One of the most important players in the payments market, it supports Vinted, Uber, Booking.com. Adyen is a company listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, which operates on a global scale. We talk about the most important trends governing the market with Ethan Tandowsky, the company's CFO.
Michał Kisiel, Bankier.pl: In the report “Adyen Index: Retail Report 2025” you draw attention to the renaissance of physical retail outlets and the role of integrating different sales channels. What do you think will be the most important trend in POS payments (in retail outlets) in this context? How might the payment experience in a store differ in, say, 3-5 years from what we know today?
Ethan Tandowsky, CFO Adyen: In recent years, we’ve seen a shift in how customers interact with brands. Sales channels are expanding, and so are the number of brand touchpoints. Consumers are interacting with brands in apps, online, and in person. Retailers are increasingly focused on how to make the customer experience better, seamless, and consistent across channels.
The result is an increasing focus on customer experience. Let's say you buy something online and return it to a store. It sounds relatively simple, but it's something that can be complex from a technical perspective. At Adyen, we're able to simplify that challenge with the data we have.
Another trend we are seeing is the evolution of terminals, or physical devices used to accept payments. Not only are their functions growing, but their form is also changing. You can accept payments on an iPhone or a small portable reader, for example. You don't have to queue at the counter to pay for something. We see that, especially in retail, sellers want to meet the customer where they make contact with the product. So the transaction can be completed anywhere in the store.
So do you expect traditional POS terminals to become extinct?
I think alternative devices will be an increasingly large part of our everyday experience as consumers. POS terminals still offer many additional features and capabilities that can be used to grow businesses and build customer relationships. Different companies use these options. However, diversity in this area will certainly grow.
The e-commerce payments industry has always struggled with simplifying the “journey” that a payer goes through. Adyen boasts about using AI to do this. How does your solution (Uplift) work and does it noticeably change the user experience?
Yes, we do put a lot of thought into the Adyen Uplift product. In short, it's harnessing the power of all the data we have on our platform. Last year, we processed €1.3 trillion in payment volume. At that scale, we interact with a lot of buyers, often serving the same consumer multiple times.
At Adyen, we use Uplift to make decisions that balance efficiency, the likelihood of authorizing a transaction, with the risk of fraud. The goal is to only block truly fraudulent transactions, not legitimate transactions. We balance merchant savings with security. For each transaction, we make an intelligent decision based on a combination of these factors. So it's not just about cost reduction, or just about authorization efficiency, or just about fraud prevention, but about combining these factors to make the most efficient decision about the fate of an individual transaction.
This is very important to our customer base because these are typically the areas they are most interested in. Especially in e-commerce, where fraud is a much higher percentage of transactions than in face-to-face transactions.
So it's basically about increasing conversions, not using strong user authentication (SCA, e.g. mobile card transaction authorization) where it's not necessary?
Of course, SCA has a role to play here. It is an important part of the offering. It should be used where it is useful, and also where it is helpful, where it strengthens the ecosystem. Not for every transaction, in every scenario. The key is to apply the technology wisely in the right circumstances.
Analyzing individual transactions based on different variables is where Adyen Uplift is really strong. And we are able to handle this challenge because of the size of the network we serve. That is what gives us €1.3 trillion in volume. Good insight into individual transactions and buyer behavior.
Your report shows that the popularity of AI assistants as aids in making purchasing decisions is growing rapidly. The next step will probably be “delegating” payments. What is your vision for agent payments in Adyen? Will AI pay, for example, with special tokenized payment cards or maybe stablecoins?
We serve merchants – that’s our customer base. Of course, we help them reach their own consumers, but we focus on the merchant side. The technology in this area is developing really fast, and there are many scenarios.
It is important for our customers to feel that we are keeping up with innovations and I think we have proven that over the years. We have often been pioneers in the market and we will be well prepared again for the developments.
We have one global platform, and that means we can innovate quickly for our customers around the world. I would stay away from predicting exactly what that will look like at this point. I think it's too early to predict scenarios. We will support customers however they want to interact with their own consumers, with whatever payment methods they want to offer. We are really well-positioned to help them do that.
For years, fraud has been one of the main problems in the world of remote payments. How has the nature of these threats changed recently from your perspective? What schemes are criminals most likely to use and what can be considered the greatest threats from the consumer's perspective?
If we're talking about Europe, of course we had PSD2 many years ago, which brought strong customer authentication, for example. In many ways it helped the ecosystem, but it's hard to say that fraud is over, especially in the e-commerce world. There's still a big gap between the level of fraud in e-commerce and the level of fraud in physical stores.
The scheme in which a fraudster impersonates another person, whether through artificial intelligence or otherwise, is certainly growing in popularity. The goal is to obtain information that can then be used for other purposes, one of which may be making payments.
This is a problem that we are able to help customers with using Adyen Uplift. Because we have such good insight into shopper behavior, we can effectively distinguish between the real behavior of a consumer and the actions of someone who is impersonating them. This is one of the areas that we focus on a lot – how to make sure that there is consistency between the behavioral patterns that we would expect and the behavior that we are seeing.
Let's look to the future. What's coming soon to Adyen? What do you have up your sleeve?
A lot of new things. I think one of the things that we're really excited about is the options that Adyen Uplift provides. I mentioned the impact of technology on merchant performance, but what we're also giving our customers is the ability to test. A customer can try multiple configurations, multiple settings, and test them on a portion of their processing volume to compare the effects.
Let's say a merchant introduces a new local payment method. How does this affect new buyer acquisition? How does it change cart abandonment rates? What does this mean for fraud? With this feature, you can run tests with and without the new method. See the difference in live results and adjust the next steps. I think this will create a lot of opportunities for our customers to continuously improve.
We are constantly introducing new payment methods – this is a response to changing consumer behavior. Merchants are placing a lot of emphasis on A2A (account-to-account) payments, bank transfers. We want to help customers take advantage of these trends.
We are introducing our own terminals to the market within the unified commerce segment. We have designed devices for various applications. Not only do they look interesting, but I think they contain the features that our customers are looking for.
There are also changes coming to security standards. For example, PCI PTS 6 (for payment terminals – editor's note) is a new standard that will come into effect in 2026. We want to make sure that our customers are compliant. The benefits of the changes in security are something that we are very focused on.
Also noteworthy are solutions in the area of embedded payments and embedded finance. Customers are using our technology to become “their own fintech” and offer their own financial solutions. Platforms were the pioneers here, but then a lot of SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies took advantage of the trend, not only wanting to offer software to their customers, but seeing the possibility of offering payment services and even things like bank accounts, debit cards or short-term loans.
This is a direction of change that we are really excited about. We are investing heavily in it, we have our own banking licenses in Europe, the US and the UK. We have the technology to facilitate this evolution.
Thank you for the interview.
