AdyenNarrow moat

Adyen is the machinery behind other companies' checkouts. When you pay Uber, Spotify, McDonald's or Meta, the transaction may well travel through Adyen — which authorizes it, screens it for fraud, acquires it from the card networks, settles the money and reports it back, all on one system the company wrote itself. Rivals assembled that chain by acquisition, leaving several stitched-together stacks; Adyen built it once, which is why a payment can move from a website to a shop till to an app without changing hands between vendors.

The economics work on a spread. Adyen processed €1,394 billion of volume in 2025 and kept €2,364 million of it as net revenue¹ — roughly 17 basis points, the amount left after interchange and scheme fees are passed through to banks and card networks. That is the number that matters: gross volume flatters, net revenue pays. On it, the company earned €1,063 million of net income — a net margin near 45%, which is what happens when a single platform serves the world's largest merchants with no acquired systems to maintain.

By geography, EMEA is home and North America is the battleground: of 2025's net revenue, about €1.33 billion came from EMEA, €0.57 billion from North America, €0.30 billion from Asia-Pacific and €0.16 billion from Latin America. North America is both the largest opportunity and where Stripe is strongest — and the region whose growth miss in 2023 cut the shares roughly in half in a single day².

That crash is the key to the valuation. Adyen once traded near 150 times earnings as an untouchable compounder; it now changes hands around 26 times earnings and 11 times net revenue³ while still growing above 20%, because the market learned that this moat is contested rather than absolute. Note also the share count — about 31.6 million shares, never split — which is why the price per share reads in the hundreds of euros.

What follows takes the two halves in turn. The Moat examines the single platform, the enterprise switching costs, the data and scale advantages and the rare genuine profitability. The Future Bets follow where the scope is expanding: selling through AI agents, the first acquisitions in the company's history, a push into corporate treasury, and the software channel growing fastest of all. Its four revenue lines are taken in turn in The Revenue Lines.