Annual Report

We’re glad to see that several significant brands chose us as their growth partner for the future. We also focused intently on the growth of the merchants already on our platform. The latter group made up a significant portion of the €51 billion processed volume we added on top of our 2017 figures, now totaling €159 billion. Volume churn was <1%, stable from 2017, and a proof point of the strength of our relationships and our speed of innovation.

This speed is facilitated by the continuous improvement of our single platform. In 2018, we increased the interval of our release cycle to a weekly cadence, allowing us to further rev up our pace of innovation. A pace that has resulted in a wide range of incremental improvements to the platform, delivering on our promise of ‘providing a membership to ongoing innovation’. Our merchant demand-driven approach to product development has also resulted in a number of product launches in the last year. Examples include the 3DS 2.0 solution we built in house and the standalone API for RevenueProtect. This speed of deployment is critical to our ability to continue to redefine the payments industry.

On the other end of the platform equation we added a number of acquiring licenses (e.g. Singapore, Australia, Canada), allowing us to provide the full strength of our single platform in more markets around the world. This full-stack (i.e. gateway through acquiring) delivers the greatest benefit to our merchants, resulting in higher authorization rates. Another key to boosting merchants’ revenue is our sustained investment in key local payment methods and domestic card schemes around the world. As the single platform becomes increasingly global, we’re able to power more growth for our merchants. Our increasingly global footprint is already reflected in our 2018 growth numbers, which we’re very happy to see.

On a macro level, commerce continued its relentless transformation. This leads to an increased need – especially in the retail vertical – to cater to shifting shopper behaviors and demand. Shoppers’ expectations now include the presentation of a single brand, whether online or offline, in a true convergence of sales channels. On the back end, many merchants in the retail space still struggle with this new reality. To solve for this, we focused on alleviating pressures on the retailers’ operations, enriching the functionality on the payment terminal and on removing friction from the shopper journey in this space. The success of our relatively nascent unified commerce offering is a testament to the strong execution of our strategy. We’re very excited to see where this space is headed in the next few years.

We added 205 FTE to the global Adyen team, which now totals 873 FTE as of end of year 2018. As a management team, we view keeping our culture as business critical. We continue to invest significant time in the hiring process, with at least one board member seeing every single new joiner before they're hired. Some of those hired were the last joiners of Adyen as a private company, as we went public in June of last year. I’d like to finish this note in echoing what I wrote at the time: Eleven years ago, we processed our first transaction. Today, we’re a global player in a growing space. And we’re setting our own course. I’m proud of being able to work with the talented team we have – and to be building Adyen together. I’m sure we will look back at this in the future – still – and realize that this was only the beginning.