lowering the cost of a merchant. And that combination, of course, is the thing that merchants are looking for. The pilot results demonstrate that we can get to 6% higher conversion, at the same time, lowering cost by 3%. And I think that is, of course, very important to our customers.

The second thing I'd like to highlight, and that's another area where we help our merchants is to reduce the policy abuse fraud. And policy abuse is sometimes very hard to spot for merchants because it's hard to spot in the data. And this is again where Dynamic Identification helps. We are able to spot that type of behavior by consumers earlier, and that helps merchants to stop that behavior also at an earlier stage, improving their margins on the long term.

So yes, I'm very excited that we can use this foundational layer to improve these products and help ultimately to improve the margins of our customers.

Thanks, Ingo. All of that sounds great. And I suppose it's also directly connected to another really big topic in the industry now, agentic commerce. So using AI agents as a sales channel. Could you give us some concrete examples of where Adyen stands today on agentic commerce?

Absolutely. So we're working very closely with our merchants to understand what is important to them. And together with our partners, OpenAI, Google, Mastercard, Visa, we work on the protocols that are relevant for our customers.

And if you define what is relevant to our customers based on the interviews that we've had with them, it's about making sure that they still keep this unique connection with the consumer behind the agent and at the same time that they build trust in the ecosystem.

And trust in the ecosystem is very important because ultimately, it helps to keep the fraud levels at an acceptable level. And of course, if you think about what's important for our customers is that combination, building a trusted relationship with a consumer and at the same time, keep as a result, the fraud levels low.

At the moment, the number of transactions is still immaterial on our platform. We started with it. I think that's very important. So we started with agentic commerce as an additional sales channel. And the beauty of having a single platform globally is that we basically have all the building blocks to cater it and to start growing this sales channel with our customers.

Great. Thank you very much, Ingo. Now back to you, Ethan. Changing gears a bit now towards our outlook for 2026, especially in the context of us transitioning to the yearly guidance cycle now. Could you walk us through some of the key considerations? So what informed the outlook that we published this morning for the year to go?

Yes, sure. So you referenced that we now give a view on the next year. So this morning, indeed, we've shared our view on 2026. That comes off of discussions with our customers because, of course, our growth is very much driven by the growth of our customers and their priorities.

And you often see that they make their road maps, they set their goals for the next year towards the end of any given year. And therefore, we are in continuous discussions with them, but more relevant discussions with them at the end of the year to understand what their priorities are.

We've taken that view. So we've been in discussions with our customers. And ultimately, we look at how we can grow together to understand what our growth trajectory looks like for 2026.

If you look at what we see in 2026, again, I referenced earlier the new business wins that we had last year that were strong on the platform and that will ramp up in a strong way. They'll provide support to our growth this year.

If you look at the existing customer discussions, they're also very positive. There's lots of opportunity for us to continue to grow with our customers and add share of wallet, not only just add share of wallet, but also help them with new initiatives, new initiatives like agentic commerce that Ingo highlighted.

We do have market volume growth as part of our growth in any given year. And there, we have the expectation that, that growth stays at the same level as in 2025. And ultimately, when you bring that all together, we've given the view that we expect our growth to be between 20% and 22% on a constant currency basis in 2026.

If you then look at EBITDA margins, we continue to have the expectation that our EBITDA margin level will rise to above 55% by 2028. And in 2026, specifically, we're going to continue to make investments into the team to drive our long-term growth path. At the same time, of course, we'll focus on automation and optimization.

And we roughly think that EBITDA margin will be at a similar level in '26 as it was in 2025 as we progress to that 55%-plus level in 2028. Our CapEx investment will also stay at the same level, so at 5% or less of net revenues is our expectation.

And if I step back from 2026 specifically, I'm really excited about the growth potential that we have together with our customers. 2026 will be another year in that step of becoming one of the largest financial technology platforms in the world, and there's so much exciting things we'll build together with our customers this year.

Thank you very much, Ethan. Thank you both for sharing your insights with us so far. We have now reached the Q&A session of today's call. For that, I'll hand it over to Maggie, who will moderate the session. Maggie, over to you.

Thanks, Isaac. My name is Maggie, and I'm going to be moderating today's Q&A portion of the call. [Operator Instructions] The first question we have today comes from Hannes from Jefferies.

I'm Hannes Leitner from Jefferies. I got 2 questions. The first one is maybe you can help us with the confidence on maintaining 20% net revenue growth going forward, if you already include 20% in your 2026 guidance at the bottom end.

And maybe you can just like square that because like you talked about 2025 being a strong cohort, the APAC-based retailers channel checks suggest that they are rebounding in the U.S. And then maybe lastly, just like EMEA slowed to 17% growth. So like that's the first question on just getting this growth algo for the medium term.

Okay. Ethan, do you want to take both of those?

Yes, sure. Maybe let me start on 2026 specifically, and then I can get to the longer-term growth. If you think about where our growth comes from at this point, it comes from a large number of customers given the diversification we now have, right? We're diversified again across markets. We're diversified across verticals. So ultimately, we look at our growth in any given year from this diversified set of customers.

Now what we see is that we are connected to their top priorities. So what they're focused on is typically where we have the opportunity to grow. If you look at 2026, there's a lot of exciting things that we're excited to work on with them, right?

If you see how we can build in core markets like, of course, our expansion in North America, for instance, on one hand, that gives us a lot of excitement as do other things, like there's a lot of macroeconomic uncertainty right now.

For instance, some of our international customers, they're looking at Latin America more, and that we can certainly help with them. Others are prioritizing agentic commerce and see us as a partner to help them with that. And we're very much then focused on how can we help them in this new age of commerce, right?

And so depending on the priority and depending on the given year, you see that there are different priorities for our customers. What's important for us is that we are the partner they look to, to help them with those priorities. And each of them have different short-term or longer-term revenue ramifications, right?

So take agentic commerce as one example. It's not going to drive short-term revenues, right? So it's not a big part of our 2026 revenue expectations. But if it's a top priority for your customer, you want to be there and you want to support them with it, and that's where we're well positioned to do it. And it will help us drive growth over a longer period of time, right?

And that's just one example. So if you then connect it to beyond '26, I come back to the signals that I have, right, which are, how is new business developing. Well, new business is developing well. I think we've seen that in the new cohort of 2025 being the strongest we've seen. We continue to see strong traction with new customers. On the existing side, we continue to be the partner that our customers look to on their top priorities.

I really like the Uber example we gave today in the shareholder letter and that we had a press release earlier this week on because it's an example of a customer we've had for well over a decade that again says, "Hey, these are my priorities. This is how we're looking to expand. Can you help us?" And we're there to support them, right, whether that's new markets or now the kiosks that they're setting up in airports, for instance.

So it's really about for us being there to support our customers because that will drive our growth over a longer period of time, over a multiyear growth path. And that's -- those are the types of signals that I look to, to understand our growth trajectory.

In terms of your last piece on EMEA, we manage our revenues, again, based on a customer lens, right? So we will see different levels of ramp-ups in different markets at different times. At the end of last year, at the end of 2024, we saw that there were some significant ramp-ups in EMEA, so we saw a stronger growth.

Again, looking at EMEA, the signals that I see are also very strong. If I look at new pipeline, we're winning across all 3 of our pillars, right, Digital, Unified Commerce and Platforms. Our customers turn to us to support them in this market.

I think Starbucks is a great example of that, which we referenced as well today, opening up in the U.K. and a few other markets in Europe. So we're absolutely well positioned to continue to grow there. But on a regional basis, we'll continue to see different growth rates at different times depending on how our set of customers prioritize that year.

Okay. Thanks for your question, Hannes. The next question comes from Mo Moawalla from Goldman Sachs.

Two for me. Firstly, I noticed you talked a lot about customer priorities, Ethan. We know that you sort of gained share within customers. Is that sort of a variable around priority mean that perhaps if your customers are prioritizing certain business that's kind of you're more beneficial to get versus more run-of-the-mill business that perhaps is more price competitive, adds a bit more kind of variability around your visibility?

And then secondly, I wanted to just touch upon the long-term guide you gave at the Investor Day, you sort of committed to this 20% growth and then giving a kind of annual guidance to that. Does that still very much stand where we sit today?

Yes. Let me talk to the priorities first. I think what's important is that we're working together with our customers on what's most important to them. Now what's different across priorities is when they will generate revenues, right? And so we're very much focused again on building a much larger business by helping our customers succeed and growing with them over multiple years.

I used a few examples, right, in the last answer, but I'll go back to it. So our large international customers want to go to LatAm, we have a fantastic product in LatAm, we can help them in LatAm. That's a great place to support them. Or they want to focus on agentic commerce. Of course, we also have a solution which can really support them with their needs for agentic commerce as they develop.

But the size of those revenues is different in 2026 than it may be in 2028. What's important for us is to be there to support and to grow with them and to support them and build together. And I think the reality is that they look to us to support them on these priorities. And I think that's what's really important. So it's not about what's priced differently. It's about what is driving revenues on which time horizon, and that's what I mean by priorities.

In terms of what we shared at Investor Day, absolutely. I think everything that we've shared at Investor Day holds. What we wanted to share was a multiyear framework to help understand where our growth will come from. That's why we laid out the building blocks like we laid them out.

We also wanted to share that the best way to understand our growth path in any given year is based on the discussions we have with our customer base. And that is why we want to share basically each February, our view on the next year as we get it. Ultimately, that's why we've shared the guidance that we've shared today.

So everything holds that we shared in November. We continue to have high expectations for our ability to grow with our customers. And genuinely, I'm really excited by everything that I see on the path for us to become one of the largest financial technology platforms in the world truly.

Okay. Thanks for your questions, Mo. The next question comes from Alex Faure from BNP Paribas.

A couple of questions from me. I mean just elaborating on what you just explained, Ethan, around those priorities and some of them, you mentioned LatAm, agentic commerce may be yielding more results in 2027, 2028. Should we think then of 2026 as a year of preparatory work for some of your customers to get ready for some of that expansion and maybe a bit of a pause in the budget they were traditionally allocating to payment?

And then my second question has nothing to do with that. It's kind of if you could update us on how you think of capital allocation. I know you touched on it at the CMD, but just curious if you have some updated thoughts there.

Okay. Thanks. Ingo, do you want to take the first one and then Ethan take the second one?

Yes, sure, absolutely. So I certainly see 2026 not as a prep year. I think we have a continued dialogue with our customers about what is next. I think what -- the point that we want to make is that we see also going forward, also multiyears out sufficient projects in the pipeline that we can continue the growth that we see.

And also what we said during the Investor Day that we expect to grow around 20% for the next upcoming years. That's powered basically by all the projects that we're working. And indeed, new sales channels like agentic are a good opportunity for us.

But it's also the other countries like the things that we're doing with Japan, India, it's with other products like the investments that we're making in the financial products at the moment. These are the priorities for our merchants, and this is basically the fuel for our growth going forward. And that's also why we have this multiyear view on sustained growth at these levels.

And on capital allocation, no, I think we outlined it again in our Investor Day in November. I think we're very much focused on the growth opportunity, right? So having the flexibility to be able to continue to invest in the business, to invest in the business as we scale revenues over the coming years is what's most important to us, but also as we scale products, right?

And as we get into broader financial products, it's especially relevant how we're positioned from a financial -- from a balance sheet perspective. And so we'll continue to have this approach that we shared in November.

Great. Thanks for your question. The next question comes from Nooshin from Deutsche Bank.

Maybe 3 on my side. First, on the Chinese platforms impacted by U.S. tariffs. Could you update us on where those relationships stand today? There have been some market expectation that you might offset part of that pressure through increased share of wallet in other regions. How should we think about that today? Is that something you're actively pursuing? Or has your approach evolved?

And then on the outlook, and I'm sorry if that's, again, sort of repetition, but have you observed any incremental budget constraint on the client side, particularly relating to international expansion or new market entries that could moderate your outlook? If so, could you share a few examples of where you're seeing caution emerge and whether this is more cyclical in nature or something structural in client planning maybe?

And then finally, could you help us quantify the sensitivity of your volumes and net revenue growth to any single large client? How should we think about the contribution or potential volatility from your largest customer when modeling growth for the remainder of the year?

Thanks, Nooshin. Ethan, do you want to take the first question and the third one and then Ingo maybe take the second one?

Sure. So on the APAC-based retailers, I think they've remained very strong relationships. They see us as a core partner. They're very international businesses, right? Maybe just to clarify on the point around LatAm, right?

LatAm is actually our fastest-growing region in this half on a constant currency basis. So it's not necessarily future revenues. We're seeing that there's traction there today, right? And we've talked about a focus of some of these retailers more on LatAm, for instance, as one example.

I think the important piece with them and with any of our large customers is maintaining strong relationship where they feel like as their focus shifts, if it shifts, if it stays the same, that they look to Adyen to support them with those priorities. And I think that's where we, again, feel very well positioned. So I'd say we're in a strong spot with those customers.

Yes. And the second question around budget constraints. I don't see any budget constraints when we talk to our customers. I think in times of more uncertainty, merchants are looking for innovation ways to reduce cost. And these are typically topics that we're really good at to work with them to, for instance, lower total payments cost.

The example that I gave around Personalized, that's typically a project that you like to run because it increases conversion, lowers costs. So far, I haven't seen any budget constraints in talking to our customers.

It's more always about what is the right timing business-wise because you can't do all projects at the same time. That's also why it's so important to work closely with our customers to see what their priorities are and make sure that we work on those priorities with them. But indeed, no constraints from a budget perspective so far.

And I think you talked about volume and revenue contribution of any single customers. Of course, given our pricing model where we have tiered pricing, we'll see more impact from individual customers on volumes in any given year than we'll see on revenue growth.

I think that's been quite clear also, for instance, over the last year, where we highlighted a couple of large volume customers and the impact they had on our volume growth, but we saw much less impact on our revenues.

And I think that's a great development that we've seen over the past years is that we have become quite diversified from a revenue basis across many, many customers, across many markets, across many verticals. And I think that's what shows up in the consistency of our revenue growth over the last few years.

Okay. Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Fred at Bank of America.

Fred Boulan from Bank of America. Two questions. Firstly, if I can follow up on the balance sheet point. The stock is down about 34% since the CMD. Would you consider buybacks as a signal to the market that you're focused on shareholder value whilst maintaining adequate capital to support your ambitions, especially on embedded finance?

And then secondly, if you can spend a bit more time on the margin guidance for 2026. Any specific areas of investment that are driving this kind of slightly accelerated pace of hiring for '26?

Thanks, Fred.

Sure. Let me start on capital allocation. I think what we've tried to share is our perspective, but we should always be open to what options are available. And of course, you need to assess what your current situation is, what your current facts and circumstances are, what's right for the business at each moment.

So we're certainly not dogmatic here. We constantly assess what's the right decision for the business, but we're very much focused on driving the growth of the organization that we expect of growing with our customers. And so we'll focus there, but continue to evaluate what the right approach is.

In terms of EBITDA margins, the areas of investment. So we will grow the team slightly more than we grew this year, at least that's our expectation for 2026. If you think about where we invest, a lot of the same things you've heard from us, right?

We're investing more in the U.S. We're investing a lot in our tech teams, in our tech hubs. So that's partially in the U.S., but that's also in other markets, think about Madrid or Bengaluru in India, where we have tech hubs as well amongst other locations throughout the world. So that's where we'll continue to make investments.

We are investing in specialized skills, right? We're building out financial products. We're seeing nice inflection moment in issuing. We're seeing stronger traction in capital and in bank accounts. So we need to continue to invest there to make sure that we can continue to grow those products like we feel the opportunity exists for. And so that's where we'll make investments.

I think if you come back to the overarching story on EBITDA margins, right, we're on this path already over the last couple of years, but also if we look ahead to the next few, where we think EBITDA margins will expand because we'll continue to make investments in the team. But we'll do that at a pace which allows the operating leverage inherent to our business model to still show through.

And so our expectation is that we'll grow up to the 55% and above level by 2028. And each year is just a timing exercise about when and how we make those investments, given that those new investments aren't typically linked to short-term revenues.

Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Adam Wood at Morgan Stanley.

It's Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Maybe just to dig in a little bit deeper on that EBITDA margin question for this year. It looks like you're planning to add maybe around 10% to headcount. Obviously, expecting the business to grow north of 20%.

Could you just help us understand, is that the cost of people you're bringing in is more U.S. weighted than it's salaries? Is there a lot more marketing going on? If you could just square that circle of headcount growth versus top line growth, there seems to be a gap there.

And maybe secondly, some of the stats you gave around Dynamic ID and some of the new products you've added to that seem really impressive. I guess a lot of your very big e-commerce merchants route pretty dynamically. You would have thought that as soon as they see those types of results coming through, the impact on volume shifting to you would be pretty rapid.

Could you maybe just talk about what the barriers are to get that to happen and maybe how long it takes you to put this product in front of a customer and then actually seeing the volume start to shift more dynamically onto the platform? What's the time frame we should be thinking about for that?

Okay. Ethan, do you want to take the EBITDA one, Ingo take the Dynamic Identification one?

Yes, sure. So on EBITDA margin, it's driven by the team. So there's nothing else in the expense base that leads to this expectation. It's driven by the team. I think we will grow the team a bit more than the 10% you referenced, but just a few percentage points faster given the numbers that we've shared.

But we're also indeed hiring more in the U.S. We're hiring specialized roles, right? If you think about what we're building out, again, in financial products. So this is really investment in the team more than investments in other areas.

Yes. And on Dynamic Identification, of course, we work very closely with our customers to see how we can help them ultimately to improve conversion because I think that's -- Dynamic Identification is in itself not a product.

So one of the product suites that is built upon Dynamic Identification is Uplift. And depending on the needs of specific merchants, we discuss with them which module they like to have.

So for instance, not all of our big enterprise merchants use our risk module yet. That's, of course, a conversation that we have then with them to demonstrate what we can do, how it will help them to use our risk module. But also, of course, we have a discussion around the monetization of it.

So that's why it typically takes time before people just switch volumes. But we see very promising results. And also with winning the new merchants, about 2/3 of our new merchants, they turn parts of Uplift on from the start.

So that's a very important KPI, and that gives us also the support that for existing merchants, it is a matter of time to explain them where they benefit and basically that we continue to expand the gap with competition on the ultimate goal of merchants, which is highest conversion at the lowest cost.

Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Justin at UBS.

Justin Forsythe from UBS here. A couple of questions from me. Just very simply on the '26 revenue guide. Three months ago about we had a preliminary guide of low to mid-20s. Why didn't you guide for low 20s when initiating that guide in October for conservatism?

Secondarily, North America growth ex de minimis for 2H seemed to be above 30% ex FX as well. Could you talk about what is driving the strength there and how we expect that to filter through in 2026?

I'll take the first.

Okay. Yes.

Yes. Let me take the first question on the net revenue guide. What we intended to share at our Investor Day was our new approach to sharing guidance, right, which is that we go through these conversations with our customer base at the end of each year to understand what is it that's on their road map? What's in their priorities for the next year.

And as we go through that process, we wanted to share the latest information that we get from them. That's why we thought if we share it in February, that will give the best insight to our -- to stakeholders, to shareholders about what to expect in that given year, given that those road maps are typically built out for, say, 12 months.

So ultimately, that was -- we were in a transitionary period of going from a 3-year guide to this 1-year view. And we wanted to give the best view that we had along the way. So ultimately, now we've had those conversations, we want to give a more narrow view or better expectation of what we should expect for this year. It is ultimately what we expect for 2026, and that's why we've shared it this way.

Do you want to take the North America question?

Yes, sure, absolutely. The strength in North America is the result of investing in North America for over a decade in combination with the fact that the North American market is only getting more complicated. So you see more differentiation in payment methods compared to 5 or 6 years ago, the importance of Unified Commerce.

So combining off-line or in-store volumes with online volumes is very important. And it's very clear also to domestic retailers that we have a unique position in the market to help them out. So that's why the North America market is performing very strong, and we continue to invest in that market. It's our biggest investment market right now, and we also expect that to continue in this year.

Okay. Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Adam at Evercore.

Two questions. I'd like to focus specifically on the share of wallet verbiage in the release since that is obviously the center of the growth algorithm. Ethan, you talked about it a bit, but it needs to be -- I just want to refine it a little bit.

Is it slower because you aren't winning as much versus the competition or their value prop is catching up to yours or they're lowballing pricing? Or is it none of that and something else? Because I think the differentiation is really important to say, is it a negative or just business as usual and things are going to ebb and flow as they go.

And then the second question is on M&A. And the narrative today feels -- feeds a bit into the bear thesis of modestly slower organic growth, which to us raises a question about M&A, which you said you're open to, but you haven't pulled the trigger yet.

So I think this is now a little bit more important of a go-forward story. So appreciate if you can give an update on your current thinking there around M&A.

Yes. So let me start with the first. I think we haven't seen any shifts in the competitive dynamics, which have changed our ability to win share of wallet, right? The reason that we've always historically talked about the long term and why we still believe in building for the long term is because you need to follow your -- the priorities of your customers.

And the priorities of your customers, they may change from year-to-year, right? You may have an opportunity to win share with them in one market 1 year and another market the next year.

You should focus on what's important to them and how you can best help them over multiple years because that will ultimately get you to the largest size relationship and the most value you can provide to them. And so that's always been our plan.

Now if you look at share of wallet opportunities that we're focused on this year, they'll have a range of revenue-driving time lines, right? Some of them will be more short-term revenue driving and some of them may be longer term. That's why I tried to share a couple of examples, right?

We're seeing stronger traction right now in LatAm as an example. We're also focusing on agentic commerce, something that won't drive strong revenue growth this year, but over time, may, right? And as long as we're there focused on the priorities of our customers, then we know we'll be able to gain further and further share with them over time. That's the focus.

So there is no change here at all. I think we're in a really good position. When we talk to our customers, they come to us to help them with their top priorities. And I think that's the key thing that we're focused on. Now each year, that may look slightly different. That's just part of building a business and building it together with them based on their priorities.

As far as the second question on M&A, yes, I think nothing has shifted from November, right? The same discussion that we had back then. I think we've gotten a lot of benefit from building out a single global payments solution. We've branched out into more and more products. And so, of course, you consistently look at what's available in the market and what you can build yourself. That doesn't change.

We continue to focus on building the best solution for our customers. And if an inorganic approach is what makes sense for us, we will consider it. There's nothing that we have to share. I think this is not different than our view has been over the past years, but we'll continue to evaluate what makes most sense for us.

Okay. Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Jason at Wells Fargo.

Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo. So I think you're making an important point. This is the first year where you're utilizing the new formal annual guidance approach. So can you just talk more about how you built the revenue forecast? I'm sure there's a pretty robust bottoms up here. You've referenced the client conversations.

But does the revenue guide include any material amount of cushion or conservatism with respect to any of the building blocks from the Investor Day or the macro? It just seems like there's no reason growth shouldn't accelerate modestly a little bit off the 21% in 2025 in a base case because you had the strength of the cohorts in '25, you're lapping some of the headwinds around tariffs, de minimis.

So I'm just curious if there's any holes in that thought process and any more insight into the actual development of the revenue guide under this annual model.

Yes, sure. So if you use the building blocks as the framework, which is, I think, a good one, on the existing business side, we basically model out our relationship with every customer. We understand where the opportunities are through discussions with them, of course, and we try to get a sense of how they expect their own business to grow.

Now some of them have a clear sense, also a sense they're willing to share, and others are less open to sharing their perspective, and we take an assumption on how they will grow their business.

So on the existing side, we look really account by account. We look at that in detail, and we see where can we best help our customers, what are their priorities and how does that ultimately lead to our own growth in this year.

That's a continuous conversation, but that gets more concrete to the end of the year, like I mentioned earlier, because that's often when the planning cycles happen for our customer base.

In terms of how we think about it, we're trying to share our expectation, right? So that 20% to 22% constant currency guide that we shared for 2026, that's our expectation for this year. It's, again, off of the back of these conversations.

It's the latest information we have, and we want to share that proactively as we get it, which is why we've moved to this model and plan to share basically our view at the beginning of each year. It's absolutely our expectation for '26.

Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Darrin at Wolf.

All right. So I mean, it does sound like the change in the -- to lowering the range is really just fine-tuning what you're seeing your customers prioritizing right now versus what maybe you thought a few months ago.

So maybe just shifting the topic a little bit more to 2 things. One is cadence. And then the second is just overall what you're seeing in the consumer and macro.

I mean, first on cadence. I mean, I would imagine just given that we're lapping APAC retailer headwinds early in the year, then it would imply second half should show a better growth profile than first. Just want to verify that first, Ethan.

But then also, when we think about overall market growth, it sounded like you're saying that should be the same. Give us a little more color of what you're seeing in terms of notable outperformers or underperformers and areas in the market in terms of consumer and what you're seeing in spending in different markets you're seeing, please?

Sure. Let me start with the cadence. Between halves, we actually expect pretty similar growth rates. I think the only thing that I'd -- I'd call out maybe 2 things.

One is that we've seen headwinds from USD. We expect that, that will continue, especially through Q1. That will still be there in the second quarter, but at current rates, at least, that will start to ease into Q2 and then Q3 and Q4 as well.

The other thing I'd highlight is that between H1, I would expect that Q1 is a bit lower growth than Q2 given your call out on the APAC retailers. Having said that, if you take it over the year or over the halves, it will be less visible. But I think it is maybe helpful to understand the difference between the first and the second quarter.

In terms of the consumer and macro, in general, right, what you get a sense for is some level of uncertainty, right? And people are thinking differently about how -- yes, where their priorities should focus in a time of geopolitical uncertainty. That's where it's best for us to listen, us to be in open ear and connected to our customer.

I think the benefit of what we've built is we've built a very global platform. So depending on where priorities shift again, we can support them in that, and it's important that we just deeply understand what's important to them so that we can best solve for them.

The reality is that we haven't seen major shifts in our data that we've processed to date. There's nothing specific that I'd call out, right, again, because the macro is also blended with the share of wallet gains that we have, and that's a big component of our growth. So there's nothing specific that I would highlight here.

Okay. Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Harshita at Bernstein.

So 2 questions. One, Ethan, I want to follow up on the guidance philosophy. And I know you talked about the formulaic approach to guidance, for better or of worse, the market rewards beats and positive revisions, which I know is not the game you play, and I also know you don't solve for the short term.

But my question is, given the volatility in the stock, is there an update to kind of how you're thinking about guiding going forward on a level of conservatism embedded? Are your internal targets the same as your external guidance?

And then, Ingo, a question on agentic. There is this concern amongst investors that you may be behind some of your peers here, which I know is not the case. And I know it's super early days. There's a lot of experimentation and your enterprise customers move at a different pace versus start-ups.

You talked about this in your shareholder letter and your remarks, but maybe expand upon why Dynamic Identification is a big asset in agentic, what problems it's solving with regards to trust and identity and intent? And also, how important is it for you to shape the standards being developed, for example, UCP by Google or others?

I'll start on the guidance question. So I think in general, yes, our stance is changing because that's why we want to share our annual view. We want to give the latest information we have through our customer conversations and to be honest, those are typically on a 12-month view, right, because that's how they build out their priorities. That's how they build out their road maps.

So we wanted to align basically the types of conversations that our customers have with us about their priorities against what we share with the market. And that's why we've made this transition now to getting to this one -- this annual view we'll give each February.

We plan to do this again next year. The idea is share the latest information that we have from our customer base. That's also why we share what our expectations are specifically for 2026. So in some sense, it's shifted, but this is just getting us to this new model we plan to go forward with.

Yes. On the second question, we are at the forefront of agentic commerce, and we will certainly show more in the next couple of months because we're working closely with our merchants to implement it. And indeed, Dynamic Identification is key here.

And the reason why it's key is because it's ultimately a trust game. So in this new world, we need to know who is the consumer behind the agent and how do we know that we can trust the agent that is indeed acting on behalf of the consumer.

And that's where Dynamic Identification really helps. So it helps to look at the signals that we get and compare that to the signals that we have in our system and then come up with the right outcome or decision whether this can be trusted or not.

In that sense, it's also very important to shape the protocols with OpenAI, with Google to make sure that, that information is not get lost, and making sure that also our merchants do not lose the connection with the consumer behind the agent because that's one of the key elements that our merchants find important, and we want to make sure that, that connection is not lost.

So more to come in the next couple of months. We are very pleased to see what's happening in this space.

Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Bryan at TD Cowen.

So 2 for me, one on Digital and one on market volume growth. First on Digital, just understanding the increased shift to Unified Commerce and the real strong growth there has driven the Digital pillar a bit lower. Just trying to get a sense of what the underlying Digital pillar growth rate really is.

So can you give us a sense of perhaps what the level of headwind it presents to digital when recategorizing do you see? And then as you operate this low double-digit level in Digital, is that a sustainable rate?

And as it relates to the second question, market volume growth, what's the level of market volume growth that you saw in 2025? I'm curious if it's fair to assume it was at the lower end of the high single to low double-digit range that you previously framed in the framework or perhaps a bit below that?

Sure. So let's start with Digital. So indeed, I think 2025 saw a number of factors that you would kind of need to normalize growth against, right? One is currency.

We saw that across each pillar, but no different in the Digital pillar that we saw headwinds from -- on the currency side. We also talked about a large Digital customer. So one customer that had more impact, of course, on volumes, but had some impacts on revenues, especially if you cut it down to the pillar level.

And then lastly, we saw that we had more customers moving into Unified Commerce in the second half than we had previously seen in other halves. To me, that's a positive, right?

That's the execution of a broader expansion strategy, being able to support our customers in more sales channels means that they put more trust, we're able to win more of their share of wallet. So in general, actually, the Digital pillar has been growing pretty consistently over the last few periods, and it feels like a very sustainable level for us going forward.

In terms of market volume growth in 2025, the biggest impact that we had on the market volume growth side, and we talked about that in H1, that was the thing that was different than our expectations back then is that we saw this impact from this handful of APAC online retailers. So that brought us indeed towards the low end of our expectations around market volume growth.

Thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Pavan at Citibank.

Pavan Daswani from Citi. I've also got a couple. Firstly, following up on the 2026 growth guidance. Could you expand on the customer priorities that you're seeing shift maybe by segment or region? And should we think about this as the new normal as budgets and priorities shift to areas like AI? Or do you expect to see some catch-up effect in 2027 and 2028?

And then secondly, you've talked about the large cohort of new wins in 2025. Could you touch on what the sales pipeline looks like for 2026, please?

Great. Ethan, do you want to take both?

Yes. I want to make this point clearly because it's not that customers' priorities shifted in some way in the last couple of months. It's that priorities look different each year, right? And that's just based on the mix of merchants that we have and what they're focused on in any given year and of course, how the world is developing, how technology is developing, how we can best support them.

So each year in terms of where your opportunity is to grow share of wallet just looks a bit different than the last or then the next one will. And that's why we want to share each year our view on the growth for that year because it's ultimately a reflection of what are customers prioritizing in that year and how will we help them with that.

We haven't seen that there's been a big shift in priorities. That's not been the case at all nor a willingness to partner with us on those priorities. They're absolutely looking to us to help them with their most important priorities. And I think that's what's key for us. It's key for us to be able to support them with whatever is most important to them in any given year.

You did call out AI. Of course, we've talked a lot about agentic commerce, both in the letter and on this call. That is something, for instance, that you see is a priority often for many of our customers. It may not be the first priority, but it's somewhere in the top few priorities that they're looking at how can they best set themselves up in this world, even knowing that revenues may not come from it in 2026 nor maybe even in 2027. That's much more a long-term play.

In terms of sales pipeline for 2026, I mean, we continue to see really good traction on the new business side. We talked a lot about the 2025 cohort. Of course, the 2026 cohort is very early days, but everything that we see in the pipeline across pillars looks like a continuation of what we've been able to build through 2025. So we're well positioned to win across each of them.

Thanks for your questions. We have time for one more question, and it's going to come from Josh at Autonomous.

Josh from Autonomous Research. I just really want to clarify what you mean by shifting priorities. It would be really helpful if you could give a specific example of -- 1 or 2 examples where a merchant has said we are going to now prioritize X versus Y, and therefore, you decide to -- you need to sort of lower your growth forecast a little bit. If you could really define X and Y, that would be really helpful.

And then secondly, putting aside just this quarter, I mean, there's been a lot of weakness in the stock price. What is the single biggest disconnect you see between how Adyen is performing internally and how investors might be interpreting the story externally? And what could help close that gap?

Thanks for giving me the chance to clarify because, again, I find this important. It's not that we've lowered our view of our growth for 2026. It's that we understand where the priorities of our customers will be in a deeper way and can share that, right?

And it's not about shifting priorities. It's about understanding where the focus of our customers will be in the following year, right, in any given year. I can give a couple of examples where things change from year-to-year, right?

One of the reasons that we're seeing strong growth in Latin America, for instance, is not only that we've been investing a lot in the product over the past years, and we've built up a great team there, and we have a strong offering, but also because as there was some geopolitical tensions, some of our international, especially retailers, shifted some of their focus more towards that market. right?

That's one example of where you might see a bit of a shifting priority. But it's not that priorities have shifted in a big way, and that's what's led to a lowering of our view. It's just we have a good reflection, a refined reflection of our expectations for 2026, and that's what we share.

Now those opportunities have a balance of when they drive revenues. Some of them drive revenues more short term, some of them drive revenues more long term. But you need to be there with your customers again, working on what their priorities are.

On your second question, like we're building the company for the long term. And I think that's very important because if you ask me, do I have confidence in how we're building for the long term and do we have a long-term growth trajectory, my answer is a full yes.

And I think what I find sometimes difficult to understand is why on the short term, the reaction is so intense, because the long-term perspective for us does not change. And I think that's what we try to be helpful to be transparent, and I understand that a lot of short terms ultimately end up to the long term.

But we think that too much focus on the short term is not helping us in that long-term execution. And I think that is potentially something that we can explain better. But in all the decisions that we make as a Management Board, we only take the 3 to 5 years perspective and not this year's perspective. And I think that's something that I always like to highlight talking to investors.

It's a great place to end. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.

Okay. Perfect. I'll set off this afternoon session. I'm Adam Wood, responsible for software and payments research at Morgan Stanley. It's a great pleasure to have the CFO of Adyen with us, Ethan Tandowsky. Ethan, thank you so much for joining us in Barcelona.

Yes. Thanks for having me. Good to see you all.

So I wanted to start off on the acquiring side and start off on the platform story. I think you talked a lot about how the single platform gives you the structural advantage versus legacy players, particularly now as we get into a world where there's new technology emerging that we can lever. You had your Investor Day this week, which I came along to and thought that was really powerful. Could you talk a little bit about how those foundations of your platform are changing? I think you talked about 3 layers. And you talked about behavior-based identity. Could you talk a little bit about how that now plays in the acquiring platform and what you're trying to do?

Yes, sure. So we talked about basically the 3 layers of our foundation of our platform. The first 2 are things we've been building for a long time and dynamic Identification, what you just talked about is what we talked about more recently. So the first 2 are the single global platform. That's essentially that we've built one tech stack completely organically, which allows our customers to process payments all around the world on one technology platform. That's both online transactions and in-person transactions. That's basically something we've built since day 1. That's always been there. In 2017, we started to add banking licenses on top of that. So we got banking licenses in the U.K., Europe and U.S. And not only is that just a licensing structure, which allows you to offer certain products that you wouldn't otherwise be able to offer, but it gives us full end-to-end control.

So basically, we are the only party in the chain between, for instance, different payment methods and our customer. And on top of that now, we're getting to scale, right? So we are now at EUR 1.3 trillion in payments volume over the last 12 months. With that scale and with that full end-to-end global control, what we see is that we can tell a lot about individual shoppers, individual behavior based on the behavior we see on our platform. And that's really important now because technology is moving the world faster than ever before, right? One of the ways that, that can be understood is fraud, right? In e-commerce, One of the big challenges is fraud. And the game has always been you're in a race with the fraudster, right? So every time you are adjusting, the fraudster is adjusting and then you're adjusting and the fraudster is adjusting. And it's always important to stay ahead. That's how we can help protect customers.

Well, now the pace at which a fraudster moves is so much faster with AI, right? I mean even simple things like if you open a new bank account, you send a picture of yourself with a passport next to your head and you say, that's what gives you the clarity that you are who you say you are. But that's -- in this world, that can be recreated in 10 seconds, right? That's something very easy to recreate with AI. So we want to leverage the behavioral patterns we see on our platform to better inform that a person is who they say they are in any interaction, and that needs to be in real time, right? That cannot just be a static check done a year ago or two years ago. That needs to be real-time behavior to inform decisions for our customers.

Could you -- I think this is really interesting about the data that sits on the platform. I think one of the things we've thought about Gen AI differentiation is the proprietary data that some companies have and obviously, you're sat on this incredible volume. Could you just talk a little bit about the data that you have access to and then how that can help you onboarding merchants, identifying fraud, just go a little bit deeper on what data you're looking at and how that helps?

Yes, sure. So let's stick with the fraud example. There's many uses of the data that we have, but let's start with the fraud example. So we have a lot of data on the platform. Again, the significance of the size of the transaction volume we have. Let's use one example, right? Maybe we gave this example earlier, but maybe to get to our -- we did an Investor Day in Amsterdam. So let's say, somebody came to our Investor Day in Amsterdam, they booked an airline ticket. And they booked a hotel and they booked a rideshare to get from the airport to the event. And maybe on the way, they stopped and got a coffee. Each of those things informs the behavior of that person, which we can use for future transactions. And think about that set of 4 transactions.

What's most useful? Well, you get a certain set of data from an airline ticket because you get the actual real name of a person connected to that ticket, but you also get some really interesting data if they bought coffee in person, right, different from if they bought online transactions. If they showed up and bought coffee in person, it's also much more likely to be them than an online transaction that's happening. And so really assigning risk levels to different behavioral patterns is where we see a lot of advantage that we can drive for customers.

So we'll be better positioned to help our customers know when somebody is truly who they say they are. And that matters a lot also if you take it into a world of agentic commerce or a lot of the changes that will develop, right? The challenge is going to be, is that person really who they say they are? Is this actually a valid transaction or not a valid transaction? And so much of the ability to do that will be the foundations we've built and the quality of the data set that we have today.

And this is -- it's about going from static to dynamic in real time. And I guess for you, it's the scale that you now have on the platform, but it has to be one platform because if that was fragmented over 10, it wouldn't -- you would...

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That's what allows us to connect those transactions to one another.

So we carry on with the example of the fraudsters using AI accelerating their pace of innovation, if we phrase it that way. We see a lot of legacy players now starting to have more and more problems in their tech stack, raising money to solve this. I mean I think we've thought for a while, like at what point is this tipping point that market share starts to accumulate even more quickly to modern players and modern platforms. Is this now a catalyst that you see they start to struggle? Is there any evidence of that in the market yet?

I would say that complexity is rising, right? And in payments, there's always been a discussion on is it a commodity or is it a functionality game, right? We've been talking about that as long as I've been at -- and it's a commodity if complexity is decreasing. And it's a functionality game if complexity is increasing. And I think what you see right now with the way that technology is evolving is that the complexity is increasing, right? Both we talked about fraud, but also the sales channels, like the means of distributing your products.

We think that over the next few years, agentic commerce will play a bigger role. That adds a lot of complexity because it's not just going to be one solution. It's going to be implementations of that agentic commerce flow in multiple different setups and multiple different protocols. And so what you see is this kind of fragmentation while technology is moving faster than ever. And that should be a reason we continue to gain a significant -- a larger share of this market in our view.

That makes perfect sense. I think as well, it feels like -- and maybe this is just an external perception. It feels like the innovation has really stepped up a level and that level of differentiation of you from other players has gone again to a different level. One of the things you've talked about is the Adyen uplift product. There was some pretty amazing stats at the Capital Markets Day around how that's helping merchants. But that seems a good example of the innovation. Could you talk a little bit about what that is and then the benefits that's delivering for your merchants?

Yes. So Adyen uplift for us is a suite of products, which ultimately help our customers optimize the full payments flow. We call it the payments conversion funnel. And whereas previously, there was a lot of discussion, especially in e-commerce around authorization rates, and there still is a lot, right? The percentage of transactions which ultimately get approved. That's a big discussion. If you compare it to in-person transactions, 10% more are declined on e-commerce than in-person. So there's still a major problem to be solved there and auth rates are still important. But what we've seen over the last few years is that other metrics have also become important, things like payments costs, right? Each payment method has a different payment cost structure. Things like when to authenticate or tokenize the transaction has become more relevant. How do you manage fraud?

And where we're uniquely positioned to drive value is that we can make a decision across each of those dimensions together. So not in isolation, not optimizing for one specific component, but truly driving optimizations across the full funnel. And I can give one example maybe to exemplify it. So we've put a lot of effort into building out our U.S. debit offering. In the U.S., if you use a debit card, there's regulation, which requires that there's the option to send that transaction to multiple networks.

So that means if it's a Visa card or a Mastercard, you can send it to that network or you should be able to send it to an alternative network. There's a few of them like STAR, Accel, NYCE, Pulse, for example. Now that's always been available basically since the financial crisis around 2008, that's been the regulation. But what we've really worked on is bringing the performance up to a level where that routing decision actually becomes possible, right? Because even if there were previously cost savings available by doing that, if the performance wasn't at the right level, then it didn't make sense to send those transactions down those alternative rails.

So we've put a lot of effort into making sure that the integration, the implementation of those alternative rails is at a quality where you don't need to sacrifice performance or cost. And because of that full funnel kind of view, that then becomes very relevant as a recommendation to our customers to say, "Hey, if you use our U.S. debit offering, we will not just optimize cost for you, we will optimize cost and higher performance at the same time." And that's really difficult to compete with because most of our competitors, almost all don't have a single platform structure. They have either parts of that product offering operating on different platforms or they have different markets operating on different platforms or they have different sales channels like in-person and online operating on different platforms. And so bringing that cohesive view is very, very difficult compared to our setup.

And is that -- particularly the direct debit routing, is that where you actually have to go and work directly with those schemes. It's not just your technology that needs to be right, it's the ability to work with those players and get them to a place where the partnership which I think has happened with some of the European schemes as well.

It's quite complex. We have to work with them. And we also had to build a lot on our end to kind of -- to make sure that the quality was at the right level, right? So it wasn't only like explaining to them and having them build, although they did build as well, but also on our side, we built specifically to make sure that the performance on those networks caught up. And that is quite a lot of effort.

I think what I'm most confident about is that because we have this foundational -- the single platform component, the pace at which we can drive and deliver innovation just looks very different to what the legacy providers can provide because if they want to bring innovation to -- if they want to bring global innovation, that often means they need to build it, I don't know, 5x or 12x or 20x to bring that around the world and bring that across channels. And we need to build it once and move on to the next thing, and that allows us to keep driving that innovation for our customers.

Now that makes perfect sense. Is there any way you can give us some ideas of scale in terms of how -- where merchants are with adopting Uplift, how material that direct debit routing in the U.S. is across the business?

Yes. So maybe a couple of stats. So Uplift is a suite of modules essentially. We call it -- we have 5 modules or so. One of them is called Optimize and optimize is the auth rates piece I was talking about, so how many transactions do you get approved. That has always been a part of the Adyen offering and continues to be. So almost all of our customers use Optimize. I think where we've seen the biggest traction is Protect. Protect is our fraud tooling. We see 2/3 of new customers signing up for Protect from day 1. That's a much higher number than we've seen historically with our existing customer base. We've made a lot of investments in that product over the past years. Now all of the rule -- there's no static rules anymore. It's all machine learning based, right?

Again, coming back to this point of fraudsters are moving quickly, if you have static rules in place like if X happens, then do Y, you quickly need to change that. And you're much better off changing that in real time based on the information you have elsewhere on the platform than having to manually go in and change those rules per customer, right? And so we see a lot of time savings for our customers, but also just way better performance as we've built that out, leveraging machine learning and AI. So there, we're seeing strong traction as well. That is a separately monetized product, albeit the best benefit we get from uplift and better performance is that we get more share of wallet over time, right? And share of wallet, we shared building blocks Tuesday as well.

Share of wallet continues to be the biggest opportunity to drive growth in any given year. And share of wallet is basically the proportion of payments volumes we do with any customer, right? So we work with large enterprises. It might be that today, we do 20% of their volume. And the biggest area for us to grow is that we get to 30% and then 40% and then 50%, right? That's the opportunity. And the way that you drive that is better performance. And uplift is how we deliver that better performance on the product side. And connected to that, we usually differentiate through service level as well, through our account management team working day-to-day, understanding deeply our customers.

And I guess it creates a flywheel that the more data the better the performance, the more merchants, more data in that creates...

Exactly.

By the way, it sounds a little bit like cybersecurity software going from rules-based to dynamic and how you deal with it. It feels like there's a similar change in this industry that has happened in...

Yes, that's true.

On The other thing that you called out this year, and I guess this makes sense and something we've been excited about is you've obviously had a phenomenal online digital business, but then you've moved into in-store. And we're starting to see more digital customers move into unified commerce where they're doing both. Is that just the natural progression? You've called it out. Is there something that's kind of tipping this over? And again, maybe just a quick recap on the benefits of what you can deliver in unified versus what someone would get from a different provider.

Yes. So our general model is land and expand -- land and expand. You start small with the customer, you prove out the value. And then from there, you gain more proportion of their volumes. One of the ways that you expand with customers is into different sales channels, right? So it could be that a customer wants to start with us in person in a specific market and then they want to add e-com later or they want to start with e-com and then they want to add in-person later. I think the general trend is that you see more and more businesses having both channels, right? That was really accelerated through COVID, and that continues to be a big focus. And the benefit you have when you have a unified commerce need when you work with Adyen is that you can process payments both across online and in-person together through one integration, and it provides you one data set, right?

So you can understand your shopper behavior very differently if you have that data unified in one place, you understand how specific segments of customers are moving more online or maybe online and returning in store or a lot of these transaction trends, you can see if you have a holistic and unified view. So employing that land-and-expand model also means that some of our just digital customers, so customers who just work online with us, move into unified commerce as they add an in-person channel. We have seen that accelerate in Q3. So we called it out. It's a general trend that we've seen over time that we get a bigger share of wallet and that share of wallet comes from more geographies or more sales channels, comes from more products over time.

And so it's just a continuation of that strategy that we've been employing over years. But I think we're quite uniquely differentiated in unified commerce. There are very few companies who process both online and in-store across the world. There's almost none that do that across the world and that do that on one platform. It's very difficult to find that solution.

That makes sense. When we continue on unified, it feels like there's been somewhat of a vertical strategy. I guess, looking into vertical finding the pain points, how to help merchants with their specific problems. Luxury has been a phenomenal success for you. Could you talk about the next steps where we're seeing the next opportunities in verticals where you're moving?

Yes. Sure. So we started in luxury retail. Think of LVMH, for example, or Burberry, right? These types of businesses who first focus on customer experience because a big benefit you get when you work with Adyen is you can improve the customer experience. So they were the first ones to really focus on payments as a part of that strategically in person. Since then, we've expanded a lot to broader retail. So think of like an H&M or Zara or those types of businesses. And then more recently, we've gone into hospitality, food and beverage have been big areas where you've seen like the convergence of various sales channels, right?

So then maybe in-app becomes important or ordering ahead and picking up in the restaurant or in hospitality, of course, a huge set of international customers, loyalty plays a big role in both industries. So those are our fastest-growing verticals today, food and beverage and hospitality. And I think overall, what we've seen is that more and more verticals see payments in their tech stack as strategically important to driving unique customer experiences, right?

And so usually, there's first movers in any given vertical. And as those first movers gain the advantage of better technology and therefore, the better customer experience, then the other players come along. And so our expectation is that more and more verticals will move in this direction of prioritizing technology, prioritizing payments as part of that, and that will be an opportunity for us over time as well.

I wanted to talk about -- because there's always a lot of debate with investors about how much of the market is open to you. And you shared quite a lot of statistics around addressable market at the Capital Markets Day. Maybe just to kind of level set to start off with, could you just talk about how big you see the addressable market for you in payments today, what your share is, just to remind us of those stats?

Yes. Sure. So we've essentially sized the total payments market today at EUR 34 trillion in payments volume, of which we do EUR 1.3 trillion of that. We took out China domestic because we don't have an offering, and we took out sanctioned countries, and we essentially think the vast majority is, therefore, available to us, which is EUR 26 trillion of that EUR 34 trillion. So if you then compare the EUR 1.3 trillion to the EUR 26 trillion we think is addressable, we have 5% share today. So there's a significant opportunity to still gain share. And one of the ways that you could look at it is like who are the biggest players in this market. It's very fragmented, but the biggest players have 3x the share we have, right? So you could debate me if it should be EUR 26 trillion or it should be EUR 24 trillion or it should be EUR 23 trillion. But the reality is that there are competitors which with worst technology with 3x the market share.

So we should at least be supported to grow to that type of level if we continue to execute and differentiate ourselves. And that by itself represents a major growth opportunity. Then next to that, the payments market is expected to double over the next decade, just like it did over the last decade. And that's on top of the gains in market share that we should see. And then lastly, we sized the opportunity outside of payments because we've broadened our product offering over the years. We're broadening it into financial products. And the opportunity I just mentioned was a volumes opportunity. In financial products, it makes much more sense to size these based on the revenue opportunity and the revenue opportunity we see just in embedding it. So leveraging our customers to go to market with these products is EUR 127 billion and expect it to grow 20% on a compounding basis over time.

So that's also a very sizable opportunity that we will go after together with our customers. It's also a revenue opportunity for them. So we're mutually incentivized. If you compare that to, we did last year, EUR 2 billion or so in total revenues. it's a very sizable opportunity as well. And that's the long-term opportunity that we're going after that we're very excited about.

So if I just come back on the payments market, first of all, the pushback I'd get is that's true. The legacy players are at that level, but they're charging single-digit basis points for commodity big box retail, grocery. And so should we be excluding a bigger part of the market? Do you think -- is that fair? Or actually does more of that come into your view over time?

I think the general trend is that more of those volumes have come into our view, right? So if I take this business 10 years ago, we've been in the U.S. for a long time. We didn't go into the U.S. thinking that we would ever win U.S. volumes. We thought we'd go into the U.S. to sell to U.S. headquartered companies and help them international where the complexity was, but it turns out that the U.S. became really complex over the last decade, more payment methods, unified commerce brought complexity, platforms now, which is a big part of our offering, added a lot of complexity. That's how we go after small, medium-sized businesses. So the complexity has been rising.

And now think about a world with agentic commerce, right? That's another lever of increasing complexity. So in general, I would argue that the complexity has been increasing over time as consumer expectations have also been increasing. And that combination gives us the perspective that if you play it out over time, more and more of this business or of the available business will be looking for a differentiated solution than a commoditized one.

If I kind of go the other way around and come to Europe, again, the pushback I get there is in digital, your shares, we estimate it might be getting up to about 20% and so people like, well, how long can they continue to grow from that level? I mean you also shared some data around penetration of cohorts. Is that a good way maybe to push back on that? Are you getting to a penetrated sales level that can't keep going up?

Yes. So the combination of e-commerce and Europe is the longest combination we have, right? That's where we started Adyen. So that's where we have, let's say, the most maturity in terms of the market. Having said that, our view is we have around 15% share. And that 15% share can easily go much higher, especially as we've been growing outside of digital core, right, which is unified commerce. And we never had real SMB penetration in Europe, where SMB is a really big part of the European market.

So there's a very significant opportunity for us to continue to grab share even in what's the market where we've been the longest. Europe continues to be one of our fastest-growing regions even at this scale. There's so much complexity across all the fragmentation you have by country. You have different payment methods in every market. This is a market that's also often, especially on the in-person side, been serviced through banks, bank -- country by country, bank by bank. And we can help simplify that complexity. So we still see a lot of potential in Europe.

So you mentioned platforms a few times, which I guess is another big runway opportunity. Could you maybe just explain what are you doing on platforms? How does SMB come into Adyen's opportunity because of what you're doing in that space?

Yes. So what you've started to see, and it started in the U.S. and has come to Europe over the last years is that small businesses are starting to get financial services from what were historically software providers. So let's take an example. Let's say you are running a restaurant. You very likely now use one of the software providers, the SaaS solutions to operate your restaurants, right? There's a number of them that you could use to run your restaurant. What you've seen is that they've all added on financial services to that. They start with payments. So now you can also buy payments from those providers.

And then you can also provide other financial products, by other financial products, like you could get a bank account from them or you could get a corporate card to manage your expenses or if your oven breaks, you can get capital from them, right? You can get a short-term loan. And all of those products are connected to one another. So we've built out those products as well. And they all interact with each other. So if you -- if we issue some -- we call it Adyen Capital. If we issue capital, a short-term loan to one of -- to a restaurant, we collect it through payments every day. A percentage of it, we just collect daily, and we make the risk decision based on their sales history because we see their payments activity. And we're seeing a lot of success with this model.

So it started mostly in U.S., moving to Europe. But for us now, it's a part of our business, which is growing over 50%. And that's basically entirely payments today. But over time, that's going to become broadly -- more broad these financial products as well. And those financial products are already a really important part of our pitch today because so many of these platforms, they have the ambition to roll out these products over time, and they start with payments to do so. We did some research. We see that the majority of small businesses are actually expecting to get payments in financial products from a platform rather than a bank, for instance. And that's a big shift. And the reason that they're interested in it is, again, the embedded nature of those products working together also with the product suite.

And because each vertical kind of has their own specific needs or requirements, we're seeing that mostly this part of the market is being picked up by the vertical SaaS providers in each vertical. So we talked about food and beverage here with a restaurant, but you could also imagine if you run a hair salon, there's a vertically oriented platform to manage your business. And I keep repeating this example because I love it, but there's one to run -- if you run a pizzeria just in the U.S. you should use Slice, a platform there that's just for pizzeria in the U.S., right? So it can be very vertically oriented down to the specific needs of that customer group and their own demands, but that's absolutely how we think the SMB segment is going to be serviced. And because it's represented by a larger enterprise platform behind it, it's a good fit to our technology. So we basically enable them to go sell into those SMBs.

So this is about digitization of SMBs as they go to software, then that software vendor has the opportunity to sell all of your payments and embedded financial services products in -- great for the software vendor, great for you. I guess, it's stickier, bigger revenue opportunity for a better experience to the customer.

Yes, for sure. For them, it's much stickier and it's a revenue opportunity. So they're monetizing each of those products, too. And you have some of these players who used to be software -- they used to be software companies, and they very much look like financial services companies at this point, given where their revenues come from. So it's mutually incentivized.

Perfect. What does the competition look like in that space? Is it different at all from rest of the payments markets?

There's much less competitors in that space because the complexity is much higher. So you need to offer a wider set of services. You need to do that globally. You see -- you need to often have a unified commerce setup, right? So in those cases, take a restaurant or a hair salon, both cases have an online and in-store component, something that you also need a strong offering in. So you find very few competitors in this space. There are a few also newer tech stack, more innovators in the space as well who are also offering a good offering in this space. So there's certainly still competition. But in terms of the number of providers who can provide this offering, it's much less. And we feel we have quite a lot of differentiation, which is also reflected in the pace at which this pillar is growing.

And that's been a kind of longer-term monetization opportunity. I think again at the Capital Markets Day, you gave some -- you gave a little bit of a feel for what you thought you could get from just moving on from payments to the embedded finance side. Can you share with how that changed your midterm outlook on that side?

Yes. So again, I shared the market sizing of it. If we then reflect it into how we look at growth over the coming next few years, we think that ultimately, it basically adds 1% and then rising over time in percentage to our growth, right? And that starts small, right? Because we see, for instance, in issuing, which is the financial product, which is furthest along that we've really started to get to an inflection point. So we showed this chart, the real J-curve that you could imagine. But -- still this year, we expect to do EUR 6 billion in issuing compared to the EUR 1.3 trillion that we're doing on the acquiring side. And that business is also fast growing, right?

So we're really starting to see acceleration in our financial products. At the same time, it's starting off a very small base and will take time to build. And we're okay with that, right? We took the strategy of create the solution, which adds the most long-term value to our customers. That was the longer path. That was building it ourselves, all of the technology we built in-house that was getting our own licenses to do so. And so that was a longer path, but we're confident that, that's going to bring more value to our customer base over time. Capital and accounts they're earlier in their maturity phase than issuing is, but I would also expect them to get to their inflection points in the next years as well. And I'm really excited about the potential of those products to drive growth over the coming years.

And on the issuing side, I mean, you're absolutely right. It was a pretty incredible J-curve that you showed at the CMD. Is that just the technology needs time to mature to build pipeline, salespeople? Or is there anything else driving that inflection point in the market?

I think with any product, any new vertical, you also start to need to get references. You need to build up the product gets better with more volume, right? So you're constantly iterating on the product. And you need to get some scale on to the product to make those iteration cycles faster, the learning cycles faster and improve the product. And I think we're just getting to the maturity level where we both have the references and the quality of the product, which will allow us to scale. It happened the same with in-person, right?

In-person also was a very small part of our business. We needed to build scale reference customers. We needed to improve the product because we built it from scratch. And all of that takes time. In-person is now 20% of our volumes. So I expect that issuing also continues. Now it hits its inflection point. It will have momentum. There's reference customers. There's the product improving itself and iterating on itself over time. It will continue to get better, and I would continue to expect that kind of quick growth on the issuing side.

You've alluded to agentic commerce a few times. I guess in tech, there's always a bit of a -- there's marketing and then there's actual technology that's real and underneath it. I think there's a bit of a concern that from the press releases and marketing, Adyen wasn't as involved in the agentic side as you could have been. Again, you talked a lot about that at the Capital Markets Day. Could you talk a little bit about what you see happening here and how you're involved?

Yes.

So the reality is that very few transactions are actually happening on agentic commerce, right? What -- what LLMs are being used for right now is mostly discovery. So we gave an example Trevor did, our SVP of Digital...

Nice cashmere jumper. It was a nice cashmere jumper...

Yes, exactly, exactly. So he said, find me a gray cashmere sweater for Investor Day under EUR 100, right? That's what people are using these LLMs for, but like -- they're not actually paying through that process, right? So they're getting a few options surfaced to them, and they may be deciding one, but they're still closing out that transaction at the website of whatever brands they see. We think that over time, that will change, that the buying will actually happen where that original interaction is happening. And that could either be by making a click by the individual themselves clicking, I want to buy that one or the next phase would be that they are actually instructing the agent to just make that buying decision themselves based on information they've provided. That is still a ways out.

And everybody is trying to figure out what is the right protocol, what is the right environment to support those types of transactions. You have the card networks building up their own protocols, right, Visa, Mastercard. You have the wallets, right, Google or Apple looking at how to set up their wallets for that environment. You have the actual agents themselves. So think about OpenAI or Google again on the Gemini side who are looking at how to set up the right protocols. And we've done over 100 customer interviews on this to understand the needs of our customers. They're very excited about another sales channel, but they're also very worried about disintermediation, about separating their brand and their experience from their shopper.

So what we've taken a very vested interest in is setting up these protocols in a way that's still merchant first, that still allows our merchants to interact with their end users in a way that's beneficial to them and which can help them drive loyalty and the same types of behaviors and patterns that they've seen over the years. We're in discussions with all of those players, right? So we're in discussions with Visa, with Mastercard, with Google, with OpenAI, with Cloudflare, right? Because there's also this interesting change that comes from some bots being good now, right, whereas historically, bots have always been bad. They were always fraud. Now there's going to be good bots as well. So how do you differentiate? So we're in discussions and building out these protocols with each of these players to ensure that the feedback from our customers is being incorporated into the setup.

Now what does it ultimately mean for Adyen? If you think about agentic commerce, in some ways, it's just the next step on the challenges which already existed in e-commerce, right? So what matters in an agentic world, authenticating some -- an agent, -- are they who they say they are? And are they acting on the instruction that they were instructed on? Payment method mix is important. Are people still able to use the same payment methods for the same type of transactions? What happens when there's fraud, right? Even in the most benign case like a kid accidentally got on the computer and just typed into ChatGPT, get me candy, right? All of those things become much easier in this environment or even, hey, I want to buy concert tickets in 3 weeks. Please make sure you buy those when they open up on Friday in 3 weeks. And then in 2 weeks, you decide to book a vacation for that same week. So you want to cancel it. How do you make sure that, that intent is still there, right?

So there's a lot of these challenges, which they still need to be solved. But what we take a lot of excitement from is that they'll build on the same things that we've already built, right? Again, that single platform, that end-to-end control, we've always been really good at authenticating a user. We've always been really good at making sure payment method mix is available to them. We've always been good in understanding fraud patterns. So all the building blocks, which are going to be very relevant in this agentic commerce world are something that we have real strength in, and we think that we can deliver in this framework as well.

I mean as well as you talk, it just sounds like there's a lot of complexity, which should be perfect for what you're building to.

That's the summary. That's the right summary. The complexity is increasing, and that's where we thrive.

Exactly. You also gave a framework for 20% -- approximately 20% growth over the next few years. Could you just talk a little bit about the decision to move to that kind of framework and guidance and give us a little bit of an idea of how we build that 20%...

Yes.

So the idea is relatively simple. We've been very long-term oriented, and we want to tell the long-term story again. That's why we did the whole TAM analysis more than to defend that it's not a limiter. We wanted to show the potential for Adyen, right? And the potential is that our market should support a significantly bigger version of Adyen than we are today. And that's not even to build something that's never been built before, like there's currently competitors of ours who have 3x the scale, right? And they don't have a better product offering. There's no reason we shouldn't be one of the biggest players in this space. So we wanted to, again, connect to this long-term view. We know we're on that path. That means we'll gain share. The market itself is growing. All of that should drive Adyen's growth potential over the long term. We've also opened up new product offerings, creates additional addressable market, drives other avenues for growth.

So the long term for us, that's the opportunity we're going after. And at the same time, we said the growth path to get there won't be linear. There will be years we grow faster, years we grow slower. That's mostly in any given year, driven off of the growth of our existing customers, both the macroeconomic environment, how fast those customers grow themselves, but also the pace at which we gain share of wallet, and that comes down to their road maps and their priorities, right? So if a customer would say, next year, our big focus is going to be Singapore. We would say, great, we're going to help you with Singapore. If the year after they say our big focus is going to be U.S., we would say, great, we're going to help you with U.S. Of course, U.S. is a more sizable market, but we follow their lead.

We follow their road maps, and we help them where they see the biggest importance. So you see that share of wallet while consistently gains has a bit of up and down based on that specific year's priorities and what that looks like. So we get that visibility about 6 to 12 months out, basically around now, right? All of our customers are going through their planning for next year. They're all thinking what are they going to prioritize, what's available to us. And we're building out specific account-by-account plans, which say these are the opportunities we're going to go after. We want to give that visibility to you all to the market. So our idea is that each February, basically, when we close the year, we'll also give our view into what the next year's growth will look like. So if you think, okay, you have your long-term view, we know we're on that path to getting that bigger share of market and an expanding market as we also grow into new products.

We'll give that shorter-term view of the information we have on a net revenue basis. And so we're moving away from like that medium-term guide that we had 2 years ago. We didn't -- we still wanted to give some visibility into what to expect over the coming years. So we created this framework, the building blocks we call them. It's basically the individual levers which drive our growth in any given year and the relative size of them, but it's not something that we're going to revisit on a continuous basis. We're going to continue to talk about the long-term opportunity and connect it to what the growth opportunity then looks like each given year. That's the plan going forward.

That makes a lot of sense. And I think people will find that helpful to have the long-term framework and then the annual setup. On the profitability, you also guided to an over 55% EBITDA margin in '28. Could you just talk a little bit about how you think about balancing investing for growth, driving the operating leverage in the business?

Yes. So first and foremost, we want to drive growth in the business. I mentioned the long-term opportunity we have. We need to invest in that opportunity to capture it at the fastest rate we can. So we want to invest in the teams and grow the team. 75% of our costs are related to the team. So that's the place where we can make these investments, and we'll make those. The biggest areas we invest are in our tech teams, in our engineering and product teams and in our commercial teams, adding account managers as we add more customers, right, they focus on the existing customer base and adding new salespeople to go win new customers. We'll continue to make those investments. At the same time, we're seeing efficiencies from automation.

We're making investments in AI-enabled tooling as well. And we've always been focused on automation, but this is another set of technologies, which will help us drive that even further. And that balance means we can continue to invest in the team while still growing the team slower than the revenues of the business. And that's also connected to that single platform. The fact that there is a lot of scale to the way that we've built out our functionality and our solution, which means that as we add more volumes from our customers, we don't add significant incremental costs. And that just brings a lot of scale to the organization. So we think we can both invest, first and foremost, in the teams while still seeing our operating leverage visible and growing EBITDA margins above 55% in '28.

Perfect. We're bumping up against time, unfortunately, so I'll close it there. Ethan, thank you so much again for joining us and best of luck with that journey out to '28.

Thanks. Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone.

All right. Welcome, everybody, and good to see you here in Amsterdam. It is 2 years ago that we did our last Capital Markets Day, and I think it's safe to say that the world changed quite a bit. AI, I think it changed how business operate, how people operate and, unfortunately, for us, how

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regulations. We are a highly regulated company and regulations change all over the world, and we are being expected to react on that with resilience. And then global commerce keeps going, but consumers and merchants expect instant innovation from us. That sounds like an environment to work in, but I think it underlines exactly how we have been building up Adyen because what we have done is we always work on a foundation on which you can build further. So if you have the foundations right, then I think you're in a good place to deal in this environment.

So I think it feels like an advantage. And that advantage that we have exploited now over the years, that is what I think brings Adyen now well positioned to be one of the largest fintechs in the world.

And with that, I want to hand it to Ingo.

Yes. So today, we're going to talk about durable foundations

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when we started the company. And it's the single tech stack that is very important to the success of our company. Because with that single tech stack, we can route all transactions through the same intelligence, but also if new trends arise, we can adopt them quickly and globally. Then in 2017, we added that new foundational layer, which was the global banking infrastructure. And with global banking infrastructure, we have -- of course, that comes with responsibilities at the one hand, but also with opportunities. It's one of the reasons why we can build capital without any involvement of third parties.

And today, we're adding that third layer, that is the third foundational layer to our company, and that's dynamical identification. And the reason why it's so important is because the industry is at a breaking point. What Pieter said around what is happening with AI, we need to have an answer to this. AI is increasing or results in increased fraud level

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decade of growth, and that growth will come from higher conversion for our customers, lower fraud rates, so better defense against AI-driven fraud, faster onboarding and, ultimately, and I think that's where it's all about today, build that new level of trust in global

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of course, we're going to start with that first foundational layer. And I'm very happy to welcome Tom on stage, who's going to talk about our single tech stack. Thank you.

Thanks, Ingo. Thanks, Pieter. It's great to be here today talking to you all. You've heard about

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I'm here today to talk about the bottommost layer of the stack, the single platform. So from the start, our guiding principle has been crystal clear. If something is critical to the way that our business operates, we want to own that. We want to own that in-house. We want to build that ourselves. One tech stack, one platform, one [indiscernible]. We truly believe that this is critical to the way that we build our platform. This gives us the control, the flexibility and the speed to operate without relying on third parties because whenever you add third parties to the mix, you distance yourself from the problem and it creates these complexity.

It's a typical trade-off, right, between cost and speed -- or between control and speed, I should say. And when we think about how we built our platform, we think about some key principles. I already mentioned that guiding principle. We want to own what differentiates us. So for those end-to-end flows, we want to have full ownership of those and [indiscernible] at the edges. This gives us optionality in terms of the solutions we're able to build for our customers. And we only scale what works, so we use evidence and data to drive that decision making.

And these are the three key principles that our platform is built upon, sound like they're like closing us off, but they're not. They're about keeping us open. They're about making sure we're able to make those deliberate choices to drive the right outcomes for our customers. And this gives [indiscernible] we can have it all. But this foundation doesn't matter if it's not there to help our customers. We exist to help our customers grow to help their businesses grow. And so let's think about what this looks like in practice.

So I talked about these principles, but how does it come across in our day-to-day work in order to help our customers? You can see this little thing animating on the screen. What it's essentially saying is that we're constantly trying to optimize between fraud conversion and cost. So if you think about a payment that's flowing through the system, a payment goes through multiple steps. So maybe there's a risk check, maybe there's authentication, maybe there's routing, maybe there's tokenization. Each one of these steps historically has been optimized discretely and independently. And that's great up into a point.

But what if a downstream decision [indiscernible] or an upstream decision could be better if you had information about a downstream decision? That's what Adyen Uplift brings. And you're going to hear more about that from Carlo later on this afternoon. We're able, with Uplift, to optimize across that entire payment journey. So we're able to optimize across all those different steps, and this means improved auth rates, lower cost and also less fraud. So we're able to balance this trade-off. And as we're building these things in, the system is continually learning. It's learning itself, and we are learning and we are adding more. We're adding new signals, new models, new relationships to make the system overall get better.

This is also [indiscernible] do this because we're operating within that single platform. Everything is built in-house on this single tech stack. So everything that we do compounds. Every change we make for one customer impacts all customers. Every change for one geography impacts all geographies. We use several types of AI at Adyen. We use classical models, so decision trees, for example, when we have clear structured data. These types of models are really good for fast decision-making at scale, and they work really well when that data is clear and structured.

So when relationships matter, the graph-based models bring out those relationships. They let us see things that the traditional or classical machine learning models don't let us see. And these are really good when you have relationships, right? So between a merchant and a shopper between a shopper and their payment instrument. So when those relationships matter, we use graph-based models.

We also use reinforcement of a previous action. So we also make use of reinforcement learning for this dynamic decision making. So think about retries or exemption requests, things like that. And when we're shipping these machine learning models, I touched on this a little bit before. Every improvement must meet the baseline and be better than that baseline before it ships to production. [indiscernible] models, conversion, fraud, latency, cost per transaction. The ability to take these evidence-based decisions and producing what's quantifiably better outcomes for our customers is what makes the AI that we build credible.

And when we think about AI, we're staying curious. Almost, not yet. We're staying curious. We're continuing to learn. We're staying open and adaptable because we need to deliver outcomes for our customers at scale. And as you can see, generative AI is no different. [indiscernible] first and safe always. When we think about how do we adopt gen AI and how we're using it today, we use a combination of closed source models and open weight models. We tune those weightings in-house and we train those models on our own infrastructure. Because generative AI is still prone to hallucinations, for any key or critical operational flows, we keep a human in the loop because we need to be able to review those decisions before we're releasing them.

We're seeing our merchant support, so our support agents are able to operate more quickly. We're able to route tickets more effectively and we're able to simplify those summaries that lets us act far more quickly and produce quicker outcomes for customers. We're also seeing internal efficiency improvements. So because we're able to search more quickly produce better results and to summarize information, our internal productivity is improving. And we're also able to reduce our operating costs through measurable use of automation.

And we're not just using gen AI everywhere. We're not only using it if it improves. So I talked about those baselines and those metrics. When we're thinking about gen AI [indiscernible] we will use the simple model. Again, our customers don't care about whether we're using gen AI or not. They care about outcomes. What tangible outcomes are we delivering for them? We're already seeing improvements from the use of gen AI internally both in terms of internal productivity but also in [indiscernible] but the real strength of the platform when you bring these all together is around adaptability. It's the ability to incorporate new things into the platform, new capabilities without building new tech stacks. The foundation is the key to this.

You'll hear this word, foundation, a lot today. The foundation is the key to everything we do. We've built the platform in a modular way. What that means is that we can compose it to [indiscernible] bricks. You can put them together in different ways to meet new demands. So as our customers need change, as the industry changes, we're able to put the platform together in different ways to drive outcomes for our customers. This foundation is what allows us to continue to solve the toughest problems for the world's most [indiscernible] strong that we can build anything.

This is how we keep ahead of merchants change and how we continue to grow the platform over time with every transaction that runs through it, with every payout that we do or with every virtual card that we issue. And that same adaptability is what prepares us for the next wave of commerce. So you're probably waiting to hear about agentic commerce today, and we've got a lot to talk about there. But the platform is what prepares the building blocks in place today to be ready. Tokenization, authentication, these are systems that we have in production at scale today. And last month, hopefully you've all seen it, we released I think on the website the talks about our merchant-first approach to agentic commerce, forefront of this next wave of commerce.

It talks about four key principles. So the first one, we should always be acting on behalf of a customer. So we need verifiable cryptographic intent. We also want to maintain merchant control of their payments setups, of their tokenization strategies able to recognize shoppers across every channel. So think about things like loyalty programs. How is a shopper that's coming to a merchant able to make use of the loyalty that they've built with that particular merchant. And the last key thing is about ownership. So we believe merchants should own the agentic commerce relationship, the customer relationship and also the data. We believe that merchants should own [indiscernible].

Now taken together, these principles make sure that agentic commerce is an additive channel for our merchants and it's not a dilutive one, and it's also not disintermediating them, which is a common problem and something that we're hearing a lot from our customers. And you might ask, who are we working with? We're working with everyone that you'd expect. Trevor is going to share more about this in a minute, and I won't steal his thunder. But you can assume that we're working with all the key players in the industry. And while agentic commerce is new and there's a lot of excitement. I spent a lot of time in SF, you drive down the 101, you see the billboards. There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of talk. There's also a lot of concern.

So a merchant-first agentic commerce framework make sure that we're able to leverage the strong foundation that we've built to continue to put merchants first. And when we think about our single platform, when we think about that vertical control or that full stack nature of it, it's not just a set of kind of principles in a vacuum. It's actually a compelling engine. So it's one that compounds performance, single code base, single data model, single tech stack, single experimentation loop.

It also allows us to bring a lower cost of change that helps our customers. It gives us a lower integration tax. We're not integrating complicated third parties. We're not losing data and handovers across the wire. We're able to continue to keep that cost of change low as we're building new things on top of the platform. And it also sets us up for the future. We're ready. The modular nature of the platform helps us be ready for whatever comes next, whether it's agentic commerce or other forms. We're ready. The platform keeps us there. The platform taken together is -- it turns learning into leverage financially, operationally and strategically.

That's it for me. I'm going to hand over to Marriette. Marriette is going to talk to you about how our licenses built on top of the single platform to make that global banking infrastructure. Thank you.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here today. We just had Tom explain as the first layer of our foundation, our single platform. And that is the technology base to innovate at scale. But technology in itself is not enough if you want to serve large [indiscernible] in our banking infrastructure. And that is where Adyen took a very different turn than many of its competitors, many other fintechs. And in the next 10 to 15 minutes, I would like to explain you why.

We are entering an age of infrastructure. The age where having full control over your infrastructure no longer is a nice to have. It is critical in the [indiscernible] I'll touch about each of these items. But before we do, let's just first pause and see what happens when you don't control the foundation. In a typical fintech, there is complexity and there is a delay. And we all have seen the consequences of that, businesses being locked out of certain verticals because the bank changed its risk appetite, platforms not being able to pay their users because accounts were frozen

[Audio Gap]

are clear when you rely on third-party risk of third-party banks, you inherit their risk. And when something goes wrong, it's not only the name of the partner bank in the headline. It's everybody else within the party that gets affected as well. It's also their name, their brands and their reputation that is at stake. [indiscernible] secured our first acquiring license in 2012, our first banking license in 2017. And we continue to build steadily ever since. And today, we have

[Audio Gap]

We control the infrastructure end to end. And by doing that, we not only remove the friction I was referring to earlier. We also add really clear advantages to our customers. And I want to highlight three of them. First advantage is predictability. Most of the fintechs live by the mercy of their partner bank's risk appetite, and when that changes, services oftentimes get disrupted and there's very little that the fintech can do. We are not facing this because we have relationships with our regulators, all in the way that it perfectly aligns with our technology.

For us, that means flexibility. We can set our course independently from others. For our customers, that means predictability. They're not faced with a certain change in risk appetite. They're not changed with the misalignment between policies and procedures between different product. We control our own. And it's that predictability that our customers like because predictability builds trust. It means that our customers can plan and scale their business on top of our infrastructure, knowing that the rails will still be there today, tomorrow and 10 years from now.

The second advantage I would like to call out is speed and optimization. Because we own the infrastructure, we can allow, we can enable faster money movement and better intelligence. Take the U.S. as an example. Our licenses allow us to maintain a master copy [indiscernible] networks. Because of that, we can control every step of the transaction on our own rails from authorization to acquiring to settlements to global payouts or quickly, efficiently and at the lowest cost.

And the results are simple but powerful. It's true instant payout 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Funds do not get stuck in transit with some partner bank. Money moves when our customers want it to move. Our customers like the speed, the control that we can offer them. They also like the intelligence behind it. Because we have been able to combine our single platform with our banking infrastructure and our global data capabilities, we can capture data, clean structured data right at its source rather than that we need to collect it from all partner banks. And it's because of that, products like our Adyen Uplift. And we have Ingo and Carlo tell you more about it this afternoon.

Then finally, the third advantage that I would like to call out is uniform product growth. Our license allows us to move beyond payments and offer our customers, both platform and enterprise customers, financial services and products like issuing, bank accounts, capital. And again, we can offer these services without the involvement of any middleman, any partner bank. We are the actual issuer [indiscernible] and the conditions on which we can offer them. And again, we can do this without middle men, but the advantage is we can also do it on one single platform. That means that our customers and their users can access our suites with one single integration, but also with one onboarding flow, thereby avoiding a duplication of KYC and other compliance checks.

The benefits for our customers are clear. They can grow without complexity. They can simply tap into new revenue streams. They can build loyalty, strengthen the relationship they have with their users, all with one single integration. And we have Thom and Catherine, telling you the latest on financial products this afternoon.

But before I hand you off to the next speaker, let me leave you with this. The whole fintech promise of speed and innovation falls apart when the foundation isn't solid. And when that foundation is a whole patchwork of partner banks, there are significant risks that cannot be ignored. Adyen's decision to secure its own banking licenses and our ability to integrate them with our single platform truly sets us apart from others because it [indiscernible] against third-party risk. It allows our customers to really control the flow of their funds, and it gives them a foundation to build for future or innovation.

And believe me when I say that building a banking infrastructure is not something that we've done overnight. It required years and years and they continue still until today because banking licenses are not light permissions. They require constant certification and validation of some of the largest regulators in the world. And they speak to our ability to offer these services in a very secure and a very controlled way. We operate at that level, and we are willing to make those investments given the philosophy that's always been clear to Adyen. We stay close to our customers. We try to truly understand what matters to them. We gain their trust and we build long-term sustainable solutions.

Thanks for listening. Ingo will tell you are the third layer of our foundation. Thank you.

It has been very clear that these two foundational layers has always had us to take friction out of commerce. It helps to serve our customers and their customers with full control and trust over the value chain, and that makes it very special. But the world is changing. And like we said, the of AI, increased fraud levels, regulatory complexity, it requires a new approach. And that new approach is why we introduced this third layer, dynamic identification. And dynamic identification is going to bridge the technology [indiscernible] for the next decade, how we define trust in global commerce.

And I think that is crucial. We are the company that is helping to define that trust in the industry. And it could be more urgent right now because the industry is basically broken in the way how they deal. If you look at how we typically do with all kind of paperwork around static checks, how we use bank statements, passports, et cetera, just to ask the question, are you really who you say you are? But we want to answer that question [indiscernible] we're going to talk about today. And before we do that, I want to give a couple of facts.

The first fact is that if you look at onboarding on average in the industry, it takes about 11 days before a new merchant goes live. We are better than that but we also have room to improve. Another data point is that about AML alerts are false positives. So we basically built an engine as the industry where 95% of the alerts are not efficient, not effective, and that's a real problem. Another problem is that up to 10% of all transactions by fraud systems for legitimate shoppers. And I think that is also a real fundamental problem that we see in this industry. And on top of that, in 2024, cyber-enabled fraud increased by 33%. And that's, of course, major if you think about this.

And it's not really surprising because with AI, you can fabricate a passport, a bank statement or even a whole company in a couple of minutes. And I think that is the reason why the need to do differently. But so far, the industry response has been different. The industry response has been we built a new lock or we add some AI to the lock. But that's not really the problem. What we need is a new door [indiscernible] about how we have built that new door over the past years. Because how do we create that new door? I think that is the crucial question that we ask ourselves and that we want to show you today how we have done that.

And the main thing is that we need to stop thinking about identification through static risk signals. We need to add a new dimension. And that new dimension is behavior. And there, we are uniquely positioned because behavior is very hard to fake by AI. And we have the data points on our platform what people are actually doing, how they are buying a coffee in the morning, how they're taking a taxi to get here, how they are buying a pair of sneakers online, how they're accepting payments somewhere else. These patterns are in our system, and they are not easy to fabricate by AI. And we are using dynamic identification, and we can build that basically from trillions of interactions on our platform.

It's really difficult to forge this, and that's why we are so uniquely positioned, also because every second new signals come into our platform. And what is the key point here? It is not a product. It's really a foundational layer that we have built and where multiple products that we have benefit from. And it's built on three strategic assets that we have. The first one is our unique global data set containing billions of transactions online, off-line from the most respected customers that we have globally. Secondly, it's built around the asset of AI-based strategic decisioning. And that means that it's not just yes or no. No, we try to give confidence levels on if a person really say who they say they are and use that as a starting point for a decision.

And the third factor is how we use regulatory infrastructure. And the regulatory infrastructure, the key thing is, and that's also what Marriette talked about, is that we had trust with regulators, but we are also in a position to redefine how we build certain things. We're not dependent on third parties to do this. It allows us to move friction out of the system, strengthen compliance and basically create a new moat for us as a company. It allows us to build a new infrastructure for trusted commerce. And I think that is the key point of today, build that new trust. And of course, on top of that, with all the billions of tokens that we have, we can add new things to this. For instance, how we can add pass keys to it, how we can add new e-government IDs to it. That's how we further improve this proposition.

And what make the proposition complete are really different here? Our approach is continuous and contextual. And these are very important words, continuous and contextual. So we keep learning and we always take into account what's around us. And that's really different compared to the old model. The old model was always about, is it validated or not? Is it approved? Or is it declined? So these were all binary outcomes. And that's really different here. We built a really contextual picture of personal data and transactions of biometrics that we have on our platform or the government IDs that I just talked about. And for the trusted entities, we can do lighter checks. But the moment a risk increases, we can add additional scrutiny to what we have.

Let me give three examples how we apply this in practice because, like I said, dynamic identification is a foundational layer. It's not a product, but we use it to improve our products. And the first product that I want to highlight is Uplift. And we're going to talk about Uplift more this afternoon. But Uplift, the first step in Uplift is how we use it to give a more contextual risk assessment on transactions. And this is different compared to the traditional outsourced systems that our merchants use, where if you're traveling and you're in an other country and you pay something with a high value, these are all kind of red flags. [indiscernible]

And why Uplift is different is because we have this context and you get a transaction pass-through. That leads to 42% less false positives. It leads to up to 6% of more conversion. And that's, of course, key metrics for our merchants. But we can do more with this. It's also very good to spot patterns to stop policy abuse. And policy abuse for merchants is typically a margin problem. So for instance, if you think about refund fraud or free trial fraud or abuse. These are patterns that we can flag and can solve or work with our merchants to stop it. And we will tell about this more this afternoon.

The second product where we're using dynamic identification is onboarding and risk. And typically, this always relied on real paperwork, like physical paperwork and it's not really telling you if this is what you need. But for dynamic identification, we have [indiscernible] how we can do this in a better way going forward. So let me give you an example. If a new merchant starts with us and the first shoppers that come in, and we have seen those shoppers before, that they are well-established shoppers on our platform, we don't have to take additional steps. It's probably a legitimate business and you don't need to take additional steps. Or if a new merchant has a bank account or a card that has been used on our platform before, we need less manual work to verify these accounts. And these are examples how we can do it better.

And of course, if there are new risk signals that come in that change this risk profile, we can immediately act on it and ask for additional information. And we can take this further. For instance, it can also help us to predict bankruptcies better. And with a product like capital, that is, of course, crucial. So that's the next step in this area.

The third example of a product is compliance, and we already talked about a high number of false alerts with AML. And this is very inefficient. We need to solve that. And also here, we are uniquely positioned. We can really redefine how compliance works. And I'm very proud that we are in that position. What we have done over the recent year is we have developed AI agents that basically process these alerts, and do this better than humans can. But of course, it's only possible if you have context. And this is exactly where dynamic identification helps again. So dynamic identification helps to bring context to the agents so that they can solve these type of alerts in minutes instead of the 30 minutes that a typical human takes to do this. And we will show you in a demo how this works later this afternoon.

This really sets a new standard for integrity and compliance. And I think that is what we're up to as a company. We want to set the benchmark going forward and go from basically slow manual work to real-time automated decision-making. That's what is needed in this industry. Dynamic identification in is a new foundational layer of our platform. It creates the context that is needed to build trust, and trust is needed in this industry. It's the key thing going forward to shape ourselves as a company.

So to make it more specific for groups around this. So if you look at merchants, of course, it results in higher conversion, faster onboarding, less fraud. For the ecosystem, it is the best defense against AI-driven fraud. And for ourselves, of course, it results in compliance but also a more scalable compliance environment.

Let's wrap this up. The truth is that the industry approach is broken. The industry tries to add AI to a broken lock. They're trying to repaint a door. But we need to build a new door. And with dynamic identification, we have built this new door. We are building a foundation for risk management for the future, for new compliance procedures for the future and, more importantly, for trust in global commerce. That's the key what we want to show today.

After the break, Carlo will take you in more detail through the different products that we have, what we currently have, but also going forward, what's on our road map. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Isaac, I'm part of the Investor Relations team here at Adyen. Thank you all for being here both in person and online. I hope the first few sessions of today were as insightful you as they have been to me. We're now heading into our first coffee break of the day. That's going to be a short one. It's approximately 20 minutes. And make yourselves comfortable. There's coffee in a few different areas here of the theater.

If you are here in person, so unfortunately not to those online, but if you're here in person and you downloaded the Adyen Events app, you might have just received a notification or you will in the next few minutes. That notification has a link to our online web shop. And you can view that link, select what Adyen merchandise you'd like to take home at the end of today's event. You can [indiscernible] the user name that you registered with your card back when you checked in at our office, and you will be able to pick up your orders at the end of the day back at our headquarters after the end of the event.

Again, if you haven't downloaded the app, that's not a problem. We have some QR code spread around the common areas here. So just scan those, and you will be redirected to the webshop as well. Again, quick coffee break, about 20 minutes. For those of you back home, there will be a counter on your screen so you know exactly when to tune back in. See you guys in a bit.

[Break]

Welcome to Amsterdam. I'm really excited you're all here, and I'm very excited to share all the cool stuff we're building today. Now before the break, Ingo explained the why. Now let me show you the how, how dynamic identification today shows up in our products and how it creates measurable value.

At the end of the day, every financial operation, [indiscernible] issuing a loan onboarding of merchants, it always comes down to one thing: balancing risk and friction. You need better information about what you're dealing with. And this is exactly what dynamic identification gives us. This is exactly what this unique data set we've been building up over the last couple of years is providing us with. And it's powering the products I'm about to show you.

Now we built Adyen Uplift not as a stand-alone but as our AI-powered engine, finding this perfect balance between conversion, risk and cost [indiscernible]. Decisions around authentication, fraud risk, token application, fees, routing, they should not be taken in isolation. Now the numbers on this slide, they are for illustration purposes. But they show what can go wrong with the payments. Other boxes on this screen, they represent steps as part of the payment conversion funnel. And that payment conversion funnel is much more than that of rates that the whole industry obsesses about.

Merchants need to make a lot of choices for each step. And this is our thesis. Approaching these boxes in isolation results in what we call conversion leakage, conversion leakage across the entire payment [indiscernible]. Instead, you've guessed it, all of these choices, they belong to one unified decision. And this is the thing. Dynamic identification, that's the foundation for that decision. Adyen Uplift consists of five modules, each solving a particular problem within the payment funnel. The design is modular. Our customers can choose to use some of them for their payments or all of them across their funnel.

Now dynamic identification is the foundational layer that helps these modules perform better [indiscernible] by creating synergies between modules. And this allows what we call risk-based optimizations and payments. Think about your own day so far. You booked flights to get here. You might have ordered a coffee in the morning. You took a ride share. Each touch point right here, it's a trust decision for us. And it helps us establish a pattern to predict whether the next action of a given shopper makes sense. And with dynamic identification, we fight fraud with precision, reducing false positives with 42% versus legacy tools and, more importantly, addressing this conversion leakage across the entire [indiscernible].

And the impact is measurable. American Eagle Outfitters sees this nice 2.76% conversion uplift for their payments. And [ Kona ] from Australia, a solid 1% conversion uplift. We have Just Take-Away, our friendly neighbors here in Amsterdam, and I'm very excited for the customer interval that will happen right after my keynotes with a Global Director of products, where we will together double-click on how they leverage Adyen Uplift. Lush from across the pond in the U.K., a 1.25% conversion uplift and still climbing steadily against a real transaction control group. And this allows us to isolate the incremental lift that only our platform can deliver. Excited. Cool stuff happening. It keeps evolving.

We're working and launching a new module, Personalize, and Personalize today is in pilot with some of our customers. One of the biggest questions we hear from our merchants, also from you all, is how can we lower payment costs without hurting conversion. There are often cheaper payment methods available, but push too hard towards them and you risk losing the sale. Dynamic identification, it makes this trade-off intelligently. We understand who the shoppers, we know what their preferred payment methods are. And hence, we can personalize this checkout experience, guide shoppers to lower cost payment methods only when to do so. And the results are pretty clear, merchants lower cost without hurting conversion.

And the data actually proves it. In some markets, we're seeing up to 3% in savings on the total cost of payment processing. That's pretty substantial for a given market. And it's another example of how dynamic identification turns what used to be this guessing game into now a tangible decision we can take together with our customers. We're also expanding Protect. Protect is Adyen Uplift fighting fraud. And we're trying now to help solve another pain point, what we all know as traditional payment fraud. And here, I'm referring to policy abuse. Malicious users, they exploit return policies, refund policies, free trials, promotions, loyalty programs, payment loops. And they're doing this in increasingly sophisticated ways and in a very structured manner.

Now individually, these cases can seem very minor, a free trial here, a refunded item there. But at scale, they compound fast, driving material losses and operational strain. This is no longer just a [ fraud ] line item for our customers. It's a margin problem. And the fundamental challenges is these patterns, their fraud systems, traditional fraud systems, they simply weren't designed for this. And most fintechs, they can touch it. They don't have the breadth of identity signals, regulatory foundation and end-to-end visibility to transactions, not just online transactions but also in-person transactions, I'm talking about to show our customers insights like these.

And this is exactly where dynamic identification changes the equation. Insight, for example, a global retailer, we could help a global retailer realize that half of their refunds we're only coming from 3% of their shoppers, crazy. And this visibility that we help them get, it helped transform this problem from a wide operational accepted burden to a targeted profitability issue we could solve together with them. Another example, retailer abuse. Merchants face both losses and brand reputation when their goods or services get resold on gray or black markets.

This ranges from limited edition luxury products being bought in bulk to then be resold all the way to digital services being acquired under promotional terms and then being resold at scale. Dynamic identification, it allows us to connect the dots across merchants and platforms revealing patterns that individual businesses simply cannot see. We can spot serial abusers, apply safeguards proactively and shut down this behavior before cost spiral. And because we operate with full banking licenses, it's all clicking together inside the supervised ecosystem with the right compliance and data governance controls.

Adyen is uniquely positioned to combat policy abuse responsibly at scale. Let me say it once more. This is not just a fraud challenge for customers. It's a profitability challenge. And dynamic identification helps us solve this.

Now I hear you thinking. We can apply all of this cool stuff beyond just payments cycle. Starting with the very first step onboarding. Today, onboarding for any financial product is slow, repetitive and frustrating. Merchants have to fill out long forms, upload IDs, connect bank accounts, submit paperwork that we've been referring to now a couple of [indiscernible] clunky, expensive and simply delays time to revenue. Meanwhile, compliance demands are rising and AI makes it easy to fake documents, but also fake entire companies. These static checks simply do not hold up anymore. They add friction without delivering certainty. Fraudsters are laughing.

We make these risk-based adaptive decisions. An example, we can start with something as simple as an e-mail address. And based on this e-mail address, we can determine, have we seen this business or its owners before on our platform based on legitimate activity. From there, verification adjust dynamically. For example, we can pop up the right government ID check, less friction, simply because we already know a user's location based on their payment. We can skip annoying manual steps like asking for a copy of a bank statement. We talked about this a couple of times now. There might be already activity on our platform proving ownership of that particular bank account. No need to ask.

The result is a completely different experience. Legitimate businesses onboard smoothly, manual reviews go down and compliance becomes stronger, not slower. This year, we started putting this into practice using our platform data to fill in missing information of legal entities we are onboarding and reviewing on our platform. And by leveraging these existing insights, we have, as part of the dynamic identification, we already have been able to reduce these manual reviews, all these annoying steps with 6%. And this is only the beginning.

Now once the business is up and running, the next step is access to working capital. Quick fair access to credit remains a major pain point for merchants today. We've been talking about this for a while now. Traditional lenders, they require extensive paperwork and long reviews. And young businesses tend to face rejection or very expensive terms. Dynamic identification changes this equation. By using [indiscernible] business more accurately and in real time. And instead of static forms, outdated risk scores, outdated credit scores, we're using data-driven decision-making here.

And it's not just the payment behavior of that business. That's a trick we all know. It's also bringing the actual customers of that business to the equation. What does it looks like in practice? Submerchants are 30% more likely to repay when the majority of their shoppers have had in-person payments across the Adyen platform. This is a pretty interesting insight. The shoppers of a given business say something about the risk and the quality of that business. Another example, submerchants that have a solid track record of consumer payments themselves on our platform, they are 15% to 20% more likely to repay. It's a super obvious insight but one that is uniquely available to us.

These behavioral signals they give us the confidence to underwrite credit earlier and with greater precision. And the result is a reimagined capital offering. We can responsibly unlock funding sooner, working capital sooner, reduce friction [indiscernible] when they need it most. Thom and Catherine will later walk you through on how that all clicks together as part of our platform solution.

Dynamic identification is not about patching old processes. We've established this by now. It's about building that new door that Ingo has been referring to. And instead of trying to fix broken checks, [ compense ] AI SaaS on something that's already broken, we use behavioral signals to manage risk more intelligently. For example, a submerchant is 4x more likely to be fraudulent if they did not have a consumer payment on our platform. And today, we already eliminate 6% of manual reviews simply by intelligently linking legal entities together on our platform.

And these are not incremental improvements. They [indiscernible] and the impact extends across the ecosystem, creating a virtuous circle. Merchants win with safer, faster growth. Consumers win with trusted, frictionless experiences and the whole of commerce wins with a 'higher [ center ] of integrity. This is a new standard for compliance, one that Adyen is uniquely positioned to set. And with that new standard comes new business opportunity, a platform where trust and growth reinforce each other instead of competing.

The part I'm most excited about, the ultimate application of dynamic identification is referring to powering AI investigator agents. Now these AI agents, they are referring to our usage of LLMs, large language models, to take over manual and repetitive workflows that have always been very difficult and very costly to automate. And this is the thing. An AI agent is only as good as the context is given. And our platform, our dynamic identification provides the richest behavioral and transaction context in the world. And this, to me, is the game changer. This is why I believe we can make this work at an enormous scale.

And this is not a theory. We are researching, building, testing and deploying these capabilities today. And I would love to show you an example from our work. When our operations team have to go through these politically exposed person alerts, PEP alerts, so established is this Jack Smith, the same Jack Smith as part of the U.S. government? They have to disprove or prove this. Our human analysts, they have to traditionally spend hours manually verifying these alerts. So they have to check potential matches. They have to jump between data sources, check public records, confirm these identities, document every single step.

It's slow, repetitive and diverts time from higher impact investigations. So we built this LLM-powered agent to automate the steps, this whole process end to end. So the agents instantly analyzes a subject's global footprint, verifies their profession, cross-checks media and produces this complete structured evidence-based assessments with consistent reasoning throughout. And it's not that our agents like our human agents have to now sit and wait for all of this to be completed, but we wanted to show you the power of an agent at work and how this will change our organization the way we think about financial crime and operations.

The results speak for themselves. This is already live in production. And as our teams are integrating this into their workflows, we are on track to achieve already more than 50% time savings. This is a significant first step towards our goal of automating 90% of investigations because this will allow our analysts to transform from manual reviewers into expert supervisors, focused on the most complex and critical threats and not on that waste of 95% that Ingo was referring to before.

Dynamic identification is not a single product and it's not a single team initiative either. From our engineers to our compliance team to our data privacy experts, our entire organization is committed to one thing, challenging legacy controls and replacing the static checks with identity [indiscernible] company-wide commitment creates a powerful compounding flywheel. It starts with our single platform, this growing source of clean and structured data.

From this data, we can build up the world's richest dynamic identification. This dynamic identification is [indiscernible] onboarding Adyen's platform's proposition, faster access to working capital for our submerchants. These products attract and retain more world-class merchants, more world-class customers. more merchants, more transactions. And with every transaction on our platform, our dynamic identification gets stronger. This is our moat. And with every financial operation [indiscernible] excited to announce Jasmin, Global Director of Products at Just Takeaway; and Gary, our Global Head of Account Management, to together unpack how Adyen Uplift is being used to leverage their payment operation and make a change and drive that conversion. And I'm also looking forward to meet all of you at the end of the session.

We talked about our layers and Uplift. But what does that mean in practice? As a former customer myself, I'm particularly excited to share story today with Just Eat Takeaway. Just Eat Takeaway is a global on-demand delivery platform focused on empowering transactions, 750,000 partners in 17 different countries. So just 2 weeks ago, I found myself in a bit of a bind, I had forgotten to order a get well gift for one of my colleagues who lived in a different country. Thanks to JET, all I had to do was do a couple of clicks on the website, wait a little bit less than an hour, this beautiful chocolate gift basket showed up at his front door, complete with Dubai chocolate, my personal favorite.

Although to be completely honest, I don't know how much of he actually got to eat because he has four ruthless teenage kids. But at least the delivery got there. As part of the magic behind making that happen, we'll be joined shortly by [ Yasmine ]. And [ Yasmine ] [indiscernible] and what was formally a complicated patchwork of 7 different platforms across their organization combined it into one. And they've really seen real results out of the speed and capabilities that I can now provide. Please join me in welcoming Yasmine.

Thank you.

Yasmine, thank you for joining us. Definitely appreciate it.

Thank you.

[Audio Gap]

since 2009. And we really appreciate the redo energy that you've brought since you joined your organization and the innovation you're bringing. But I have to ask you, it's a complicated business. And I'm sure you have so many stakeholders internally. When it comes to fintech, how do you think about what success looks like? And how do you measure it?

Gary, as you mentioned, our vision is to empower everyday convenience. And we want to move from 2 to 3 orders per month to 2 to 3 orders per week. That is our ultimate goal. And your question towards fintech, specifically my department, how do we contribute to that? If I simplify it for you in buckets. There is one thing that we really do is really diversifying our supply, right, looking at new verticals. We are adding groceries, we are adding electronic, we are adding flowers, chocolate, as you mentioned, right, even pet food.

So we are really diversifying our supply. And we have to understand, if you change your product and service, that means that you hold checkout and payment experience from conversion, transactional cost, the refund authorization, everything change. So [indiscernible] and teaming up also with Adyen to change that and make sure that we are dynamic and flexible and can deal with that.

The second part that is keeping me awake at night, I would say, conversion. And Carlo mentioned it several times, conversion, conversion, conversion in combination with the right experience and order frequency. And we all know in the industry if you work in product and tech, if the customer is experiencing on the checkout of payment something really bad, I can't add or you get blocked, 3DS, whatever, right, [indiscernible] the same month. So that is impacting my order frequency. And if we look at our company, more star is order growth. The two key metrics that

[Audio Gap]

That's what we are focusing on.

Got it. So order growth, definitely the North Star, and there's a couple of component metrics, one of them being conversion, of course, and then the other being with the complexity of the SKU proliferation and how you do your consumer behavior with that. .

Correct. Okay. And how do you work with Adyen and our team to help you improve on those areas?

The full journey. I mean, from checkout, payment, risk, authentication, and I am lucky to work with an amazing team. And I think they are here. I cannot see it because I have a lot of light in my eyes. But I think Lukas here and Anna, and I worked with Lukas for years now. And what I love is the co-invested and they lead by, how do I see it, with clear vision and strategy, but they balance it with a bold thinking and grounded execution. And what I mean with it, I know what our challenges are and think along how we can solve that. That is one part. .

But they also know, I'm a product person, I can easily talk about tech and product for hours. So they will -- if we have challenges, they will link us up with Carlo or with the right team to talk about the challenges, it's easier for us. So it's really the grounded execution that I was talking about. This is a d*** good example, aligning with the right people and having that access like it's really convenient. So I really love that about working with Adyen.

Well, thank you. Much appreciate it. I know Luke and Anna, I think they're up there do a great job. And our ambition and our mandate as a team is to help you achieve your ambitions faster. And what about Uplift? You heard Carlo talk a little bit about Uplift. Can you share your experience with it?

So I think when -- before we talked about Uplift, it was really important that we clarify our goal. As I mentioned, active customer frequency is something that is keeping me awake, right? So when we sit down with Luke and Carlo and the team, we said, okay, what can we do to move loyal shoppers, have a frictionless experience and what do you have to offer right? This is how the conversation started. So we talked from instead of talking about the product itself.

So when the team explained about Uplift and the potential, it was really obvious, it is the right balance between payment and fraud and holistic overview and trying to find, as you saw in the animation, continueversion with cost, right, but also the fraud element. And this is where we thought, okay, how can we do that? How can we implement it. And we now introduce for our loyal shoppers a way seamless experience compared to, for instance, bad actors that we felt like we need to double-check that with biometric challenges or a different way of approaching stuff. And we have seen [indiscernible].

Conversion and risk that you here. And I'm sure our audience here would probably love to hear how has that manifested itself in the metrics, in the numbers?

Okay. So I was -- we're talking about it. I checked in with my fraud expert. She's so passionate about it. I told her like, can you give me a report out what happened in the [indiscernible]. She gave me a whole essay. And I was like, oh, gosh, it was like 23 data points, a lot and she was so passionate and so positive. So I had to write it down because I know I will do it wrong.

Look, Carlo already mentioned the 1.07% increase in conversion. But what was also interesting to see is that we saw our block rate drop extremely with 83%. You don't see it on the slides, but it's important to highlight that. I think this is really important because of the conversion and experience that we have. Next to that, the false positive halved. That was also incredible to read back in the report out that I got from my team. And not only that, we see 8 million, for instance, settlements without extra fraud.

So it was really amazing results over and over again from the whole spectrum and all resulted in the 1.07%. From a cost perspective, look, I cherish a lot the effort and time that people put in things. So when we found out that our fraud teams, including product and tech but also the experts in the business needed 80% less time to manage the cases, the profile, that is big numbers. So we are last year, 2 years ago, as you highlighted, we kickstart the globalization of our platform, but we couldn't do it with the one platform that Tom was talking about and link it to our ecosystem, which allowed us to have a time to market with 86% -- we improved our time to market with 86%.

So really great numbers. extremely proud. I know my fraud experts are proud. So thank you for that and I'm looking forward to the next steps.

Thanks. That is an incredible set of statistics, not just what we're seeing on the slide. But that 50% false positive, those are all -- that's 50% less insulted customers, right, that have been falsely flagged that want to get something that can now get it.

Exactly

So what's next for JET and Adyen together?

So I am personally so excited about agentic commerce. I think that's the future. And I do think you do need to do that in a balanced way but, at the same time, shape it together what is right for the industry. And I'm excited about that, working with Adyen and our partners and seeing how that will look like in the future. Next to that [indiscernible] in our ecosystem. And my favorite is loyalty and wallet. That is coming. So for the Dutch [indiscernible]

So just to quickly recap for our guests. JET, obviously, a very complicated, massive at-scale global platform. And we work together very closely together to make sure we're solving real [indiscernible] results you saw up here earlier today. These are metrics that have real top line and bottom line impact. And beyond that, if you think about the wallet, the loyalty piece of it, there's so much more that we can do together because it's a complicated business and they have a lot of needs that we're helping solve together.

So thank you, Yasmin.

Thank you for having me.

We do have. Absolutely. So we talked about building blocks a lot today. So I wanted to share some additional building blocks for you.

I love this. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Hi everyone. My name is Thom Reiter, I'm the VP of Product for Financial Products. Earlier today, we covered the foundations. Tom showed how our single platform brings us speed and flexibility. And Marriette explained us structure gives us full control across products. Now we're going to show what these foundations make possible because financial products are how the same foundations translate into new capabilities for our customers, powered by our banking licenses in Europe, U.S. and the U.K.

These slides [indiscernible] to end without third-party dependencies, and this enables us to connect payments to bank accounts, payouts, card issuing and capital in the best way possible. And that enables us, our customers and especially platforms, to embed these financial products into their ecosystems. Until so far, we haven't given this area its own spotlight. It's smaller than payments but it's growing across all of its components. Now let's zoom in.

Next to payments, we have banking, issuing and capital. Banking consists of bank accounts ranging from business accounts for small, medium businesses all the way up to FPO accounts for enterprise-size platforms. But it also is helping our customers to pay out their users on a global scale and it consists of liquidity management solutions to basically take away the friction between pay in and pay out. Here, you can think of faster settlement, instant cash-outs or smarter overdrafts.

Card issuing [indiscernible] our customers to pay out their user base by using the card networks or for them to issue cards to manage expenses more efficiently. And capital enables our SMB customers to grow their business fast without the complexity and the negative customer experience that banks traditionally offer. These modular building blocks enable our customers to move money end-to-end by connecting payments, bank accounts, payouts or card issuing, but they also enable our platform customers to embed these financial products into their ecosystems and to become fintechs. And that's what we'll spend on this section.

I'll sit down with [ Jason Downing ] from [ EPOS ] now, one of our earlier embedded finance adopters. Next up, and I'm really excited to

[Audio Gap]

Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. It's great to see you here. So Thom has mentioned these different sets of product offerings that Adyen currently have, beyond payments such as issuing bank accounts, capital payouts, liquidity services and so on and so forth. We think about designing and building them as modular legal blocks so that various pieces can be put together to form solutions that serve different business needs out there. Let's take an example to make this concrete.

Please allow me to introduce a made-up platform called Peace of Mind. It is a vertical SaaS platform serving local hair salons, beauty stores and so on. My friend, Christine, runs her shop, Sleeping Beauty, on this platform. Now in order to [indiscernible] management as well as payment acquiring are a must have. And it's probably also a no-brainer nowadays to predict that Christine would want one single payment solution that can give her online payment as well as in-store at the same time. Now let's say, beyond that, what else can Peace of Mind do to help Christine to focus on growth but not logistics? And what can Adyen do to help behind the scene?

In the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through a few cool tools. And in order to do that, we are going to start at the beginning of the fund flow. So imagine a shopper like myself, I walk into the store, I got some service. I make $100 payment for the service that I just received. It's very easy for the platform to configure using Adyen so that they can take $5 as a service fee from the platform and put that into the platform balance. Whereas the remaining $95 goes into the stores on revenue balance.

Now let's say that I just got one of my favorite hair style, and in order to thank my hair stylist, I decided to add a $10 tip. And I know people from the U.S. are very much used to 18% to 20% of tips, and you must be thinking; that sounds too good to be true, right? And I have to confess I learned to tip the Dutch way after [indiscernible]. Okay. So with that $10 coming in, the tip can go into a separate tips account and separate it from the platform as the shops own revenue balance. So the set of segregated balances are backed by different business accounts behind these.

Okay. So with the business up and running, Christine now wants a cart to run her business spending. This is where Adyen Issuing comes in. With the issuing-powered card, Christine can purchase hair products, cleaning supplies, maybe subscribe to a flower arrangement service, who knows what they want to spend the money on. At the end of the day, she will have all of her incoming revenue and outgoing spending running on one platform with one source of transactions, one source of truth for all of the transactions, And she does not need to log into 3 different bank accounts, 2 different credit card accounts, running through stacks of receipt so that she can figure out, okay, what's my cash flow? How do I close my books and file taxes?

Quickly, the months and a purchase. What does that mean? That means a number of bills is coming. So in order to prepare for that, Christine checks her cash balance. And she realized that while the business is ramping up, the cash flow is not quite at the place to handle such a big amount of bills at the end of month. And what does that mean? That means she needs and will be seeking for faster access to her incoming revenue. And you know what, this is where Adyen cash-out can help. Cash out would allow business owners to get access and make use of their incoming payment funds near real-time and on demand.

So with all of these problems solved, we do help Christine to focus on her growth instead of logistics, right? So what's next? Fast forward 3 years, Christina focused on the growth of our business. She build up a loyal customer base and probably is one of the highest-rated salon hopefully, on the platform. The demand is growing. And now her shop seems too small to fitting the foot traffic that's coming in. She is going to think about expanding, right? In that moment, we all know that expanding takes upfront capital investment, and that's usually beyond the cash flow that SMBs typically runs with. And now it's time to introduce Adyen Capital. It would provide business loans that can be repaid over next several months by utilizing, for example, the Sleeping Beauty's incoming payment funds.

Now that I walked you through a number of building blocks as you've seen on the screen, and you probably start to see where I'm going with this, the uniqueness of Adyen is our ability to offer such a wide range of building blocks and serve different needs of a business along their [indiscernible] to let the business choose what blocks they need, when they need it and piece them into the overall funds flow while everything still works with external financial ecosystem out there. That is a special power of Adyen.

So you may think, great. But is it real? Does it actually work? This is where it gets exciting. Issuing volume has seen an 8x year-over-year growth in 2025. Capital volume has doubled this year. And the number of [ pads ] happens on our platform is on a steady 40% year-over-year growth with tens of billions of euros being transferred between Adyen and other banks on a monthly basis. Cash-out I just mentioned is a new product that we launched earlier this year. In less than 9 months, it went from 0 to hundreds of millions of euros annual run rate -- annual volume run rate, just to be precise while still in pilot phase.

So all of these are built on the single platform, utilizing our banking licenses and the dynamic identifications that you've all heard of. The same layers of foundations that gives us resilience and control is also feeding entirely new growth opportunities for our customers.

All right. With that, we're going to welcome Thom back to the stage and the SVP of Product from Epos Now, Jason Downing. They are going to share a customer perspective -- now this time is not made up, a customer perspective of embedded finance. Thank you, everyone.

Jason, thanks for flying all the way to Amsterdam. Great to have you here.

Thanks for having me.

We're working together for 5 years, but can you explain the audience what Epos Now is and what you do?

Epos Now is a business growth platform. We've got 80,000 merchants, mostly SMBs. They run corner shops, pubs, small venues, big venues. And we're live in 10 markets and we process billions of euros every year.

And with growth -- with high growth numbers. So that's really impressive. You make use of all the products that Catherine just explained. Can you tell us a little bit about the sequencing, how you started with payments and how it took off from there?

So very kind of similar story to the one that was just replayed to you all. In the early days of the company, we shipped point-of-sale systems and the software elements. And we would kind of pass that revenue, the payment processing revenue off to third parties. 5 years ago, we bought in Adyen and we consolidated everything. We started with payments and then we started to layer the products over each other, starting with capital after payments to give merchants better cash flow and then landing some of those funds in bank accounts, offering the cards so we could then see the end-to-end picture of the merchant. And now we have many, many merchants who will take payments with Adient and the funds land in one of the bank accounts and then spend with the card. So we're really closing the loop and providing a single ecosystem.

And so you offer your customers a full integrated experience. How important is the integrated experience that we offer to you?

That's extremely important. So because the merchant is doing KYC once and it's a single platform, I can enable the merchant to then kind of access those incremental services when they're ready, when I want to kind of push them on to the next thing. But also because Adyen has a single platform

[Audio Gap]

just like has Yasmine said, the partnership is wonderful. We have a really excellent account management team. And they opened the rest of Adyen up to us. We get access to experts across forward, acquiring, issuing, and your teams really deeply understand our products. They help us build together day by day. Really, I don't think we would have got this far without you guys.

That's nice to hear. We always strive for that, but it's great if you -- if one of our customers can confirm this. If we -- so basically, our promise is to help you grow and grow your customers, grow services towards your customers.

[Audio Gap]

Of course, you have. I think the -- but it's the quality element that you've really delivered on. It's that depth of digital experience that the merchants expect. And I think if you pick apart -- let's say, we pick apart the capital product, you're beating the incumbent that we have. They're head-to-head same page. But because the Adyen experience is better, the customers already pass KYC, there's fewer clicks to get the loan and the loan is paid out faster. Just you get more depth of kind of nuance with the customer, and therefore, the commercial result is better both for you and for our platform.

And specifically on [indiscernible] and we started the journey like 2 years ago. What did you make us -- select us basically, while you already had a provider?

So we wanted to build a marketplace. During those 2 years, when I launched 2 years it was these ago this November. I went live in 3 countries all in one go, no around. You gave me access to Australia, which I didn't have before. Since then, I've gone live in 2 extra countries. And hopefully, Spain is going live in 2 weeks. So really, there's pure scale there. The digital experience is excellent. The unit economics are good for us and good for you. And the price to the end customer is good. It's better than the incumbent has offered.

[Audio Gap]

Good question. So the advantages of that, the digital experience is excellent. In terms of improvement, I want to see higher loan sizes. And I think those will land in a couple of weeks on our platform. But most of the merchants are also asking for better accessibility. So they really want to kind of evolve [indiscernible].

And that's, I think, something that shows our partnership. We're always listening to each other and see how we can improve.

To talk about soon. We'll expand into new markets and you're kind of unlocking that for us. It's a single platform. We can go quite easily. On the embedded finance side of things, we launched cash out, which I think was just spoken about in 3 markets, 2 more markets going live before the end of the year and just expanding that capital product and layering it into the rest of our products.

Thanks. I'm also really looking forward to the future. We're here at the end of the interview. I want to thank you a lot for coming over to Amsterdam and giving the crowd perspective on how we work together and what Adyen does for you. I know your son really loves LEGO. So you also will get a LEGO block books. But no, this is intentional because you have to fly. So what we want to do is basically let a JET delivery person delivered it at your doorstep., So you'll get it when you're back home. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much.

Customers experience our products and how they can grow not only the technology, but also like the customer -- the customer experience, the user base and how they make their products better and we grow together. And I think that's what we strive for. This was the end of the Financial Products sector [indiscernible] to agentic commerce. And Trevor will take you through the age of agentic commerce. Thank you.

All right. Earlier today, you heard how our single platform, our global banking infrastructure and our dynamic identification gives us the foundation that compounds reliability and learning over time. [indiscernible] allows us to let confidently at what's next, the age of agentic commerce. Now this isn't a trend. This is the next phase, the next phase of the digital customer journey. Now you probably ask yourself like, how soon will this come? And that is the real question here.

We believe 2026 will be the year of experimentation. It's going to be the year where agentic protocols get refined. It's going to be the year where merchants gain confidence in this new channel. And it's going to be the year we deepen our understanding of exactly how customers are going to leverage shopping with AI.

All right. So this next phase of commerce. I want to talk about three things. The first one is how this new AI-driven life cycle is emerging and how the roles are being defined. The second is our merchant ambitions. We have talked to a lot of our merchants and we listen to them directly to understand what are they excited about, but also what are their concerns? And the third is how Adyen is building the foundation for agentic commerce and how we're partnering with merchants and ecosystem players to make this happen.

Now if we look at the traditional life cycle, there's four phases: discovery, selection, purchase and post purchase. Now AI is evolving rapidly. These new use cases are shown every single day. Now today, most of you are probably using AI for the discovery phase. But over time, AI is going to start to move into selection and the purchase. And when that happens, these four phases, they get consolidated, they get reduced into two and at some point, even one. And so today, when I buy this great cashmere sweater I'm probably searching on 10 different websites to find that perfect sweater. But tomorrow, I want to type in a prompt. Find me a great cashmere sweater, less than $100 size, size medium, have it delivered here just in time for Investor Day.

And so the AI behind the seas is searching. It's comparing [indiscernible] science fiction. These experiments are starting to happen today. And so in the next 5 years, it's expected that $2 trillion worth of commerce will be influenced, will be kicked off, will be actually managed by agentic commerce, $2 trillion. But where does it start? Where does it begin? Where is it going to apply? And so we believe in the beginning, it's going to be things like apparel. It's going to be groceries. It's going to be marketplaces. But it's going to be in these areas where AI can quickly review a lot of the same similar product. It's going to be where automation can add real value into the space as well.

But there's one caveat. What caveat is around just how much that person who is initiating this transaction wants to control and to select what they're looking for. So me personally, I don't know much about cashmere. Cashmere is cashmere. I don't really care about brands for my cashmere sweater. You might feel differently. For my scneario, this is perfect. If you have more selection, more control, it's probably going to take a little bit longer.

The next one is ticketing. So you can imagine movie tickets, concert tickets, that one is kind of an easy one for agentic commerce. By me these 2 tickets [indiscernible], get seats not in the front 10 rows, a little farther back, and I want for Friday night. That's not that far away. And then we get into travel. And I know a lot of you traveled here to Amsterdam and probably spend a lot of time like myself on, okay, what flight do I want it to take? And coming from the U.S., hopefully, the flight actually makes it. And then, of course, you have your hotels, you have transportation. There's a lot of complexity that happens here. So in this case, AI solving something slightly different than the other use cases. it's solving for complexity.

So we think that's also another great opportunity for agentic commerce. And then further down the road and probably quite a ways but is there is true real personalization, luxury goods, [indiscernible] again, lots of selection. It will get there but it will take a little time. So in short, we believe agentic commerce will start attacking those industries first, less selection and control needed from the user.

There's a lot to compare against. Automation adds real value. But what we do expect is that over time, context really matters here. And so for example, the more you're using AI today, the more AI is learning about you. It's remembering what you did in the past. It's you remembering what brands you like. It remembers what colors you like. It's going to remember what car you drive.

And so as it learns more about you, those future scenarios actually get pulled in to become more of a reality.

My slide is blank. The landscape up here. We're already today seeing a lot of new models emerge. And they're all [indiscernible] we're part of all of this. And so the first one, global card networks. So with the global card networks, they're leveraging their network token capabilities that they built years ago. They're scalable, they're reliable, they're global, they're trusted. A lot of merchants use them today. But there's a challenge with those. The challenge is, well, everybody in the ecosystem scheme standards. And what about local payment methods? Will they fall into the same card-centric world?

The second, wallet providers. Think of these as the Apple Pays, the Google Pays. Consumers, we all love them. They work. They're easy. They're simple. There's low friction and there's automatically robust authentication here [indiscernible] is that merchants actually received the least amount of context in data when a wallet transaction occurs.

The third one, protocol led innovators, Think of these as the AI agents themselves. They're developing some really powerful agentic protocols today. And their goal is to make that checkout [indiscernible] together, which is fantastic for the consumer. But scaling that also becomes a challenge because now, every merchant entertainment service provider has to have bespoke integrations with these AI protocols to get them to work.

And then lastly, we're seeing a few merchants take list themselves. They're building their own agentic protocols. But that is a challenge too because that means they got to do that for every AI agent they work with. And today, there only maybe a handful that really matter. But over time, there could be hundreds [indiscernible] experience. And so when you take a look at these four different models, we see some real value. We see some real amazing experimentation that's going to happen that we're all going to learn together as an industry. But we see some real challenges.

The integration for merchants is complex. The lack of data [indiscernible] partners is an issue. So we don't see success here on who wants the interface. We see success on who is enabling interoperability and the trust and putting the merchant in control. And when we look at these different models, for us, when we see this new innovation, we go back, we begin with the customer. So we've talked with over 100 different customers. We talked to C-suite folks. We talked to the people who actually run payments day-to-day. We talk to folks in retail, digital content platforms, hospitality, travel.

All of them said, we're excited about the revenue opportunity. We're thrilled about the new channel. But we have concerns and we have several of them. And we said, let's hear them. Tell us because we're building something for you. And what they said, the #1 thing every single merchant brought up was, disremediation between us and the shopper. How do we ensure we maintain our brand, our loyalty, our relationship with the customer.

And so that, we said, okay, we need to do a couple of things here. One is we need to make sure that, that merchant gets all the data that they normally will get if the transaction actually occurred on its own system. But we also got to make sure that, that shopper is initiating the transaction, that AI the agent doesn't go rogue and start buying things on.

The second thing we heard, lack of flexibility, that's a concern. And so merchants asked us, they said, look, I don't want my payment stack to be stuck and forced to go down a single path. And with respect to that, we said, all right, we need to make sure, again, that merchants get the data they need to run payments, how they want to be able to route transactions, where they want, store tokens how they want, maintain their checkouts, subscription flows. That flexibility has to work. Freedom of choice must work in this space.

Fragmentation. The merchants came to us and they said, we're worried about siloed islands and complexity. And for that, we said, you know what, we need to spend a lot of time and energy talking with different ecosystem players to make sure that we have standard protocols in the industry, open protocols in the industry and simplify complexity for these merchants.

And then fraud. We talked a lot about fraud already. They said, I'm worried about AI agent fraud or AI agent is going to commit fraud. And how did the speeds work in this new world. We're leveraging Protect. And so we're extending to protect for agentic commerce and that real-time AI evaluation of all the transactions that we do today will automatically just work in this new world.

And then regulation, the last piece. And they came to us and they said, yes, but this is worked globally in the world. And it's true, and we recognize that in Europe, for example, it's going to be a little more challenging with 3D assets required, PSD2, PS3. And so we do believe the U.S. are probably one of the first to actually adopt it a little quicker. But reality is we have a global compliance framework, a global set of processes, a global team that's already built to be able to handle this new type of channel.

And so the takeaway here, customers, they're demanding infrastructure. So in this new ecosystem, we see Adyen as a universal translator for agentic commerce. We see this us as the bridge for merchants to be able to manage and process any payment they want through any AI protocol through any AI agents, one API, one platform, full control. And this isn't just about payments. It's about data integrity. It's about trust. It's about identity. When you combine all these three things

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And how we want to translate those now to our own rails and our own architectures is what I want to talk about next. Now Tom already talked about this later principles are, but I think it's really important that we talk about it again and restate these. The one thing that I want to call out that is super, super important is Adient was built for this moment. Adient was built for this moment. We've already built the tokenization, authentication, Protect, a single platform. We've built a foundation already. So the principles that our merchants are asking for already fit within that.

But let's go through them. Number one, verifiable intent. This is all about creating a verified mandate. And the point here is making sure that, that customer, that shopper is the one who's really's

[Audio Gap]

Second, merchant control flexibility. So we're using a universal token. And that token is what translates and brings over all the context, all the data to the merchant so they can manage their payments the way they want. They can continue to manage cards, wallets, process local payment methods, card on file. But they have that flexibility just as they do today. They don't lose that.

The third, universal recognition. And so the days of cookies and log-ins, those are over in this new road. It's chat, it's voice. And so how do we make sure that, that same user now through these new mechanisms still gets tracked through all these channels, this new channel no matter what payment they're using. And again, we're going to leverage the universal token, super important.

And the last thing is ownership. One of the key things about ownership is data ownership. And for data, even though the AI agent is collecting it, the merchant has to own the data. They own the data with that customer. And it's not only important for this transaction today that they're trying to conduct. We go back to those four phases earlier that I discussed, the post-purchase. How do you give a refund or exchange or handle that customer post that purchase? You have to have the data that exists.

So all these principles in the past, but reality is we made just an adaptive channel, and that's what's really formed out these principles. And the last thing I'd say is that everything we build here, it just works. There's no separate integration that merchants have to take and consume to get access to this foundation that works today.

So the vision is already in motion. We're working with the largest ecosystem players. today. And we're ready. We're ready to test. We're ready to [indiscernible] And we can do that because we don't need any new major investments. We've already built the foundation. And so here are a handful of the major players that we're collaborating with today. Open AI, we're collaring with them on their agentic commerce protocol standards. For Visa, Mastercard, for Cloudflare, we're working with them on how to identify a good versus a bad agent.

Now this is important. I previously used to run a fraud team at a merchant. I thought that bots are always bad. Bots are now going to be good in some cases. Getting this right is critical and on the payment agent protocols and the onboarding processes. But each one of these collaborative efforts, it goes back to what Tom has said earlier. It's about the adaptability, is a design principle. This is key in what we do. And so we're not reinventing our platform. We're extending it [indiscernible] process today are the same rails that will process agentic transactions with the same compliance, the same reliability and the same observability. It's all built in.

So let me close with this. Every major shift in commerce over the years, whether it was Unified Commerce and all of that uncertainty. But those that were the winners were the ones who invested in the foundation and they got it right and they invested early. And they focused on durability, interoperability. And so the full potential, it depends on is it robust enough to be safe and compliant? Is it open enough to be interoperable across partners? Is it neutral enough for merchants to be able to leverage it and manage it end to end?

This is the space that Adyen is going to play in. For merchants, this means confidence to innovate without risking their brand. It means direct control over the data [indiscernible] starts to mature and excel. They can scale with it. Our philosophy hasn't changed. We listen to our customers. We build what matters.

[Audio Gap]

Thank you.

Nice. Thank you, Trevor. We're now heading into our second coffee break of the day. Grab yourselves a drink, work on your notes if you want to. And please be back here for our third and final block of the day, where Maggie will have a fireside chat with our CHRO Group, followed by a financial update by Ethan, our CFO. See you guys in a bit.

[Break]

Hello, everybody. We hope you had a great break and got some coffee. My name is Maggie O'Donnell for those I don't know, I'm on the Investor Relations team here. And I'm very excited to be joined by Brooke Nayden, our Chief HR Officer.

Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us here in Amsterdam.

So you've heard today about the foundation, the layers of our foundation and how all the pieces fit together. Now we want to talk about the most important part, the people who bring our ambition to life. And so that's why Brooke is up here to have a conversation with me. We have coffee. I hope most of you have had a cup of coffee in the last 20 minutes. We are doing what we call a coffee chat. At Adyen, this is a really core part of our culture. So you all got to go into the lobby. You saw employees sitting, having a very open direct conversation, probably just in the middle of the lobby, and that is very common here. The coffee chat is a core part of our culture. And so I want to start there. What is the coffee chat really? And why is it important to us?

Yes. So I'm glad you all got to actually come to our office and see it alive a bit in the middle of the day because our coffee chats aren't just about giving employees a caffiene addiction. That's a bit of a side effect I hear. But it's really that we want to create spaces in our office where our team can come together, debate, share customer stories, deep dive on to dilemmas, and that's when our culture really comes to life, and it really shows you our way of working. So more than just a cup of coffee, but really the discussions that go along with it.

Yes, exactly. So part of why we wanted to do this session is that people and culture is a core part of our business model here. If you've been following us or have been investing in us for a long time, you know that. And we wanted to answer the really important questions that all of you typically ask us.

So I want to start with the most prominent question because we are here in Amsterdam. Obviously, this is still our hub. This is where we were started. Some investors see this as a differentiator, so something that really sets us apart. We're different from the other Silicon Valley companies, but others see it as something that might be a restraint on our ability to grow globally. What's the right question that they should be asking? And how do you think about our global growth?

Yes. So I guess the question I imagine you all are asking and you should ask, and it's the same question that we ask ourselves is, does Adyen have the right global team to build our platform and support our customers around the world? It's a simple question and maybe a more complicated answer. Of course, we want to say yes, but I want to give you a little bit more to show how we think about it and how we build over time.

So Behind me, you can see this image. So basically, the circles, the green circles are really there to show the size of our customer base. And this is from 2022. So this is an approximated image of 3 years ago where our customer base is and then the number is the number of people in the commercial team in that region that support those customers. So that's 3 years ago.

Let me bring you up to present day, where you can see great that we've grown our customer base in each of these regions, but also that we've made key investments in these commercial teams. So these have been intentional investments, and you can see that the percentage of headcount growth outside of Europe has been faster because that's following the growth of our customers.

So if we think about our top 20 customers, just as an example, only 5 of those are headquartered in Europe. And in our top 20 customers, they are working in 80 distinct countries at any given time. So when we think about kind of the organism it takes to support our customers, that is a team spread around the world working together. So that's the commercial side. I think on the technical side and the teams that are building our platform, we see kind of 2 priorities. One, we've seen over time, we want those teams to be closer to our customers as well. So we've built tech hubs in different parts of the world, changing from our previous strategy of mostly being here in Amsterdam.

However, we also want those teams to be grouped tightly together so they can collaborate. So that's kind of how we've thought about investing in our team and where people are located.

Makes sense. All right. So let's double-click for a minute on the commercial part of it. So 2 years ago at our Investor Day, we were talking about a very large investment that we made in the sales force. Obviously, it's been going well. We talk about the new cohort, but I'm curious how you see it. How do you measure the success of the commercial team?

Yes. So maybe to start off with, when we say commercial team, we also don't just mean sales. We've got an amazing shout-outs to our account management org earlier today. But when we say commercial team, we're really talking about our sales team, our account management team, our partnerships team, our marketing team. These are the teams that come together to form what we call the commercial engine, the engine behind Aden. But maybe to call out a few things.

On the sales side, we've been talking about that investment, that investment we've made over time, really focused in key markets like the U.S., but also more emerging areas for us like Japan and India. We've been very intentionally building those teams over the last few years. And we're seeing the results. We see shorter sales cycles. We see larger average deal sizes. In general, we see stronger merchant cohorts. So these investments are not hundreds of people, but they are very intentional. We look for very specific talent in very specific places, and we get them going.

On the account management side, we're always repeating that 80% of our revenue or more is coming from existing merchants. I think you all heard today from our customers, which was unplanned, but very well fits my narrative that it's our account managers and the relationships that they form with their customers that really grow our business. They unlock the rest of Aen and bring it to our customers. And that is an investment that we'll continue to make. As our customer base grows, we'll continue to build that team around the world. So I think you all should expect that because there is scalability through technology and as we build these teams. But in general, we're an enterprise business and those relationships are super important.

So we also won't be shy to build that team. So if I was going to summarize all of this, sometimes it can become mis numbers and adding numbers to a page. For us, it's not about just adding headcount or growing the team, it's about adding impact, and we try to really measure that and hold ourselves to a very high standard.

Yes. So on impact, I think one thing that's really interesting is our approach to hiring for AI. One of the things that investors tend to do is follow our LinkedIn page very closely and judge or have an opinion on any role that's posted. So if we're hiring for a role in San Francisco in AI specifically, they think that we are just getting started on it. It's the first time we've ever hired for AI. Obviously, that's not the case. So how should we think about innovation and how we hire for tech roles?

I'm seeing some smiles in the audience. So thank you for keeping an eye on our job board. We're always hiring, apply. No. But joke aside, we've been building this team for the long term, right? And building a product that uses great technology and prioritizes scalability is nothing new for us. I mean you saw it on stage today, right? None of this is stuff we've built in the last month or 2. Tom talked about the core of our platform and that, that core allows us to use technology and automate. Carlo shared how AI powers products like Uplift. Trevor shared how we're looking at Ientic commerce and what we're building along with that. So I guess the message I would say is like we haven't just discovered AI. We haven't just discovered incorporating new technology into our platform. But at our core, the approach is pragmatic. We test things, we listen to our customers, and we only implement something if we see that it adds real commercial value.

Yes, absolutely. So how do we think about AI, I guess, from an employee base perspective. People are hoping for us to get more leverage by just using AI and not having to hire as many people in the future.

How do... Yes, lot of replaces with robots, exactly. How does AI play a role in our hiring plans?

Yes. So maybe the starting point is that we've always had a very intentionally lean team. We spend a lot of time talking about investments that we have made. But overall, I think if you compare us to legacy players or other Fintech, we have quite a small team really delivering a lot around the world. And that's because automation has been at our core and this idea that every person should multiply their impact and that we use technology to scale ourselves, like that's been true at Adyen since I joined 8 years ago.

So that's not a new concept. But now we have many different types of AI tools that just make that easier and more accessible for more people and more teams. I love the example that Carlo shared, right? It shows how AI is changing the style of work and actually showing that each employee can do significantly more. And I think that's the way that we think about it from a people lens is not where can we cut things and replace it with AI, but actually how can we move faster, do more, have more impact with each person that we have. And I think we're only able to do that because we've had a lean team from the start because we've never had highly repetitive work and large, large teams that could be automated, right? We were always automating along the way. So that puts us in a really strong position today.

Great. I want to shout out our finance team. We actually are one of the -- I think, the #1 team using internal AI tools.

So very cool. I want to end where we actually started the day. So Peter had mentioned that we are on the path to becoming one of the largest fintech companies in the world. Clearly, from your answers, it seems like you think this is the team that is going to bring us there. What gives you the confidence that, that's the case?

Yes. So yes, to end where we've started, this people layer of our foundation, it's our culture. It's our culture that gives me confidence. And it's not because our culture is just something that lives in our lobby, which you saw. It's because it's what shows up for our customers. So I'm going to share a quick story. We had EPASOW here today. I actually met the COO, Richard of EPASNOW a few months ago at one of our events and something he said to me really stuck with me. He said, someone recently showed me this agent formula, your values, but it's funny, I had worked with your team for so long that I actually could have like paraphrased almost every point just from working with your team. And obviously, as a people leader, this is exactly what you'd want to hear from your customers. But to me, it shows something specific. It's that our culture is not distinct from how we show up for our customers or what we build. When I think about our ambition, this is how we reach it. It's through our people, it's through our customers, and it's through our technology.

Perfect. Let's leave it there, and we're going to bring up Ethan to close out the day.

Thank you.

All right, everyone. Let me be maybe the last, maybe the second to last, but definitely with a lot of gratitude, let me thank you for coming to Amsterdam. I really appreciate it. Spending the time with us and investing your time to be here with us for a full day presentations is really helpful in understanding our long-term story. And that's exactly what I want to share with you all now. I want to talk you through the opportunity that we're going after.

So as mentioned a few times before, we are becoming one of the largest financial technology companies in the world. That's the ambition. That's the opportunity that we have as an organization. And before I talk about what that represents for the future, I thought it might be helpful to look back, look back at where we've come from and how we've built Adyen over the last decade. Back in 2015, we processed EUR 32 billion in payments volume. Now I wasn't there yet, but that must have felt like a lot of payments volume back then, I can imagine. And over the last decade, we've scaled it to over EUR 1.3 trillion in payments volume. That's a 45% CAGR over the last decade.

We've shown a proven ability to scale our platform and with our customers over these years. And that EUR 1.3 trillion is the basis for our future growth into the next decade as well. So let's talk about what this means in terms of the total market that we're going after. Here, you can see 2015 again. You see the EUR 32 billion of payments volume in that little green square in the bottom left of the screen. The bigger white area, that's the total payments market. And back then, that was EUR 18 trillion. A few years later, that market had grown to EUR 20 trillion, and we were EUR 159 billion. This is when we went public back in 2018.

Today, the market has grown to a whopping EUR 34 trillion. And we represent, again, that EUR 1.3 trillion green box you see in the left corner. Now what you see here is that over time, the market has grown. It's grown quickly. It's doubled, and Adyen has grown much faster. We've 40x over those 10 years. That's significant gain in market share over those years. And how do we then think about which part of that market is addressable for us?

We think the vast majority of the EUR 34 trillion is truly addressable for Adyen. We've taken out China, we've taken out sanctioned countries, and we're left with EUR 26 trillion of this market, which is addressable to us. It's addressable because we've added capabilities over the years. We've added in-person payments. We've added a platforms offering, which helps us go after SMBs as well together with our larger enterprise customers. And that means that we represent today EUR 1.3 trillion in an addressable market, which we size at EUR 26 trillion. So what does that mean going forward? Well, first, that's just 5% of our current market opportunity. The market is expected to double in the next 10 years, again. And while it's a very fragmented space, the largest players in our space, just in payments volume, they do 3x the market share that we have today. This is the true long-term opportunity that we're going after to gain share in a fast-growing market.

That is the opportunity we have in the years ahead. It's a very, very significant one, and it's the one that gets me most excited. And that's just payments, right? Because we also spent a lot of time talking about embedded financial products today. It represents a significant additional opportunity for us at Adyen. Now we've talked over the last few years about shifting reporting more towards net revenues from volumes. That made sense because of our pricing model, right? We have a tiered pricing model based on the enterprise merchants we go after, but it also makes sense for us because we're going after more products. And some of those products don't always have volumes associated to them. So we've sized the addressable market in financial products according to the revenue opportunity we see. And let me show what that looks like here. We've sized capital issuing and bank accounts. right? These are the 3 biggest opportunities we see. Yes, this will also be online after the presentation, but it's great, take your pictures. It's EUR 127 billion of revenue opportunity, right? This is just the embedded financial products revenue opportunity. This is how we go to market with our platform customers to win, right? And it's a mutual incentive. This is the revenue opportunity for them, too. We go together -- it's how they monetize and how we monetize together. And that's the mutual incentive that we think will drive our success in financial products. And not only is it EUR 127 billion today, but it's expected to grow 20% annually over the coming years.

So again, another fast-growing market, another very sizable market, right? And you can compare our current business. Last year, we did EUR 2 billion in revenues compared to this EUR 127 billion, right? So 2 very sizable market opportunities to fast-growing markets that we're playing in. That's what excites us. That's the true long-term opportunity at Adyen. Now I want to take that back and connect it to actually how we look at our growth over the next few years. And to do that, I want to use the same framework that we talked about a couple of years ago. I want to talk about the building blocks of our net revenue growth. So let's look at how we built that up back in 2023 at our last Investor Day. This is what we shared. And we largely see these building blocks very similarly today as how we saw them back then. And I want to run you all through how we think about each of them today.

Let's start with market volume growth. The way to think about market volume growth is essentially it's the growth organically of our own customers. So as they grow, we grow. That's what's represented here. If you look at how market volume growth has developed over the past years and also into the future, you see that, yes, there were some strange years during COVID. I think everybody can understand that. But besides that, we've seen it stabilize at a high single-digit level, and that's what's expected for the next few years.

So we think that market volume growth on its own, growing with our customers, that will drive high single digits growth over the coming years. The second building block and the largest one for us is how we expand and gain share of wallet with our customers, our existing customers. I want to show you a few charts which help explain why we think we can continue to add significant share with our existing customer base. The first one I want to share is this chart here. What you can see is that as you move to the right, you see customers who are longer on the Adyen platform. And the percentage that's shown, that's the percentage of volumes, the share of wallet that we have on average with these cohorts. The takeaway is that if you've been longer on the Adyen platform, you have a higher share of wallet with us. And this is an average, right? There are customers who do 100% of their volumes with us. There are customers who do very little. But on average, we see that our share of wallet increases, the longer customers are on the platform. And that comes back to everything we talked about today. That's because they get better -- a better product because of the foundational layers we've talked about today. That's because they get better service because of the teams that we're building. And this is ultimately what we think can drive a significant part of our growth into the coming years. We also didn't want to just share it from our perspective. We had a few great customer examples today, but we wanted to also give you a view on what our customers say. So we shared this also 2 years ago, we wanted to give you an update that we still have leading -- industry-leading NPS scores, and they're continuing to go up.

This is the representation our customers give back. This is the feedback they give back to us about how we're performing, both how our product is performing and how our teams are performing. This is what truly gives us confidence that we can gain share over the coming years. We both have the base to grow from and our customers like to work with us crucially. The next building block we have is our tiered pricing impact. If you look at the 2 green bars on the left, that's how we grow volumes with our existing customers, and we incentivize them to do that. So we give them better pricing as they do more share of wallet as their businesses grow faster with us over time, they get the benefit back. Here, we've sized that similarly to how we have a couple of years back, negative low to mid-single digits. We did that because we feel we're in a similar pricing and competitive dynamic to them.

Our next building block is how we win with new customers. That's represented in these 2 building blocks. So both new wins, think about that as the first year you're on the Adyen platform and the ramp of previous year cohort. Think about that as the second year you're on the Adyen platform because we employ a land-and-expand model where we start small and grow over time. I want to share this chart with you, which shows how cohorts of new customers have developed over time. Again, some different buying behavior during COVID. But the general story is that over time, this trend has increased over time. The size of the new cohort has become bigger. We are able to add more and larger customers to the platform over time. And you can especially see it in 2025 with the biggest cohort we've had yet. This is because of investments we've been making in our team, right? We talked about it in 2022 and 2023, especially. We made bigger investments in the team. We're continuing to make strategic investments in the team, but also because those team members are longer with Adyen and they become more effective over time. And this is what we see in the first year. But if we then look into the second year, we see quite consistently that the second year, those customers contribute 2 to 3x the growth that they do in the first year.

So they go from low single digits impact in year 1 to mid-single digits impact in year 2. Everything I've shared so far is the same building blocks I shared back 2 years ago. What's new is that today, we want to add in financial products as a new building block to our growth. We've talked a lot about financial products today. We're really excited about the potential. Our customers see the benefit, and we think we're really at the point to start to see strong traction also financially. Issuing is a product which is furthest along. And I want to show you how issuing volumes have developed over the last years. We took the longer but better long-term outcome approach for our customers, which was to build it ourselves, build it on our own licenses and own it completely end-to-end integrated. And while that took some time, we're starting to see that really pay off. We feel we're at an inflection point with our issuing volume, growing up to now EUR 6 billion we expect for 2025. And capital and accounts are also products we're very excited about. They're earlier in their maturity phases, but we think we'll get to this point as well over time. And while we're really excited about this, we also know that this is additive to the payments business, which is, again, $1.3 trillion in payments volume, it's growing quickly itself, too.

So we size this as approximately 1% of our growth over the next few years. Over time, we think that this number will go up. But we're very focused on driving this success with our customers and scaling these products in the way we've seen issuing take off. When you put these building blocks together, what you see is a framework for our growth, a framework built up of multiple business levers, not that all always run together in tandem, but that are diversified and that will drive our growth over the coming years if we can continue to drive the value for our customers that we've talked about today. We're confident in that. And that's why we've also shared our expectation that in any given year over the next few, we expect growth around 20%.

Now let me frame that in the sense of our guidance. I think most importantly, we think about our long-term opportunity. The long-term opportunity comes from the explanation I just gave about the addressable market. In relative terms, we still have so much opportunity to grow in our market, both because it's growing quickly and because we have a limited share compared to others in our space. There's lots of room to grow. We're also expanding to other products. All of this provides us a long-term growth runway we're very excited about. Over the next few years, we expect that these will continue to be the building blocks to our growth. These will be the levers to drive our growth in any given year. And given that our growth isn't linear, right, the individual size of these building blocks are dependent on, for instance, road maps or priorities of our customers. They're dependent on how fast our own customers grow in any given year. We want to give the visibility that we have, which we get around 6 to 12 months out, and that's why we want to commit to giving our guidance on an annual basis. Now we set this guidance 2 weeks ago, and we'll continue to leave this unchanged with an update expected in February as we refine that.

That's the plan also going forward. We plan to give our visibility, the view we have on the next year's growth. Now how are we going to invest in this? How are we going to drive this growth, this opportunity? We plan to continue to make disciplined and deliberate investments to drive our growth. So where do we invest? Well, we invest primarily in our team.

Our team is about 75% of our operating costs, slightly up since 2022, but relatively stable over the last few years. This is how we can invest in driving growth in the business. I wanted to give you a few examples of what that actually looks like, where we actually invest in the team. The biggest areas are tech and commercial. In tech, we invest in our engineering and product teams. They build solutions like EFP, right, solutions we've been working on already for years, but that we'll continue to enhance and iterate on, build out our uplift suite, and they build out other products like our local payment offering in markets key to our success like in India or in Japan.

We build out our commercial teams. We've talked a bunch about account management today, which is great. We build out our account management teams as we add more customers. They help drive growth. They help support our customers. We're growing our sales teams to make sure that we continue to drive further growth in our new cohorts given the sizable opportunity we have, and we build functional and regulatory expertise, which supports that scale. Importantly, we're also making infrastructure and AI-enabled tooling investments to help our people do their best work and make this a place where we can best utilize them and their capabilities. And we've seen the benefits of this deliberate approach over the last few years.

Since 2023, when we made more significant investments in the team, we've seen our revenue per FTE scale over the last few years quite significantly. We're seeing both the operating leverage of our business model and the ability to invest in the organization grow together. We want to continue to do that to make investments in the organization to drive the growth over future years. And that's why going forward, we expect to increase our EBITDA margins to levels above 55% by 2028. It's again finding that balance of driving the right level of growth in the organization while still being deliberate and strategic about where to invest. And to wrap up on the financial objective side, we've left our CapEx objective unchanged.

We continue to expect to maintain a sustainable capital expenditure level of up to 5% of net revenues. Let's move to capital allocation. We've talked a lot about growth and growth continues to be our main focus as an organization. We're going to continue to take the same approach, which is focus on sustained investments in the organization. We think the strength of making those investments will bring the best shareholder returns, those shareholder returns being driven by the growth of our business over time. We also see that the strength of our balance sheet positions us really well in 2 ways: one, with our regulators, think about that foundational banking layer that we talked about earlier, but also with an industry-leading credit rating, which helps support the growth of our financial products. And lastly, we want to remain flexible.

We have such a large opportunity ahead of us. We want to remain flexible to capitalize on organic or inorganic opportunities as they arise. So let me leave you with 3 key takeaways from today. The first and the most important for me is that we are on the path to be truly, truly becoming one of the biggest Fintech players in the world, and that means significant growth from here, both in gaining share and in markets which are fast growing themselves. This is the opportunity we are first and foremost going after. Second is that we have multiple levers which are driving our growth, continues to be a focus on growing with our existing customers. We continue to focus on adding new ones, and we're adding more products that are starting to come through, financial products to be specific. And the third is that we're going to continue to make intentional investments to drive growth. Those investments are going to be strategic.

They're going to be direct where there's impact, as Brooke's said. But we're going to continue to make those investments over time, over the next years because we think we have a major opportunity for us in the years ahead. And with that, thanks again for joining us, and I'll pass off to Maggie, who will get us ready for the Q&A section.

All right, everybody. We're going to take a few minutes to get all the chairs set up. I'll do first a quick recap. So we talked about the foundation today, the 3 different layers of our foundation, how they all fit together to help us set up for growth for the long term. These 3 layers of the foundation, they are actually key decisions that we've made as a company over time that are setting us up for whatever comes next. So these aren't just things that we're picking out to name today. They're really, truly, really key decisions that we've made over time. They all translate to growth over the long term, and we're going to continue to invest to help that happen.

So I'm going to invite up all of the speakers from today to come and join me on stage. The way that we are going to do this is that Isaac and my colleague, Paula, are going to come around with microphones. I will point out who -- if you have a question, raise your hand. Josh has a question already. We're ready. And I will -- they'll come over to you and you the microphone. If you're comfortable having your face on screen, stand up. Also please announce your name and your firm if you are open to doing that. And then I will take the question and direct it to the right person on stage.

Mo and Josh, very eager, very eager with their questions. I see you both. You can take your hands down. Do we have enough chairs?

I still...

I'm going to take this one. All right. Where do we have Paula? Do you mind handing one over to Josh over here? Issac is going to bring it over to Josh.

My name is Josh from Autonomous Research. Two questions. Ethan, you used the word inorganic. I've covered Adyen for a long time. I've never heard Adyen talk about inorganic opportunities. Is that a change? Is Adyen open to buying things? And then the second question is about Agentic Commerce. Is the law set up to deal with this? Do we need new case law? I'm just thinking of examples when you have a bad purchase. I tell the agent to book a romantic weekend for my wife and I in Paris, and it books a weekend in Paris, Texas. I'm not happy about that. Who's on the hook for that? Is that going to be settled?

Let's start with Ethan on the first part. Netflix movie about this recently, I think. Trevor, do you want to take the second part of it after Ethan?

Okay. Go ahead.

Do you want to start with the first part on the M&A.

I understand where the question comes from. I think for us, the strategy is still the same. So this is not a change in strategy. I think what we saw very clearly is that taking control and owning things yourself is the best path forward. That continues to be the best path forward. That's also why we haven't done anything in an inorganic way. At the same time, it would be naive to say that we shouldn't look at what's available in the market, especially as you broaden your product suite. We just haven't seen anything that made sense for us. So it's not an active part of our strategy. The active part of the strategy is build organically, grow the business, build it in-house, but we want to remain flexible for both organic and inorganic means going forward. And that's not anything new. That's always been the case for us.

Yes. I think from my standpoint, so we're early days. We're early days in trying to understand exactly how the dispute process is going to work. I think the expectation is that the merchants for e-commerce today, the merchant is typically held for the liability unless some sort of authentication might occur. But this is why we're investing in authentication and authorization and making sure that we actually pass the merchant all the information they need to help protect themselves and that stand in to help prevent fraud just as we do today for the existing transactions. So we see this really as another channel that comes in, no different than it is today. But that's also why merchants are concerned about here, right, is they want to make sure that there is the same evidence. I can imagine a world maybe where the card networks will reevaluate the compelling evidence rules, for example, but -- so there might be some changes that come out of that over time. But ultimately, it should flow relatively the same as today, but it also shows just how important it is for us to help our merchants protect every single transaction as we do today.

Great. Thanks for your question, Josh. Mo, go ahead.

It's Mo from Goldman Sachs. Really helpful. First one is really on the kind of growth algorithm. You talked a lot about the sort of framework. Can we perhaps flip it the other way around and look at the kind of pillars and how you kind of think about that growth evolution and how the business mix changes kind of by pillar? And connected to that, the sort of -- when we look at volume sort of take rates, you're starting to roll out monetization, particularly with uplift on new products. How do you expect that sort of disconnect between volume and sort of net revenue to evolve? And then the second was again on Agentic Commerce, maybe for Trevor. You talked about the ecosystem and everyone you work with. Could you give us maybe some case studies with some of the merchants that you're working with already on the Gentic AI? And who else in the ecosystem that you think from a tech partner standpoint is still missing to add?

Ethan, do you want to take the first 2?

Sure. So in terms of the pillars, I think what you've seen over the last few years is that the platforms has been our fastest growing. Also, if you look into our newer cohorts, you see that a bigger proportion of those cohorts is moving towards platforms. And that's a major opportunity for us for multiple reasons. One, because it's a multiple region opportunity, right? A lot of these platforms are looking for offerings which cover multiple geographies. They're also looking often for a unified commerce solution, right? So also in-store components next to the digital one; and there's an opportunity for embedded financial products, which is significant similar to the example that Catherine shared earlier today.

So I would say that's the biggest shift in mix over the past years and also what I would expect to continue is that given where the new cohorts and where our pipeline is at the platforms would continue to be fast growing.

In terms of what that means maybe from a monetization perspective, what we typically see is that the size of the customer is the biggest determinant, right? So it's much less tied to the pillar as it is tied to the size of the customer. And if you think about our monetization strategy going forward, it continues to have a tier pricing component to it, right? That's what I shared in that third building block earlier.

But the way to think about Uplift specifically, is that there are components of it which are monetized. Think about our Protect module, which is our fraud tooling? That's monetized separately and honestly, it always has been. What is different over time is that Uplift should drive more volume to the platform. It should help us gain more share of wallet with our existing customers, it should help us win new customers. And there are components of it that we would monetize, but we didn't call it out separately as a separate building block because that's less significant to the opportunity. The opportunity is providing the best performance to our customers and helping them grow on our platform.

Right. And then on the customer one [indiscernible]?

Yes. I think it's really fascinating. And I thought about customers almost every day, right? And we have this whole spectrum. And there are some customers who are just dabbling, they're interested, they're curious. They're looking for us to help consult them on what they should be worried about, what should they be thinking about but they're not the fast movers here, right? They're kind of waiting, they want to kind of see what happens. And then you have the other side, which is definitely quite a few merchants who want to go first and who want to pilot this and don't want to miss it, and they want to be the first ones out. And those we're seeing are definitely more in like the travel, the OTAs, the apparel, and even the ticking a little bit I would say as well. And so with them, we're spending a lot of energy with them and also [indiscernible] on working through, okay, what does this experience look like? What does their customer experience look like? How do we protect them? How can they leverage our authentication on Protect.

And so we're still early in the experimentation on working through what those scenarios look like. But we're definitely seeing quite a few of them wanted to move fast. And I some part your question is like which players are still not fully involved? I think we have more work to do with issuers as an industry. I think there's been a lot of really great discussions so far between the merchants, the AI companies and ourselves. And we're starting now to talk to the issuers because at the end of the day, like, they can start blocking these transactions as well, right? And that's just really important is every player in this ecosystem has to want to make this work at the end of the day to be successful. I think we have a little work there to do as an industry, but we're getting there.

Thank you. We've got Justin in the back.

This is Justin Forsythe from UBS speaking. First, I want to start off with a qualitative question around the guidance. Ethan, you're not getting away too easy. So first one, [indiscernible], great shot with EPOS now there. I caught that drop about the loan size increase point. If you just wouldn't mind elaborating on that a little bit more. So maybe what the parameters in place today are? Any restrictions on the amount or the size of loans that you're issuing? And how you expect that to change if that's a more broad platform change that's upcoming? And maybe just more broadly, how do you think about the growth rate and the sizing of capital? I caught the 2x growth rate in '25 off of a low base, how do you think about that scaling forward? And maybe you could also comment on issuing volume, clearly growing much, much, much faster? Where do we see that going from a volume perspective in the next few years?

And then on the guidance side, Ethan, the building blocks -- and sorry to hold you to the exact number, I think the midpoint I'm calculating is around 23% based on the numbers on the slide. So I think the 20% is maybe if you imply that minus 6% at the high end of the pricing tiers? Maybe you could just walk us through the dynamics with the guidance there and the time period we can -- or the framework, sorry, and how long we should consider that valid for?

Thom, do you want to take the first couple?

Yes. Specifically on capital and the loan sizes. This is -- for us, it is a pure risk appetite process. If we start with the product, we want to ensure that the product is good. And therefore, if you look at loans, the loan sizes that we offer to our customers basically increase over time if you feel more confident that we can grow these loan sizes. Of course, higher loan size will also result in more capital volume. It's not an objective per se. There's not -- the reasoning behind increasing the loan sizes that is because there is clear customer demand, and we follow the demand of our customers.

I think if you specifically look at the volumes, specifically, what Ethan said before, capital or let's start with issuing, issuing is a bit further ahead in its growth trajectory. Over time, we expect that capital and banking will also follow similar parts, but these products are in a more nascent compared to issuing.

And then let me talk to the guidance piece. I think I'd like to take this a bit more holistically, right? So I think if we think about our ambition, we think very long term, that's how we make decisions for the business, right? And we think long term because the opportunity should be sustained over a long period of time. We want to be in business with our customers in 10 years, not just in the next 6 months. And so our decision-making framework is very much long-term oriented. That's why, hopefully, also sharing a bit on the addressable market that we're going after and expanding that into other products, helps to explain that kind of long-term opportunity that we're truly going after that we're trying to build together with our customers.

Then we said, okay, what's the right way to give formal guidance to the market. And we felt it was most helpful to give the visibility transparently as we get it. So around this time each year, we go through a process where we understand the road maps, the priorities of our customers. They're usually building out their priorities now, right, for next year. We understand how we can grow alongside them, right, which markets they want to grow into, maybe how they're thinking about shifting payments volumes, maybe adding another sales channel on their mind or another product. And that's the type of visibility that we then have for that 6- to 12-month time frame. And that's why we want to get into this model of sharing each February what our view is of for the next year. This year, we're already kind of in that model because we set a 3-year time horizon 2 years ago. So we're getting up against that model. We'll further refine that in February.

But we also wanted to give today a bit of a view on what we should also expect over multiple years, and that's why we try to create this framework, right, framework, both of what will drive our growth, so what are the actual levers themselves, give an update on that from 2 years ago add in financial products and then relatively size them. But the idea is not to come back to these levers every year and say how they've shifted. We want to do that through our annual view of guidance and then give people context of what we're seeing in the market because we're very confident about the opportunity beyond that. That's ultimately why we've set up our guidance now going forward in this way. That's on the revenue side, of course, and we can get into others if there are questions.

I think we have another question right up here.

[ Omar Mirza ] from [indiscernible] Capital. So in the case of enterprise merchants, we typically choose multiple payment providers. Do we -- and where we end up not being the primary audience, not the primary payment provider, can you typically say why they choose another provider to be the primary provider and what holds us back from becoming primary providers for the enterprise merchants?

Can I give this one to Gary?

Yes. I mean, ultimately, most of the merchants we work with care about some combination of like revenue, costs and fraud, right? [indiscernible] of between multiple of them. There could be other reasons why they have external factors that help the decision-making. They could be locked into a long-term contract for some reason, that takes time to expire. It could be that they have geographies that they want specific capabilities like we don't do, for example, point of sale in Vietnam, for example, right, so they could use a different processes there. So it depends on the means a little bit. But ultimately, that's what we're trying to do is make sure we understand what their needs are and help them optimize against that to ensure [indiscernible].