Long Sales Cycles Cut Both WaysNarrow moat

Selling to large enterprises means long sales cycles, and this cuts both ways for Adyen — a source of durability once won, but of slowness and lumpiness in the winning. Landing a major global merchant is a lengthy, complex process: the merchant must evaluate the platform deeply, run technical and commercial due diligence, plan a careful migration, and commit to a comprehensive integration — a decision that can take many months or years and involves many stakeholders. This slowness is the flip side of the switching costs: the same depth of integration that makes customers sticky once they are on Adyen makes them slow and deliberate to adopt it in the first place.

The long cycles have a real upside: a customer won after such a thorough, committed process is a customer that has invested heavily in the decision and is correspondingly durable and unlikely to leave lightly — the slow courtship produces a lasting marriage. But the downside is that growth from new logos is slow, lumpy, and hard to accelerate: Adyen cannot simply turn on new enterprise revenue quickly, because winning and onboarding each giant takes time, and the revenue from a new win ramps gradually as the merchant migrates volume onto the platform. This makes Adyen's growth dependent on a steady pipeline patiently converted and on the expansion of existing customers, and it means the business cannot easily offset a slowdown in existing-customer growth with a quick burst of new wins — a dynamic that contributed to the 2023 growth scare, when expansion slowed and new revenue could not quickly fill the gap. The long sales cycles are inherent to the enterprise model and are, on balance, a feature — they produce deeply committed, durable customers — but an investor should recognize that they also make Adyen's growth slower to steer and quicker to disappoint, a high-quality but not fast-twitch engine whose deliberate pace is a strength in durability and a vulnerability in any quarter when growth needs to re-accelerate quickly — as the 21–23% guidance requires¹.