Annual Report

Dear reader,

Looking back on 2024, we’re proud to have made strong progress in a year spent further executing against our long-term vision. With a clear ambition to become the world’s most customer-focused financial technology platform, we consider 2024 to be a defining chapter in our story. For many years, we have taken deliberate steps to evolve from a payments company to a leading financial technology partner – expanding our capabilities and investing in the continued growth and success of our financial services offering. As we do so, a long-standing reality is becoming increasingly clear: payments are not a commodity. In 2024, we continued to enable our customers to reduce cost, increase efficiency, drive growth, and better serve their own customers, while establishing additional revenue streams for our platform customers.

A key differentiator of our technology is our continuously evolving platform intelligence, built on years of innovation and data-led decision making. In a year when AI dominated the global discourse, we further deepened our investment in our established capabilities to sharpen our platform’s decision making. A significant innovation in this area was Adyen Uplift, which we built and piloted throughout the year. Our AI-powered Uplift technology draws on our expansive dataset to optimize the full payments funnel, balancing conversion, risk, and cost to enable frictionless and secure flows while controlling fraud. During the pilot, businesses using Uplift saw an increase in payment conversion rate of up to 6% compared to legacy implementations, serving as a testament to the tangible value we provide.

This intelligent approach is also the core of our US Debit offering. By optimizing conversion and cost outcomes without impacting performance or the front-end consumer experience, this solution differentiates our offering in a highly competitive market – one that is critical to our success in this key strategic region. Year on year, we are proud to have nearly doubled the number of customers adopting and benefiting from our US Debit solution. By building our platform entirely in-house, Adyen’s tech stack was designed to capture a cohesive view of payments data. As a result of this, a fundamental characteristic of our platform’s intelligence is its ability to improve with scale, meaning that as our processed volume grows, so too does our intelligence. In 2024, we were pleased to surpass the 1 trillion EUR mark of global payments transactions processed, underscoring the scale and depth of insights that enable us to continually expand the intelligence of our platform by orders of magnitude each year.

A philosophy at the core of our long-term approach is our promise to provide a subscription to innovation, as exemplified by the continual enhancement of Adyen's in-person payments (IPP) technology. The launch of our first proprietary multimedia platform, the SFO1, represents an expansion and an evolution of our infrastructure and touchpoints. We also expanded our Tap to Pay capabilities in 2024, making them available on Android in Europe, the UAE, and Australia, and on iPhone in Italy, Germany, Canada, Austria, Czechia, Ireland, Romania, and Sweden. These product innovations reflect our commitment to providing our customers with front-end touchpoints that transform and enhance brand identity, elevate every interaction, and streamline operations.

The advancement of our platform would not be possible without the Adyen team, which remains our core asset, and one we are committed to strategically investing in. Following two years of accelerated hiring, we spent 2024 effectively onboarding and ramping our new talent, scaling our Formula, and ensuring every stakeholder was set up for success. This year, we also welcomed a new board member: Tom Adams, who was appointed Chief Technology Officer and brings over 25 years of experience in technical and leadership roles at high-growth technology companies. Alongside our talented tech and engineering teams, we are confident that Tom’s expertise and leadership will play a crucial role in driving our long-term development. Together, we aim to further fuel our innovation, ensuring Adyen continues to deliver forerunning platform solutions with the highest standards of uptime and security.

As our team steadily grows across our 28 global offices, internal collaboration persists as a central factor in maintaining our speed and strengthening our connection. In 2024, this focus was demonstrated by Connect, an annual, in-person gathering that brings together our global team. Spanning the course of a full week, Connect is an important tradition that fosters invaluable connections and strategy alignment, designed to last long after the event itself. Through engaging and content-rich programming, our teams gain a deeper understanding of our business, priorities and overall vision. Recognizing the holistic value of bringing everyone together at such a pivotal moment for our company, we continue to be committed to doing so responsibly. In 2024, this meant reducing the environmental footprint of Connect through various initiatives, including consolidating multiple global, functional events into the week and making the most of being together in person to organize valuable team-building and networking opportunities.

Just as we invest in connecting our teams for greater impact, we are also focused on leveraging our strengths to create solutions supporting both our business and society at large. One of the key ways we multiply our positive impact is by leveraging the core strengths of our platform, people, and partnerships, alongside our 1% Commitment. Our Impact technology, which currently consists of our Giving product and is directly supported by this 1% fund, remains fundamental to this approach. Built around our core payments expertise, Giving reflects our customers’ growing priority to facilitate charitable, nonprofit donations in times of global crises. By enabling our customers to authentically showcase their social impact and help close funding gaps, Giving has a profound effect. In fact, since 2020, we are proud to have processed nearly €25 million in donation transactions through Giving, alongside driving a nearly 50% increase in Giving terminals in the field.

In 2024, we upheld our commitment to meeting our customers' needs while ensuring the long-term growth and resilience of our business. Since our founding, we have focused on ensuring balanced growth, managing risks effectively, and adapting to an ever-evolving landscape. Building a business for the long term requires a thoughtful and responsible approach, and we are proud to share our progress across a range of topics in this report.

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, we remain committed to our long-term vision and feel confident in our ability to execute on it. As we continue to scale, we are focused on driving our growth trajectory while prioritizing our unique culture, one global team, and innovation-first strategy. We are excited to build further on our single platform, expand our licensing portfolio, invest in our talented team, and further strengthen our global reach. What has always set us apart – and continues to do so – is our ability to embrace challenges, seamlessly navigate complexity, and unlock meaningful value. We look forward to continuing on this path as we seize the substantial opportunity ahead.