Adyen N.V. (ADYEN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming to our Investor Day here in San Francisco, a place that is very special to us, given all the customers that we have here, but also our big office presence here in the city. My name is Ingo Uytdehaage, and I'm Adyen's Co-CEO, and I'm here with Ethan Tandowsky, our CFO. What we want to do today during the Investor Day, is give you an update on our strategy. And our strategy at the core has not really changed over the past decade. We want to help our customers to implement the right financial technology. But at the same time, the needs of our customers have evolved, and that's where we want to play. At the same time, we have also realized that based on the feedback that you have given us over the past months that we want to better explain how those changing needs of customers will also help us to change our approach to the market. And that's what we're going to do today. We're going to help or going to give more guidance on what the building blocks are, how we want to grow in the next couple of years, together with our customers.

And of course, growth with our customers and supporting and building out our strategy ultimately impacts our financial performance. As we've always been, we remain long-term focused because we feel that long-term decision making will lead to the best outcomes for us to realize the large opportunity that we have ahead. At the same time, again, listening to your feedback, we understand that more updates about how the business is developing along the way would be helpful. And that's why this morning, we've shared our update on our Q3 performance and also why we plan to share quarterly updates in the year ahead at least. So without further ado, I'll pass it off to our hosts, [indiscernible], who will take you through the agenda. Thanks for being here.

Hi, all. Welcome. It's great having you all here dialing in online here in San Francisco. The Adyen team has, over the last few months, prepared a full agenda about how we look ahead the opportunity we see, how we execute, and how we'll execute on it.

But before we dive in, we'd like to give you a sense of what you can expect to hear today. So we'll be starting with our Chief Commercial Officer, Roelant Prins, who will talk about our overall strategy for growth. After that, we'll dive into our 3 commercial pillars, Digital, Unified Commerce and Platforms before we have our first Q&A session of the day, which will focus on our commercial strategy. This will be followed by a short break.

After the break, we'll dive into the second set of presentations of today, where our first speaker will be Brooke Nayden, our CHRO, who will talk about how we've built and scaled the Adyen team and culture with intention over the last few years. After Brooke, Ethan, our CFO, will have the final presentation of the day, where he'll talk about our Q3 business performance and the building blocks to our future growth. To wrap up our day and time together, we're going to have another Q&A round with Brooke, Ethan and Ingo here on stage and to get the most out of both Q&A sessions, we ask you to keep your questions about financials and people and culture until the second Q&A we have today. Thank you.

And finally, just on housekeeping, this is a hybrid event. And for those participants who have registered online, you will have received a Slido code, which will enable you to participate in our Q&A through slido.com. For those of you in the room, we have people helping out with microphones who will come so you can ask your questions. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome our Chief Commercial Officer, Roelant Prins.

Good morning. I'm Roelant Prins, and I'm the Chief Commercial Officer at Adyen. That means I look after our commercial activities. So that means our account management teams, our marketing teams, our sales teams, partnerships as well as the teams that look after our commercial strategy and building our commercial strategy globally. I've been with Adyen for the past 16 years. And yes, it's great to be here. What I'll do is walk through a number of items today. I will start with walking through some of the main trends that we see in the industry that impact our customers and how they impact payments specifically. Then I'll talk a bit about our positioning within our world of commerce. Specifically, I'll talk also about the type of customers we are focusing on and how we think we're differentiated specifically in that space. Finally, I'll also spend a bit of time around the feedback we get from our customers and how we measure that and how we're growing and scaling our commercial organization. But let's start with the trends that we see in the market. And many of those are trends that, in our opinion, are actually making the world of payments and financial technology for our customers more complex than it used to be. Let me walk through 6 of the main trends we see that are impacting these customers. To start with, a well-known trend, obviously, but really important, digital transformation still has a long, long way to go. Consumers are more and more acting very fluidly in how they're interacting with brands. They want to buy online, in-store and everything in between. They expect a super consistent experience in how they're dealing with retailers, and they want super fast and easy ways to interact. This means a lot to anyone in retail in a broader sense. It has a big impact on your technology stack to service your customers much better. Of course, we're seeing that the role of stores is changing really rapidly, where it used to be a very transactional space, now it's changing much more in an experienced space where you want to capture data from your customers to service them better on the longer term. All these changes in consumer behavior mean you need to understand customers better. Any customer nowadays that would walk into a store, has always been quite anonymous to retailers. Data is a key thing that they're all focusing on to try and get the understanding to be able to offer a much more personalized service, build loyalty with the consumer. And it turns out that payment data is a very unique way to build that customer understanding. But to get access to payment data, especially how consumers are acting across these different channels as they want to, you need a payment solution that really works across the channels, ideally across many different countries. Another trend is commerce continues to further globalize. Of course, e-commerce has been global from day 1, but it continues to evolve. More and more populations for e-commerce in many different countries are growing and brands want to tap into that further and further. Now what you see in many markets globally is that payment methods differ significantly from country to country. And this has always been like this, but there's ongoing change. Just a few examples. Pix is a payment method in Brazil, that didn't exist a few years ago and is growing really, really rapidly in success. You need to tap into that payment method in order to do well in the Brazilian market. Swish is a digital wallet in Sweden, very important. You need to tap into that if you want to be successful in mobile commerce. Bank-to-bank payments are growing in popularity in many different markets, including the U.S., again, it didn't exist a few years ago. There's a lot of expectation. How do you implement it? How do you make sure the customer experience is great? So much change in order to succeed in global commerce, and we don't think it will ever be a very simplified world. The third trend is around the trend of shifting from cash to cashless, a trend that's been going on for a long time, but so much more to do. Countries like India, Germany, Mexico, Japan are all still heavy, heavy cash countries. Governments are taking a lot of initiatives to change that. And these initiatives lead to new ways to payments, a lot of opportunity for more digital transactions and opportunities for brands to tap into that. Again, you need new technology to make that happen. Fourth trend, regulation continues to be complex and is becoming increasingly complex for merchants, specifically around protecting of data as well as protecting payment security. There is a lot of change all the time around how payment methods work. The card schemes but also a lot of the local regulators and countries are looking at ways to make it more secure in how you take transactions. A good example is the biometric ways of authenticating card transactions nowadays. And there's more and more moments when you need to authenticate a consumer with different authentication mechanisms that didn't exist in the past. Now how do you navigate as a merchant the best way to balance compliance, security, but also on the other side, the best customer experience and successful payments? Having a solution that helps you navigate that is very impactful to reach the best balance in lowering costs, but also maximizing successful payments and customer experience. This regulation is not going away. We see it's increasing in many markets. The fifth trend we find important to highlight is the trend of platforms taking over as operating systems for small businesses. In the past, any small business running a coffee shop, a restaurant or maybe a small retail shop had to source all the different solutions they needed to run their business individually. Cash register, accounting system, payroll system, et cetera, et cetera. Nowadays, we see that for any industry out there, there are vertical SaaS players that are offering an integrated holistic solution to run your business. These solutions integrate everything you need in a nicely packaged way. So you can run your business focusing on running your business. And we're seeing this for spas, gyms, restaurants, dentists, plumbers, anything really, and it's growing in many, many markets. This is a trend that's not going to go away, and it provides a fantastic opportunity for payment companies, financial technology companies like us to embed payments as part of the holistic offering so that payments are also offered through these platforms to their customers. And on top of that, as these platforms know their merchants, their small businesses really well, you can start to offer financial technology on top of that. Why not offer a bank account as well? Why not offer an expense card to make purchases for your business as well? Offer loans? So the opportunity for embedded financial technology that we're talking about, we see is growing every day. Finally, an important trend that all of you have also recognized is, of course, the uncertainty around the current economic conditions. We're seeing, of course, cautious spending behavior by consumers, uncertainty in the economy. So what does it mean for our space? We're seeing a lot of our merchants are focusing on efficiency. The year of efficiency is active for many, many companies out there. And what does it mean? Of course, there's pricing pressure. But on the other side, it also provides an opportunity to look at ways to lower payment costs for companies because payment costs are much broader than the fees companies like Adyen charge, and there's ways to impact that, either by optimizing the routing of transactions to lower-cost networks. We're doing that in the U.S. through the debit card rails. We're doing that in Australia by routing to the debit card networks. We're doing it in France through the local CB network. These are ways to smart routing of transactions, lower cost of payments in general. Bank-to-bank payments similarly offers such opportunities. So where there's, on the one hand side, current pressure on pricing and efficiency is a big thing, we're seeing opportunities on how technology can play a big role to lower cost. So these are the main trends we're seeing that are impacting our customers. And the way we look at it and also what we see from our customers is that complexity is becoming bigger and bigger. And in our opinion, payments have really over the past 50 years, changed from being a transactional means and much more commodity in how it operated towards much more a strategic enabler for running and growing your business. Think about retail and servicing these customers better, payments is a key way to do that. Reaching more customers across the globe, payments is a key way to succeed. So we think the role of payments is much more strategic than it ever was, and that's not going to go away. Now who do we work for? Who are the customers Adyen focuses on? To start with, Adyen has made a very conscious decision to focus on enterprise-type merchants. Doing this means we can really focus our energy to build solutions that fit the needs of enterprise customers in terms of automation, in terms of reporting, in terms of customization of the solution. Smaller merchants, we have decided to approach through platforms. So through [indiscernible] means. This is our focus, and this is how we're going to approach the market, and we have been doing. Enterprise merchants need a lot of support, so it also enables us to really invest in a service model with account management and a lot of additional teams to really help our enterprise merchants succeed. Now within that enterprise domain, we're categorizing 3 different types of merchants commercially: Digital merchants, companies that are really selling through online means, specifically, in many different markets; Unified Commerce, brands that are operating and servicing their customers through online and in-store means and anything in between; and finally, Platforms that I talked about earlier. How do we position ourselves for these customers? What is unique in how we support our customers. As I said, there's a lot of complexity coming to our customers, and we try to make that complexity simple. We try to help them navigate this complexity and make them succeed wherever they play. And we'd like to do that with a simplified offering. So the complexity in the market, we try to solve by keeping our solution simple. This is why we are so focused on building everything we do on a single platform solution, running our own licenses that we control, running technology and developing the solution with our own engineering teams, controlling everything end-to-end, no third-party dependencies. This is really important to us because it means we can adapt quickly to change, and it means we control everything, and therefore, we can control the quality of the solution. And it's a unique approach. The reason we do this is that it gives our merchants the benefits of simplicity, one way to integrate with our platform, one way that payments are being settled, one way of reporting, whether you're operating in Japan, Brazil, U.S. or Europe. That simplicity is really valuable. Consistency on how you work online and in-store, whether you're operating in-store payments in Europe, in Japan or in U.S., it works similarly, but it's localized. The consistency and standardization is very, very valuable for our customer base. One platform to cover all the markets, whether you're launching in Brazil or in a country like Dubai or in France, you can support local payment methods that matter, but the way you interact with the platform is standardized. And one way to cover one platform that supports all the different payment functions we've built, gateway, risk management, payment processing, but also the bank that we recently launched, offering issuing of cards and lending and capital, all these different financial functions sit on the same platform. Why does it matter? It matters because the funds, the money sits in one place. So the moment we take a payment, we can instantly move the money towards a card we issue for our customers. Having the money sit on a single platform has huge impact on improving cash flows for our customers and keeps things simple. Let's talk a bit about our customer base. We see that our customers very much value our solution and how we support them and we keep track of this. So we measure -- one thing we do. Of course, we have a lot of ongoing discussions with them all the time, but we also like to track NPS, Net Promoter Score, to see how it's trending. And what you see here is our Net Promoter Score over the past few years. And we're very happy that we see it's trending up. They are good levels and they're trending up, which is a very nice thing to see that our customers are generally very happy with the service they provide to us, which is a good foundation to do more business with them. Now how do we find our customers and how do we support them? How are we organized on the commercial side? Our commercial team largely consists of sales teams around the world and account management teams. Sales teams find new customers. Account management teams manage the existing relationships. We've separated these roles, given our existing customers have so many things going on all the time in terms of expanding into new markets, running new initiatives and really managing all the complexity and change in the payments market. That's why we separated the roles. The sales cycle with enterprise merchants is very long, hence, we have dedicated sales teams. These teams, sales and account management are distributed over our 27 offices across the world to be really close to our customers, and that's why we have local teams in all the markets because local people know the local culture, know what's happening in the specific country and they speak the language. We want to be close to our customers. So we've ramped up our teams over the past 18 months quite significantly. Typically, our account management team grows as we find new customers. So it's a very linear path. On the sales team in the past 18 months, we've quite accelerated the teams. You'll see that a bit later on. It's going to take quite a bit of time for the impact, given that the sales cycles are long, people need to be onboarded and once we sign merchants, it also takes quite some time before these merchants really ramp up their volumes with us. So it's going to take time to see impact from this. How do we scale the sales organization? How do we scale the commercial organization? We put a lot of effort in training our teams internally. We've created a Commercial Academy that's really focused around training our teams around how Adyen works, the Adyen way of selling, which is very much centered throughout, enabling commercial teamwork globally. There's a lot of international teamwork in our organization. Secondly, it's all about understanding our customers really well and being 100% aligned with their interests. That is a unique thing about Adyen. We really focus on making sure everything we do, everything we build is 100% aligned with what our customers need. The other thing we've done more recently is organized our commercial teams in line with our pillars. The 3 areas that we're focusing on: Digital; Unified Commerce; and Platforms is what we call pillars and that's how we organize our sales teams to be much better prepared and experienced in the domain our teams are working in. Beyond the sales and account management teams, we also have commercial pillars that develop the go-to-market strategy for each of their domains. Secondly, they are working towards making sure all our customers are really well understood and they [indiscernible] the needs of our customers towards our engineering and product teams so that we can ensure that what we build is what our customers need. Let me finally give you a view of how we've scaled the sales and account management organization over the past 18 months. So this is the end of 2021, where, in total, we had about 800 people in the team. If we go to September 30 this year, you see that the total number is 1,255. And specifically in North America and Europe, we've grown significantly, more than doubling the team in the U.S. And this is really the scaling effort we've made to try and make more impact. What we'll do next is we'll go deeper into the specific pillars I talked about and what our specific strategy is there to give you more understanding of how we're thinking about that. And in order to do that, we've invited the pillar teams to do that for you. So next, I would like to ask my colleagues Davi and Trevor to start on the Digital side. Thank you.

Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm Davi, responsible for Adyen's commercial success in North America based out of San Francisco. I've been with Adyen for almost 9 years. I built my career on the commercial side and have been fortunate to work close to our largest and most demanding customers. Many of them fall under our Digital pillar, which I'm excited to discuss with you today.

Hi, everyone, I'm Trevor Nies, Global Head of Digital. I joined Adyen 10 months ago from Microsoft, where I used to lead all of our global payment provider relationships, our payment optimization focusing on authorization and cost and also risk and fraud, all this for the entire e-commerce suite, so Xbox, Advertising, Azure, Office and online retail. I'm also based here in San Francisco. It's great to be here today with you all. So before I share with you what our digital strategy is, I want to share with you the tremendous opportunity that we have here in the Digital pillar. And the first thing to call out here is online payments are not a solved problem. In fact, 15% of online transactions fail today. 15%, that means one in every 7 transactions still fails. This means it's not solved. I see an opportunity here for us. The second thing is the industry keeps evolving. Customers' demands continue to get higher and higher. They expect minimal friction in everything that they do. They expect to be able to use the payment types that they want to use anywhere they go. And you can take a look at Brazil, for example, Pix is one of the fastest-growing payment methods the world has ever seen. In fact, in a short period of time that it's been around, it's already generating 30% to 40% of all online transactions. And it's not just Brazil, it's all over the world. In fact, even here in the U.S., we're seeing wallets continue to take a lot of share, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App. Buy Now, Pay Later is an important payment method for retailers and merchants to offer as well. And banking pay methods are starting to really gain some traction. I see an opportunity. And the third thing is, this landscape keeps evolving, but so do our customer needs and what they're going through. And if you take a look prior to the pandemic, it was all about revenue growth. And in the pandemic, we know the story right around digital transformation. We saw a 5-year plus digital transformation get bundled into small period of time is absolutely phenomenal. And now it's about costs. The macroeconomic conditions are really forcing our customers to worry more than they ever have about costs. And so again, I see an opportunity here. And so as we think about those opportunities, adding this position extremely well to really help our customers get through these opportunities and take advantage of them. And so we've created 3 USPs, unique selling points, that we're focusing our energy on to add the most value to our customers. And the first, performance and cost. I can tell you, when I was at Microsoft, this was the most important thing we focus our energy on for us and all of our peers were also focusing on this, but it was never solved. It's a continuous battle to try to optimize in this space, Adyen can add a ton of value here. The second thing is simplifying global complexities. The world is not getting simpler. The payments world is getting more complex everywhere we go, especially here in the U.S. Adyen can help there. And then the third one is around value beyond processing. Our customers are demanding more than just payment processing. They need help in so many other ways to create these customer experiences that they really want to have to continue to innovate and really change their world and compete effectively. And again, Adyen can help here. And so if we take a look at each one of these 3 USPs in detail, the first one, we create value for businesses by optimizing performance and cost. And you can see here, we combine these two. It's not an either/or statement. And so the first one around performance. If you look at the last several years, Adyen has done a phenomenal job on driving up approval rates. And we did that with our single platform, with our technology advancements, with our speed. We're always first to adopt new technologies like network tokenization, like Real Time Account Updater. But that's just the beginning. The next frontier is looking at that whole purchase funnel. And that's what we're focusing our energy on now. And it starts with ensuring that we have the right payment methods that customers want because if you don't have that, they're going to go elsewhere. From there, it goes to authentication. And authentication is a requirement for a lot of transactions in Europe, but even in the future, Japan [indiscernible] 2025. There's a lot of experimentation of authentication in LatAm. So making sure we get this right, reduce the friction for customers is critical. And then even on the issuer side, ensuring approval rates occur at a high success rate, still not solved. It's still not solved. And the reason why is because the issuers still don't have the data that they need to successfully make an accurate decision. And we can help there. In fact, Davi is going to talk about that here in just a few minutes. And then on top of that front, fraud is a never-ending battle. It continues to hunt every merchant. And the problem with fraud is if it's not minimized not brought to a reasonable level, it impacts everything else in this funnel. Pretty soon issues are declining more transactions than they ever have. You have to start authenticating a lot more transactions, which creates more friction and it's just this downward spiral. So making sure that we're looking at how to minimize fraud throughout that whole journey is critical. And then on top of that, it's a complex system. There's so many different players involved, the schemes, the issuers, us, the merchants, there's opportunity for errors. And so our focus, our differentiator where we can add the most value is not just focused on approval rates, an important piece, but it's a lever. And if you focus too much on that, you actually [indiscernible] some of these other levers. And so we've built machine learning, focusing on all of these areas together, ensuring that we fully optimize that entire purchase funnel. The second component is cost. So North America, the costs are really expensive, really focusing around interchange and scheme fees, chargeback fees. The Adyen costs are actually quite small. And so a 10% reduction in Adyen fees is nothing compared to a 10% reduction in the rest of this pie. And that's where we see the value. How can we help our customers reduce their cost with this whole pie? And we've already made a lot of investments in this space. We can send additional data to the issuers to qualify for lower interchange, lower scheme fees, we do that today. We can route transactions down different alternative rails that are cheaper for our customers, we do that today. But [Audio Gap] and we're taking that machine learning that we've built for the performance side of the house, and we're applying it here as well, the cost, how to optimize the cost. And we already have had a lot of success [Audio Gap] USP is we create value for customers by simplifying global complexities. This is our bread and butter. This is where we grew up. That single platform that we've always had, that single integration, it's been here for the past, it's where we are today, it's going to drive the future as well. And it's so important because our customers don't want to focus on these complexities, right? And so with the single integration, you get a single reconciliation, reporting, access to the local [indiscernible] matter and you get shielded as a customer, you get shielded from all these regulatory changes that occur because we just handle that with that single integration. Now on the local payment method side, we have more direct integrations to local pay methods than anybody else. That matters. And it matters because that means there's less [indiscernible] there's less latencies. We can provide the best customer experience for these local pay methods. And you can see here, 90% of our customers take advantage of that. They see the value. They see how we differentiate there. It's important to them, it's important to their customers. And so the takeaway here is, our technology allows our customers, let them focus on what they do best and we'll handle the complexities. That's what they're looking for us to do. The third USP is we create value for customers by expanding beyond payment processing. Part of that is our risk system that we have today, a super important part for the entire purchase funnel, it's critical. The second round is around smart authentication. Our aim is to minimize authentication when it's not needed. So if it's a low-risk transaction, why authenticate? Let's remove that. But we realize at times you need to authenticate. Today, 3D Secure requires you to log in with your bank app [indiscernible] SMS. We have a vision. We have a vision to simplify that to reduce the friction, which is why not use facial recognition, use your fingerprint, things that everybody in this room does every single day, that simplifies the experience. It removes the friction. And then probably the most exciting part is Adyen isn't a payment processor. We're a financial technology platform and we have banking licenses. A lot of our competitors do not have banking licenses. This is a huge differentiator for us. So we can do things like issue cards. We can do things like real-time payouts, which we're seeing a lot of demand for. There's a lot of use cases that are coming up for real-time payouts. Traditionally, in the U.S., it takes 2 or 3 days. We can pay out 24/7. There's no cutoff times. You want to pay out Sunday afternoon, pay out Sunday afternoon, we can do that for you. So there's a lot of things. We're just scratching the surface with these banking licenses, huge opportunity for us to add more and more value to our customers. And so the takeaway here is processing is just the beginning. It's about the value that we can add beyond that to ensure that our customers realize their full ambition. So I'm going to hand over to Davi now to talk about how this digital strategy is driving our commercial success.

Thanks, Trevor. So we talked about how payments aren't a solved problem. And we also covered our strategy in the Digital side. But what does that mean for our commercial success? And most importantly, what does that mean for our commercial success in the U.S.? A market that we consider to be highly strategic for our future growth. Now Trevor talked about how this industry is the most dynamic it's ever been. There is a lot of changes, especially in the macroeconomic environment. We've seen a huge shift from growth to profits and online businesses had to adapt. But so did we. We just talked about how our digital strategy is essentially oriented around optimizing for both growth and cost. Now helping online businesses become more efficient. It's not news to Adyen. Not at all. In fact, we've been really good at that over the past years. What the news are is that we are now more focused on that mission than ever before. So what we want to talk about today is areas where we find a really good opportunity, again, for online businesses to optimize across growth and cost. And these are a fragmented ecosystem, local nuances, affecting how people like to pay, and finally, technical challenges impacting authorization rates. These have been ingredients to Adyen's success worldwide. And what I want to spend some time with you today is around how these same dynamics are shaping the future of the U.S. market. So let's dive in. Starting with fragmentation. It's fascinating to see like even in a very mature, simple industry like cards in the U.S., there can be a lot of change. What we saw over the past years is that the cards industry in the U.S. has become increasingly more complex and fragmented. Those changes have been driven by new regulation like the Durbin Amendment, affecting debit, but also new technologies like network tokens that Trevor talked about, which is now widely accepted in the U.S. but also across the globe. As the industry evolved, online businesses had access. They had got access to these products, but that doesn't necessarily help them take full advantage of these products. Now at Adyen, we invest a lot of time in innovation and making sure that we are always first to market when it comes to things that matter. These are two examples. We were in the U.S., the first player among the first players to go live with network tokens and debit routing. We've been optimizing ever since we launched. [indiscernible] with merchants in the near future, in the next couple of years in the U.S., is essentially a scenario where for every transaction that comes in, we can orchestrate one level deeper. We can help them again optimize across both growth and cost. And we are seeing amazing results with that strategy. And in fact, debit is an area that we are really doubling down when it comes to our product strategy going forward. Meta is a fantastic example of a large online business that has worked with us to benefit from these technologies [indiscernible] efficiency, they saw really great results across network tokenization and debit routing. Now these are only 2 out of many products that we can offer today, and we are planning to expand in the coming years. Moving on to our local nuances. We know that payments is very cultural. But that holds true across countries. It also is true across generations. What we are seeing in the U.S. is that a new generation of shoppers is driving a lot of change in the payments mix in this market. What was previously a very card-heavy market, it's now a very interesting mix of cards, Buy Now, Pay Later, wallets and more recently, bank payments. We understand more than anyone else in this industry, the importance of local payment methods. We've seen how wallets can generate explosive growth for merchants in Asia. We've seen how bank payments can help merchants significantly reduce costs in Europe. We've been doing this thing for over a decade, and we are capitalizing on all of those learnings and applying them here in the U.S. Our endgame here is, again, to make sure that our merchants, our customers, especially the online customers can benefit from access to new shoppers, lower cost as well as flawless customer experience. We just announced a few days ago, our partnership with Plaid. Plaid will help us tap into the bank payments industry. We're looking to build with them an enterprise-grade best-in-class pay-by-bank solution, which is not only going to remove friction for shoppers but, again, help our businesses and our customers reduce cost. We are very excited about that partnership and what it can do for us, not only in the bank payment side, but also in the financial services as we move and expand with them. Next, technical challenges. Well, Trevor mentioned earlier today how 15% of payments in average will fail in the online space. But if you look at the authorization rates on the brick-and-mortar business, there is a significant gap. And the key question here is why? Why are those transactions failing in the online environment and most importantly, what can be done to solve for that gap? Well, online transactions can fail for a number of different reasons, but a good portion of it will fail because the issuers may not necessarily have enough context or enough data about the shopper to make the best decision. And it just happens that merchants do. Merchants invest a lot of money to get to know their shoppers, their customers. And the problem is merchants and issuers have never been able to talk. We are uniquely positioned to bridge that gap. And I'm excited to share that we are already working with one large U.S. issuer in facilitating data sharing between merchants and issuers. We think that's going to tremendously help filling this gap, especially when it comes to false positives. Those transactions that were not necessarily fraud, they were just declined because there was not enough context or data to be approved. So when we think about our growth in the U.S., it's important to reiterate, we continue to grow really fast. We've taken the U.S. from 10% of our business to over 1/4 of our net revenues in just 6 years. And we've done that while Adyen overall was growing incredibly fast. But this is just the beginning. We truly believe we are in the early stages of Adyen across the globe, but especially in the U.S. If you look at our industry, we still have single-digit market share here. We think that our continued investments in this market will help us capture more and more of that share. Like Roelant said earlier today, we are growing our teams. We are especially focused in North America. If you look at the past 12 months, we invested a lot in growing our commercial teams as well as our engineering and tech teams in Chicago, where we have our tech hub here. We have our full suite of products available in the U.S. across payments, data and financial services. We've been investing in optimizing those products for the past decade. There's a lot of machine learning investments that we're making and we continue to make. And finally, we have just been granted our banking license in the U.S. 2 years ago. We are barely scratching the surface there, and we think there is a huge potential for growth and for optimization for our customers coming out of those rails. So when we think about how Adyen can help online businesses in the U.S., it's a lot about what we just talked about, optimizing for growth and cost, but it doesn't stop there. We are uniquely positioned to help U.S. businesses expand, whether that's APAC, Latin America and Europe, we are present all over the world with local acquiring and local teams, which is more important. We can help online businesses tapping to brick-and-mortar without any additional development. It's all on one single platform, whether it's an experience center or a pop-up store, there's a lot that we can do to help businesses tap into that space. And finally, again, we are very excited about what our financial services suite of products can do to help online businesses create new revenue streams. So what are the key takeaways for today? Again, online payments aren't a solved problem, and that's also true in the U.S. In fact, things are just getting more and more complex in that space. The increased complexity drives the need for optimization across both growth and cost. We think there's a really, really good opportunity there, and we'll make sure that our businesses and our customers can capture that. And finally, in a market that continues to grow, there is a real good opportunity for us to continue to grow ourselves, but most importantly, support and enable U.S. online businesses in their growth journey. Thank you for your time. I will now hand over to my colleagues, Gayathri and Alexa, who will talk you through our Unified Commerce strategy. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Gayathri Rajan, and I'm based out of Adyen's Chicago Tech Hub. I'm new to Adyen. I joined just 4 months ago. And before Adyen, I spent almost 16 years at Google, where I built products for payments, ads and maps.

My name is Alexa von Bismarck. I'm based in our Berlin office in Germany. I've been with Adyen for about 10 years, which is more or less that time when we started our Unified Commerce offering. That's why I'm very excited to talk about where we stand today and where we see our future opportunity. Roelant already mentioned earlier, the trends that we see in the market. More and more [indiscernible] shoppers have higher expectations, which means the opportunity for us is growing. So I don't want to spend more time on that. I think you know that. What is also interesting is that this is an equally big opportunity for merchants. If they embrace these trends, they can turn them into competitive advantages by setting up a unified commerce business. Setting this up is quite complex, but one of the foundational building blocks is enabling unified payments, and that is where we come into play. We are the only global financial technology provider that runs all channels, which is online, in-store, mobile and then app on a single end-to-end technology platform that spans across multiple geographies that is fully built in-house. No one else can do that. That is why our ambition is to accelerate the digital transformation of omnichannel businesses through unified payments, financial products and data on our single platform. Now how do we do that? 10 years ago [indiscernible] changing a payment provider is like an operation on an open heart. You need to plan this very well. You need to understand the end state. You need to take a bit of risk. And most importantly, you need to have trust. And that really stuck with me. We are a tech company, but we are also running a people business. We need to enter long-term relationships and build our trust with our merchants and that takes time. We want to win those businesses every day. We work with amazing customers already, and that is what we call our land and expand strategy that you all heard about before. Now I want to talk a bit about our USPs, why we have the right to win in Unified Commerce. And I want to cluster that in 3 elements. The first one is we help reduce complexity. You've heard that before. We help our merchants to grow. And the last one is our subscription to innovation. Let's talk about how we help to reduce complexity. Running a global or just a domestic business across multiple channels is very complex. You see technical complexities, regulatory complexities, you see local complexities such as local payment methods and a lot of operational complexities. With a single integration into Adyen's platform, we enable a global access to payments for our merchants independent of the channel. But let me make that quite tangible because it's always a bit easier if you have a good example [indiscernible] that most of you know, I guess. When they move to Adyen, we managed to reduce the number of PSPs they worked with from more than 20 to one in the geographies that we operate in. They also managed to reduce the number of contracts they had to maintain that spans from terminals, terminal fleet management, PSPs, et cetera, from 94 to 12. And on top of that, in every store before moving to us, they had to do a 30-minute reconciliation run at the end of the day, per cash register per store, which is now completely automated with us. So you can see that with Adyen, we give access to a global platform and global payments through a single integration. But at the same time, we are optimizing operations from headquarter down to the store level. And I may repeat myself, but no one else can do that. As a commercial team, we care mostly about what the next deal we're bringing in, what are the [indiscernible] wallet gains that we're winning with our existing margins. But obviously, as a company, we are also tracking additional numbers to see if we're trending into the right direction. Today, we have more than 460 merchants live across multiple geographies with us. And that is one of those numbers that we thought -- that we look at regularly to see if we're trending right. Now I'm on to the next USP. We [ help ] our margins grow. And again, we do that in different ways. The first one being we unlock [indiscernible] but logic because we are creating additional moments to sell, just think about a service partner in store that has a mobile terminal and you don't need to queue up. Now, think about how we can connect the dots between channels and understand where a shopper wants to spend more money and then you can incentivize them through payment-linked loyalty. With Adyen, we can help margins turn transactions into relationships. But again, I want to give you another example. Burton, I'm not sure how many of you ski or snowboard. It's a big brand. We work with them in the U.S., in Europe and in Japan. They have quite a young audience, which is why for them, it was very important to implement innovative shopper journeys, and they've received great feedback from their shoppers about being able to buy online and return in store. But at the same time, the knowledge about their shoppers allows them to create pop-up stores, to add additional interactions with their shoppers. And they do this by using Tap to Pay on iphone which they call shop in a box, which is part Adyen. It's another exciting story for us. The merchants that we see processing significant volume across multiple channels with us is constantly increasing. We are at more than 300 today. And I think this nicely symbolizes how relevant it is to create brand journeys as opposed to single silos in an omnichannel only setup. The last USP, I want to talk about is our subscription to innovation. A good example of that is tap to pay on iPhone. We were the first to market in July last year with the likes of GSAT and [ Nike ]. And what tap to pay on iPhone is, is it turns an iPhone into a terminal that can accept payments. So again, it reduces overhead for terminals, but at the same time, it's a nice way of creating innovative shopper journeys. We also had the first transaction live on tap to pay on Android this quarter. Another good example is I think giving shoppers are 4x more likely to shop at the brand with a strong purpose, 4x, that's significant. We enable seamless donations to the charities of our merchants choice through [ adding giving ], and we are already live with the likes of UniCloud, Decaflon, H&M and Etsy. Those are just 2 examples of how we provide a subscription to innovation. The foundation of this is our single unique platform in the Adyen network, which Gayathri will spend on a bit more time later. To give you a sense of the scale that we operate in. Today, we have more than 250,000 terminals lives on our platform, live and transacting, which includes the range of Adyen Design terminals. Now we spend a bit of time on what the trends are, what the use piece are and why we have the right to win. And I want to briefly highlight the verticals that we focus on most. Historically, we saw a lot of traction in the luxury fashion space. It's part of what we call small format retail. And the reason is also quite logic because those customers run international businesses, they see consistency and we need to ensure that they have great shopper journeys because it's a very high ATV and they're high-end customers. And we continue to see a lot of traction in that space. We work with the likes of LVMH and others that we continue to grow with. Now it's not just luxury, it's also the likes of footwear, apparel, cosmetics, accessories that we continue to see traction in. And I also want to give you a sense of the scale that we actually operate in. We just went live with a merchant called KIKO Milano, which is a young Italian cosmetics brand, and we managed to roll out close to 2,000 terminals over 450 stores in 2 countries within the span of 2 months. Another area that we focus on is what we call large formed retail. They are the likes of Home and Garden, furnitures, DIY stores, and we see an increasing traction in that space. Those customers are more domestic ones by nature, and they are more focused on running lean businesses. So the total cost of ownership discussion obviously is also driving demand. But at the same time, they want to be future-proof and be able to reach their shoppers across all channels. And that is why we feel that is a growing and very big opportunity for us also in the U.S. where we work with the likes of big sporting goods already. The other two verticals that I want to highlight is, one, hospitality and entertainment. Those merchant sell experiences. So the payment experience has to be even more embedded in the shopper journey, and that is again where we come into play. They also run international businesses and we help them have a consistent high-end shopper journey. Here, we work with the likes of CitizenM, Kempinski hotels and others. And lastly, in the food and beverage space, we also see a lot of demand. It's again, the complexity of running a lot of shops with a lot of transactions that we help with. There's an additional complexity with stead of franchisee setups that creates a lot of overhead for our customers. Fast, it's our bread and butter. We run a single platform. We can really help them scale. So summarizing this up, we feel there's a huge opportunity for us out there. We are really excited about this. we feel it's a big opportunity in the countries that we already operate in, but also in new ones that we see, which are the likes of Mexico and Japan. And with that, I want to hand over to Gayathri to talk about the investments we're making in the product.

Thank you, Alexa. So as you know already, we have a very differentiated product offering in the market today. But we're not stopping here. We are doubling down our investments, and I want to talk about 2 areas where we really expect to focus in the next couple of years. One is our investments in machine learning and leveraging data across Adyen's network. And there are a variety of applications for this, but one area that we're very excited about is to help optimize the checkout funnel. Essentially help our merchants convert interested buyers to paying customers. Secondly, doubling down and really tapping into the potential of our in-person payments, our in-store terminals product. And so these are the 2 areas that I will double-click into a little bit more to give you a flavor of what you can expect in coming years. So as you know already, Adyen is leading when it comes to performance for payments, right? Or operates. We've consistently kept it at a very high level. As you heard previously from Davi and Trevor, it's no longer just about performance. Cost is becoming increasingly an important consideration. So our machine learning models can now optimize both for performance as well as costs. So for example, with U.S., the U.S. debit product, we can now, through machine learning, route transactions, to the lowest-cost network, while still maintaining performance. We can also begin with our machine learning models and leveraging Adyen's data. manage, optimize both for performance while also optimizing for fraud, for reducing fraud. And we do this because we've integrated our risk engine within the payments process. So for example, Body Shop found that Alfred switched over to our automated machine learning models for risk checks, they saw an increase in their [ auth ] rates up to 80%. So essentially, we can do both. We can optimize both the performance as well as fraud. Our fraud models are becoming ever more sophisticated because fraudsters also are ever sophisticated. They're a moving target. And we're doing more and more leveraging the data across Adyen's network. We can also detect good shoppers as they make their way across channels and across merchants. So for example, if you see me in store, if Adyen sees me in store, buying lotion from Body Shop, when I come online next to purchase from an Adyen merchant, our risk engine will score me as a trusted shopper because I'm a known entity. It's not just about fraud. We can also help our merchants mitigate other forms of abuse. So take, for example, reseller abuse. Our models can detect power shoppers. These are shoppers who buy a lot of merchandise and they go back and resell it and often in markets where the merchant either does not have a presence yet or was planning to have a presence, but essentially what they've done is hurt the business potential. Our models can detect that and help the merchant determine how best to mitigate that risk. It's more -- way more that we're doing. But the main point I want to make here is we're no longer just about optimizing the performance, we're really broadening our purview to think about conversion because that's what our merchants really want. They want to convert interested buyers to paying customers. And they want to do it at low cost and they want to do it while still managing business risks. So that's an area we'll be focusing on over the next couple of years because it will be something that we really believe our merchants are coming to expect from us. The second area is in-store payments. And you've heard already from Alexa just the innovations we've made in building in-store terminals, something that is really hard to do typically tech companies stay away from hardware, Adyen realize the opportunity. But what we've done is we've done more than just design terminals. We actually built a platform that can be used to reinvent the in-store experience. Our merchants are already embracing this concept, and they are starting to innovate alongside us on these platforms. So for example, we have a major pet retailer in the U.S. that configure their terminals to bark. Only they want to do this, but the power of the platform is they can personalize it for their business. Our Dunkin' Donuts, for example, has integrated loyalty into the payments experience in store. But this is just the beginning, and this is what gets me excited with the power of data and these in-store terminals. Imagine the kinds of experiences we could build for the future. Targeted loyalty, personalized promotions and experiences that we yet don't imagine today that the platform essentially can power today's and future experiences. So we'll be working very closely with our merchants to start to transform and shape what the new in-store experience of the future is going to be like. So in summary, we have tremendous market opportunity. We have a differentiated product in the market today. But we're making investments for the future because we bet this is going to be a really important market for Adyen, and we believe we can actually help shape the future for our merchants. So thank you. And with that, we'll hand it over to Blake and Karolina, who will talk to you about our platform strategy.

Hi, everybody. I'm Karolina Noronha, and with me on stage today is Blake Breathitt. Both of us are based here and are very excited to talk to you about platforms because that's literally what we've worked on for the past 7 years from the inception of our platform's offering its first commercial success, eBay to where it is today. Our session today will be a quick walk down memory lane. So you understand the decisions which we've made so far and why we'll give you an update on where we are with platforms and why we are so excited about the opportunity ahead of us. You heard Roelant earlier. When we think about platforms, we think about technology companies who are building software to cater to the needs of small and medium businesses. That software is becoming the critical operating systems of those platforms, the software they're using every day, and they're running their entire business on top of it. Thinking about platforms, they have a pretty incredible TAM. The entire universe of small and medium businesses. Think about your local bakery, the trampoline park, you might have taken your kids to over the weekend or the CPA who hopefully filed your taxes in the last few weeks. Most of those SMBs have embraced digital transformation. 80% of them are already working with platforms and platforms are helping them gain efficiency, streamline operations and keep up with the evolving needs of the user base. But only 34% today are getting their payments serviced via platforms, which presents for our platforms a pretty incredible opportunity for future growth and additional revenues. And our ambition in that context is to help platforms to live up to that ambition to create a competitive advantage for them to meet the -- let me go back. Our ambition is to empower our platforms to gain maximum competitive advantage with embedded financial services and embedded payments. In order to understand our long-term strategy, I'll hand over to Blake, who will tell us about the history.

Thanks, Karo. So -- as Karo said, we thought some history today would be helpful. So we first saw this embedded payments opportunity to take place in the marketplace space. Think about eBay and Etsy and GoFundMe, we saw we had this unique opportunity to provide deep value to these marketplaces by leveraging our global compliance and regulatory framework, paired with a few key things. First would be just our sheer global reach. It's very important for these marketplaces to be able to tell their sellers. Not only can they reach a larger, more diverse group of buyers, but they can do that by offering all the relevant local payment methods and currencies. Two, our solution is invisible by design. We take a white label approach. We stand behind the scenes. This is very important for marketplaces as they're always looking to elevate their own brand and create this unified branding experience for both the buyer and the seller. We've always said that if we're doing our job right, both the buyer and the seller, they don't even know Adyen exists. Three would be that these global marketplaces look awfully similar to a global digital merchant and that they care deeply about our white glove support, our relentless focus on outrates and reducing fraud and through the enterprise-grade resiliency. So from our early days of working with these massive marketplaces, you could tell that our solution is really built for scale. In parallel, what we were also seeing were platforms we're starting to embed payments. The global need for onboarding and global payouts was no longer exclusive to just marketplaces. What was different, though, is that with these platforms, they needed to meet their customers both online and in-store. We saw this as an opportunity, an opportunity to integrate our strongest -- one of our strongest differentiators in our unified commerce solution and to our platforms, unlocking our platforms to have access to the same tech stack that we've built. Now that takes us to today, where we're going to be talking about embedding payments and embedding financial products in the key markets and verticals you're going to hear about. Now what does this mean for Adyen? As Roelant said, platforms are our in to the long tail of the market, significantly increasing our addressable market in the most scalable manner possible. We once -- we previously went directly down to this space resulting in just under 5,000 customers onboarded. Now through our early work with these marketplaces and platforms, we have now onboarded over 7 million active users on to the Adyen platform through these platforms. Of that 7 million, 70,000 are active business customers. Now these are business customers who are highly likely to adopt an embedded financial product in the future. Moreover, this is where the market is moving. Platforms are becoming ubiquitous. We're seeing them everywhere. We think it's just getting started. That's why we're going to share a few key success metrics that we track. The first of which being the number of platforms processing on the Adyen platform doing over $1 billion annually. Now this is an important metric for us to track because we've already established relationships with some of the world's largest platforms today. And of course, it's our ambition to find more of these platforms and work with them. But what's equally as important is it's our job, it's our responsibility to create more winners. To fuel the fire, the growth of our existing platforms to help them reach that number. Why is that important? These massive platforms bring us access to the segment of market we've never had before, leading to the next one. The number of platform business customers. So these are businesses that have been onboarded to these platforms. Again, that's a 70,000 number I referenced earlier, and these are customers who are highly likely to adopt an embedded financial product from their platform such as capital, and embedded bank account or an issued card. Now we'd like to talk about why and where we win. You've heard us say it before. I'm sure you're going to hear us say it again. We build everything in-house from the ground up. And that's very important to us. It allows us to innovate at speed without any third-party liabilities. What's beautiful about our platform solution is that it sits right on top of that core payment engine. So as we innovate and as we introduce new products and services, such as a new terminal, a new device, network tokenization or data products, our platforms have instant access to these same features, able to offer them these features to their customers. This keeps them ahead, these platforms ahead of other platform competition, but also ahead of payment companies. As Adyen tends to be first to market with these payment innovations. We've proven that time and time again. This is why we like to say we're truly given these platforms, a subscription to innovation. Now the next thing we're going to talk about, well, that -- let me back a second. That paired with our enterprise first approach, which means we're invisible by design makes us an ideal fit for these ambitious platforms. Most notably, we have unprecedented quality when it comes to our unified commerce solution. Not only are our sheer global reach, but also our ability to support these local end market nuances, such as tipping flows, for instance, very important for these platforms. A good example here is Zenoti, a salon, spa and fitness center platform. Zenoti had really ambitious plans, not only to expand it internationally, but they wanted to do it online and in store. Only Adyen can meet those ambitious plans. And today, we support them in all the key markets from U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, online, in-store and they're able to offer all the relevant local payment methods and digital wallets. Leading us to this next metric. The number of active terminals through our Adyen for platform fleet. Now we show this because we believe that our platforms benefit from the same innovations as the other pillars. And as that number grows, we are ensuring we're giving enterprise-grade payments to the long tail or as we like to say, Adyen for everyone. Karo?

Shifting gears to financial services. Platforms work with us because we are able to future proof them work with us because we can help them transform from technology company to financial technology company. And we can do that without exposing all of the complexities it takes to run a financial technology company. And we know quite a bit about that. That enables platforms not to only further differentiate their offering, but also to create much more unique user flows and unlock a completely new revenue streams for themselves. We talked quite a bit about our one platform, our subscription to innovation, but we feel with financial services. We take that actually to the next level. Once the platform has onboarded a user to accept payments, the entire universe of financial product is available for them. The platform can then decide when to turn that bank account -- that payments account into a bank account, issue a card against it to start spending or give them within seconds alone because the coffee machine might have broken and they want to quickly replace it. This frictionless user experience is only possible because we've done all the hard work of getting our own license. If you would have to work with a network of third-party banks that would not be possible. Where this is really interesting, is when you look how underserved business -- small businesses have been when it comes to banking. And platforms have such a unique in because their software is already that critical operating system, which is being used every day. They have worked together over years and proven themselves as a reliable caring partner, pretty different than probably their bank relationship is. Platforms are the ones who initially helped with inventory management, cash registered website building, but increasingly take on payments, financial flows and therefore, are really well equipped to bridge the trust gap between banks and small-medium businesses. The last point I want to make, and that's probably one of our strongest USPs. We are not only to help them with financial services, but the combination of the payment side, payments and financial services puts our platform in a very unique position. It gives them a very rich data set to create truly bespoke, unique financial services for them. They can decide where to set a limit on a card, how big of a loan to give, whom to give a bank account. And in that context, we are super, super proud to announce our partnership with BIN, a leading financial operations company for small and medium businesses, and they're leveraging our payment side capabilities together with our card issuing capabilities to power their own robust payment service. For us, super exciting. As you can hear, we are proud of the capabilities we have and the long tail opportunity at hand, but it is still early days. It's early days for us, but it's also early days for the entire industry. And therefore, it will take time until those products reach the same maturity as the rest of the business. And therefore, we are not including any growth metrics yet. Blake?

So next, we're going to talk about where we focus, where we execute on this platform strategy from both a regional and vertical perspective. On the markets, the U.S. has proven to be the furthest ahead. When you look at the sheer number of SMBs who are leveraging platforms for embedded payments. However, we're seeing similar trends play out in other key markets most notably the U.K., followed by Europe, Canada and Australia. Moving on to the verticals. As you can see, within these verticals, we benefit from our unique position of being able to offer a global unified commerce solution. It's imperative that within these verticals, they offer both an online and in-store approach. We also -- furthermore, these verticals are all proven and they're growing. People are perpetually going to eat, go get their hair cut or go see a doctor. What we've also seen is that these verticals have proven to be the furthest along. They're the most ready and have the most mature appetite towards embedded financial products. One interesting dynamic that we're seeing within these verticals is these subverticals popping up. A good example here is Slice. Slice is a food and bev platform here in the United States, but they're very specific to pizzerias and they dominate this space. They're widely successful, and we're seeing other similar platforms pop up and start to dominate these verticals, only telling us that these opportunities are truly endless. Karo?

Hopefully, by now, you understand why we are so excited about platforms and want a scalable way in into the SMB segments they are for us. But there are really 2 takeaways with also look for you to take. First of all, we are empowering platforms to unlock a completely new transaction-based revenue streams for themselves. We not only do this by our unified platform, our licenses, helping them to embed payments. But also we give them the ownership to create truly unique user experiences, figure out how -- or give them flexibility on how to monetize them, equip them with a rich data set to really target those offerings and set them up for the future with financial services. Our platform business is really combining Adyen's two biggest assets our global payments capabilities and our enterprise-level unified commerce offering. And this is why we win because we enable those platforms not only to compete with other global payments companies, but also go head-to-head with banks in their segment. Thanks a lot and see you back at Q&A in a few minutes. Thank you.

So after our first round of presentations, we have our speakers here back on stage for a round of Q&A. We'll do a mix of questions from people here live with us in the audience and people online. [Operator Instructions] With those household notes, I think all speakers are ready for our first question. So for those in the audience, if you raise your hand, someone from the team will come and find you. I see your first question here from Harshita.

This is Harshita Rawat from Bernstein. So you -- subsequent to 1H results, you talked about refining the pitch to the customers to kind of highlight total cost of ownership. Can you talk about how those conversations have gone, whether you have been able to kind of get some of the volumes back from some customers who may have kind of switched to lower cost providers?

Yes. Yes. Thanks for your question, Harshita. Roelant, if we talk with our customers about total cost of ownership, can you give some voice over into what we talk about, how the dialogues evolve?

Yes. absolutely. I think what's happened is that, of course, throughout the past 1.5 years, the theme that merchants are looking for has shifted from growth expansion to a bit more efficiency cost savings. That's where we've seen the impact. And I think it took us a bit of time to adjust to that because we're quite historically programmed to talk about expanding and growing, et cetera. But if you look at how the discussions can go, we have many ways to help our customers also on the cost savings side, as we explained earlier. But we need to train our team a bit on that. We need to figure out like what's the best way to approach it. I think typically, what you see is that merchants respond well to it. They're very open about the ideas we have there and how we can help them. I think we saw some examples earlier. And it goes still very much hand-in-hand with also discussions we have with them about opportunities to increase customer experience because, of course, it's not only about cost optimization, anything you can do to sell more, have better authorization rates, things like this also continues to be an important element. So the message changes a bit. I think we needed a bit of time to adjust but we found our way better now, I would say.

Thank you. I think many more raised hands in the audience. We have Mo sitting it in front here.

Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. The first was just in terms of your sort of pricing strategy in the U.S. market. Some of your competitors have been quite aggressive you sort of maintained a stance on kind of holding pricing and seeing some customers perhaps have shifted volume. How has that kind of volume recovery been? Have you seen sort of any evidence of that, particularly in the last sort of 3, 4 months coming back? And secondly, you said that the U.S. now is it's not just about pricing, it's about complexity increasing. So as you sort of think of that sort of forward conversation with your customers, where is the biggest kind of competitive deferation in your view versus a lot of like kind of pure digital only customers?

Thanks for your questions, Mo. Trevor, could you start with the first part of Mo's most question on how pricing is evolving for our U.S. digital customers? And then, Davi, maybe you can follow up more with the competitive landscape we see in your markets?

Yes. I think we have definitely seen more aggressive pricing. But as we mentioned in the past, it still holds true. Like we really believe that we have more value that we can add. And I can tell you, when I talk with our large merchants, like they're very willing to pay for more value, right? Cost is important when everything else is equal. And so for them, as long as we're demonstrating more value, they're going to pay for it. And so a lot of the value that we bring is precisely what we were talking about here. It's about how to not only maximize the approval rates on that whole purchase funnel, but also make sure that we can help them with costs in different ways. Because again, adding is costs, it's just a small piece of the total cost. And I think making sure that we tell that narrative, make sure that we're very clear on the value that we can provide has been really, really important for us. But we're going to continue to demonstrate value, which we're confident we'll continue to win volume our way and win our customers.

Sure. And as it relates to the competitive pressure in the U.S. market, I mean it's important to reiterate that our competitors, they have not come up last year or the year before. I mean these competitors, they have been around for over a decade now. So this is not necessarily a new dynamic for us. I think what we have done is not only invested a lot in our product strategy to Trevor's point, continue to add value to our customers but more recently, to Roelant's point, we have equipped our commercial teams so they can have the right conversations with our customers that are essentially oriented around areas of opportunity for growth or for cost reduction.

Thank you, Davi. I think there was a second follow-up question from or second part of Mo's question.

I wouldn't mind adding a bit to it because I look a bit at the U.S. market opportunity from a bit of a longer window. So if -- when I look back when we started 60 years ago in those early years, we never actually really anticipated being a domestic U.S. player, because at the time, U.S. payment processing was purely Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, very, very simple setup, nothing else and very commodity-based pricing at that time. And what we've seen happen over the years is that actually more complexity has come to the U.S. market. There are buy-now-pay-later, there's debit routing. There's bank-to-bank payments. There's now unified commerce operating online, in-store. All these things have come to the U.S. market, which means much more reliance on technology first payment solution. So that shift is still very much happening. And of course, there's multiple players with a technology type solution, but we feel we have quite a unique angle to that. So I must say, looking at it from that perspective, there's more traction now in the U.S. than we ever anticipated a longer time ago.

Thank you, Roelant. I'm going to see any audience for more questions. I see you raise hands there. I see someone sending right next to you.

Craig Maurer with FT Partners. Want to ask you about the increasing consolidation onto platforms even by merchants that are quite large, thinking specifically about Shopify, right? In a case like Shopify, if you were a processing partner for them. You're a supplier to a supplier to a business, right? So there's pricing pressure in that dynamic that happens twofold, right, as it moves down the chain. So as you continue to push into platforms and you're only offering payment settlement within those platforms, how do you deal with the constant pricing pressure that will come on what is effectively a commoditized offering?

Yes. Blake, I think this question is perfectly suited for you. So go ahead.

Yes. That's a fair question. What we see within platforms is sure, we're seeing some competitiveness, nowhere different than the rest of the business. But this platform solution, like I said, is built on top of that core engine. So our pricing philosophy still consists with our platforms. What's different, though, is you say just payments, we're actually doing a lot more than that. And the way our pricing strategy evolves is these incremental services that we're providing these platforms, there's obviously incremental fees, et cetera, such as onboarding and payouts, which, of course, extends into embedded financial products. And I'll say that with these platforms, what we're seeing is, of course, we have these pricing discussions, but the nature of what's next, meaning they're doing embedded payments now Embedded finance is on all their radars. Whether they're doing it today, they're all going to do it tomorrow. And they trust that we have built a vision around that, all within our own licenses. So believe it or not, the pricing discussions aren't so -- those discussions, these platforms aren't fully centered around pricing effects.

Thanks, Blake. And I have a follow-up question coming in online from James Goodman from UBS, and I think it's a really good follow-up one to add a discussion that you already had here. James is asking how and what specific factors have driven our very high platforms growth, looking at the number ex eBay volumes that we reported just this morning, because given competitive dynamics that we see or how do we see them? How do we continue to fuel that growth?

Yes, a few things. If you look at the competitive landscape of platforms and if you're looking at who out there can provide a global solution for platforms, both online and in store. And then it is also future proof to be able to offer embedded financial products. I really have a hard time finding more than just us. And then further to that, it's not just about winning platforms as you would probably say is these platforms are oftentimes growing faster than payment companies. So when you look at our growth, it's not just for winning new platforms. It's our existing platforms are growing and they're taking advantage of all the innovations that Alexa and Davi and Trevor have talked about from network tokenization, et cetera. they are bundling these services up and really commercializing them for that SMB space.

Thanks, Blake. And maybe to set the record straight, James works at Barclays and not with UBS. Still some Amsterdam services got jet Lagged. Let's see whether we have additional questions in the room here. Let's see whether we have a few raised hands or in the middle of the audience still.

Thanks. Given PayPal's recent comments about more focus on profitability, have you seen any impact yet? Or are you expecting an impact for you? And secondly, your NPS has steadily been improving, but we saw a bigger jump in the slides you showed this year. What do you attribute that to?

Yes. Roelant -- the first part of your question, could you repeat it once more? We can start with the second part.

Yes. And I think I heard your first question was about PayPal dynamics and the impact of that. It's hard to see impact in short term. So let's see, I think the way we think about pricing, we think about -- we continue to think about pricing as we've always done. We look at where is the real value that we can provide, and we need to ensure that we find a pricing model that reflects the sort of value we create for our merchants. And competitive pressure it's there. We welcome it. I mean it keeps us sharp. And basically, what we're doing is very much looking for opportunities with our customers or potential customers where we see a good strategic fit. So is there indeed a value that we can provide to our customers, let's make sure we clarify that and find a fitting pricing model. And there is some flexibility we have to do that. And so that's a bit how we look at it. I think on the NPS, we tend to focus a lot on servicing our customers well. I think the area where we've improved a bit on -- if I look at the feedback we got was around being a bit more clear around future road map what can they expect from us? I think that's where we lagged a bit for a while. We've been better at actively talking about that with our customers, so they know a bit more of what's coming. That's one of the things that I think was appreciated. But, yes.

Thanks, Roelant. Let's go to another question here from the audience. We have Adam Wood here in front. If someone from the team could come and give him a mic.

It's Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Maybe just first of all, you've talked a lot about the discussion with merchant shifting to that cost discussion. How much of the issue was it being your sales teams being able to explain that to merchants and demonstrate versus having to kind of engineer that into the products and change the shift of how the products worked? And when you're competing with somebody day one, they're x percent cheaper than you. How long would it take for your routing and optimization and so on to demonstrate that value to a merchant on average? Is there a kind of time frame that, that would happen over?

I think it's a very good point because there's, of course, if you're faced with low pricing, that's a very easy number to understand. And if you then have someone else who's explaining to you, well, actually, we're going to help you reduce cost. We're going to help you sell more, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, that's a promise, whereas a number is a number. So that's -- and this has been a challenge or opportunity that we have always faced. And we need to make sure we train our teams really well. in how do you make it very concrete to show the impact we can make, and we're very advanced in showing the impact we can make on selling more, whether it's unified commerce. What is the impact that you buy something and return it in a store. Well, there's benefit. We can put an actual number to that. I think we weren't as experienced yet on showing real impact on what cost savings we can create and how do we put a value to that. We can talk about the things we can do, but part of it we are developing, but there's also a training and getting more experience on that side in turning it into a real number in our discussions with merchants where we lagged a bit. So I think we call-up on that, but I think pricing is always easy to understand to put in an Excel sheet, so to say.

Is there a kind of time frame where you -- does it take weeks, months, quarters for that difference to be? I know it's kind of -- the answer is going to be it depends. But is there any help you can give us on that?

The answer is -- it depends.

Thanks, Adam. I see another question from just behind Adam with raised hands.

Sandeep Deshpande at JPMorgan. Just coming back to this pricing discussion and what happened in the first half, have you seen that shift in the third quarter and into the second half -- sorry, this is very long. In terms of what the customers are asking because, I mean, one of the issues in the U.S. market is that there are many financial services companies which have other offerings. I mean we talked about PayPal. They have other offerings, which they can co-sell with the merchant offering that they have. Many of the card issuers have processing as well. And so they have other things that they can subsidize their payments offering with and which is what Adyen doesn't have? And does that impact your negotiations with customers?

Thanks for your question, Sandeep. Overall, Q3 developments will dive into later with Ethan and Ingo at the end of the Q&A. But the broader dynamics here in North America can definitely speak to. Maybe Davi starts and if Roelant has something to add, then go ahead.

Sure well, like we said, I think our pricing strategy fundamentally hasn't changed. We continue to price for value, and that's essentially because engaging pricing wars is something that we believe is not sustainable. I think fundamentally, we want to be in a position where we can continuously invest in our product suite and continue to have the right conversations with our customers. Like we said, in the U.S. alone, Adyen fees represent 5% to 15% of the total cost of payments for any merchant. There is a really important opportunity to help merchants achieve many more in terms of their savings or growth than they would by say, saving on a bit on our pricing proposal. So our focus is really to make sure that we add value to our customers and that we continue to do that in the long term.

Thanks, Davi. Roelant, anything to add? .

Yes. No, I will add something on the idea of bundling products towards very low pricing on the payment processing side. So let's assume we would run our own payment method, and we would provide an offering to our customers and say like, hey, you pay nothing for payment processing. However, we want you to put our own payment method as #1 on your checkout page. We don't believe in that model. And the reason we don't believe in that model, it creates a certain conflict of interest. We want to do, as I said earlier, we want to align our interests in our pricing model, 100% to the interest of our customer. And whether the interest is we want to reach more customers, we want to give our customers a better experience. We want to lower cost of processing. We want to align with that. So that means, yes, we want to see that if there's a certain value we provide, yes, you pay something for that. We don't believe longer term that if you pay nothing that's going to lead to inability to support, invest in the solution. We have a really talented account management team -- an account management team managing a customer where there is 0 revenue. Nobody likes to do that. That's not a healthy setup. And many of our customers ultimately do understand that. So we think that's -- yes, we aim for the value proposition and can be competitive around it, but that's what we think is the way to go.

Thanks for your question. We're headed into the final question of this Q&A round. I see a few raised hands still on this side of the venue, and I think we haven't addressed that yet. So if we can give someone the mic on that side.

Bryan Bergin from TD Cowen. I'll ask one on platform. So can you talk about the life cycle of a platform customers as it scales? Do you see some of the larger ones? Do they want to bring payments in-house? And you showed good growth here in platforms, again, ex eBay. Can you just give us a sense how close you are to fully lapping the volume headwinds there?

Yes, sure. Thank you. I think once more, Blake, I think this is a great one for you on how we ramp and grow with platforms.

Yes. So when you look at the lifestyle of platform, let's start from the beginning, if you will, so we have data that suggest that the sales life cycle of a platform is naturally stronger. What's most different from our traditional merchant base is the migration away from a provider to Adyen. Which is why the growth tends to come a bit later than our traditional merchant base. And the reason being, if you think about it very simply is, when you migrate a single direct merchant from one provider to another, you're typically migrating a merchant account or two or maybe a handful in the platform use case, you're migrating hundreds, thousands, in some cases, millions of underlying merchants or sellers, which takes a lot of time because you want to focus on eliminating any sort of user churn. Did I answer that -- is it enough? Okay, the in-house part. Yes, I'm sorry. So yes, I think you referenced eBay. So we see that -- we're unique in our offering that we're able to sort of turn on and off some of our platform infrastructure. So if we see a platform start from a very nascent stage and grow with us and turn some of these features on and off, we think that's a success story that we're able to provide. And they will tell other platforms that we can take them on the same growth cycle. But naturally, when you come to us, you typically leverage more and pair things off as you grow and as you scale.

Thank you. That also finishes up our first round of Q&A. Thanks for having all your questions here. Thanks for the online questions. We're now going to go into a quick break, and we'll be back soon with the second part of the event. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. I hope you all had a nice break and are properly caffeinated for the second half of our presentation today. My name is Brooke Nayden. I am the Chief HR Officer here at Adyen. I've been with the company for over 6 years. I've had the pleasure of working both in our San Francisco office as well as in Amsterdam. And I'd like to take a bit of time today to chat a little bit about our team and the investments that we've made in that team. We've spoken quite a bit about this investment phase that we've been in the last few years. But I actually want to go back a little bit further. Over the last 16, 17 years, we've been growing Adyen consistently over time, carefully. There's a reason that we're not 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people today that is growth. The teams that we've built, we organized into small teams. We think smaller teams with ownership over their work deliver the best results. We give them freedom to approach the different challenges and problems that come their way in a way that makes sense and leans towards scalability. We always talk about automation internally. We don't hire roles that are focused on repetitive tasks or data entry. But instead, we ask our teams to automate those challenges away. Some examples to make this a bit real for you all. One close to my heart, our recruiting team. We don't have an army of recruiting coordinators that sit behind computers all day scheduling and fighting calendars. We automate that away. All of our interviews are scheduled via software. Reconciliation is a topic Alexa mentioned earlier, a big pain point both for us and for our customers. Instead of hiring teams of analysts or outsourcing this somewhere, we put a small team of amazing engineers on the challenge and continue to find better ways of working through it. This is the way that we approach our work, and it allows us to have that scalability in our talent. The talent that we bring in, we also really invest in them. We want to make sure that anyone that gets an offer from Adyen also gets a promise that they will sit next to the smartest people they've ever worked with every day. That's a high bar that we set for ourselves, but as a people team and as a leadership team. We grow people in lots of different ways. We allow people who prove themselves to move into different functions, try something new, move across the world and understand a different market. We get so much more out of our talent because we really stretch them. We grow a lot of our leaders from the inside. We give them opportunities to lead bigger and bigger teams. And over the last few years, we've also seen a huge amount of positive outcomes from bringing in external leaders that have seen the type of scale and our -- have worked through some of the global challenges that we see today and can really sharpen our ideas and how we've worked in the past. You've actually seen the magic of this pairing throughout the morning, right? Some of the leaders that we've brought in, but also that we've developed internally come together to come up with brilliant ways of working. Across all of that, we keep our bar for performance very high. We are always very clear that performance management is a part of our culture. We don't hide behind big exercises, but it's a consistent expectation for all of our leaders that we are always setting a high bar, coaching people towards it and making tough decisions when it's not working out. That allows us to have a high functioning and lean team. So the team that we've built. A few years ago, this is what we saw. We were around 2,000 people. Now we're over 4,000 in the numbers that we just shared where you can see the big investments that we've made in our key markets like North America, where we're really growing out teams that can better support our customers. So what's next? We expect to end the year around 4,200 people. That's a little bit less than we had shared about a year ago. That's been an intentional choice. When we think about our growth for a year, we want to really estimate where we think we're going and where the opportunities will come up, but we also never treat that as a target to hit. We want to ensure that every person that joins the Adyen team is bringing something to the table, and we hope that each person we bring on actually speeds us up. So next year, we don't believe we'll add more than a couple of hundred people to the team next year. And those hires will be focused in 2 areas. One, probably no surprise, is our key commercial teams that we're still continuing to invest in, particularly in the U.S. as well as some markets that we're beginning to invest in a bit more like Japan and India. So we will continue to build those teams and carefully add great talent where it makes sense. And we will also look at some critical technology roles in our tech hubs to continue building out our engineering teams. So -- this is how we think we'll build the best for our customers, a great strategy needs a great team to deliver on it, and that's what we're trying to do. So all of that said, our growth story has been a very intentional one. We have developed these small, high-performing teams that work together that automate with great people, a great culture and way of working, great technology and great customers. We have what we need. That is the horizon that we keep our eyes on. Thank you. Next up, we will hear from Ethan on our financials.

Hello again, everyone. Now that you've had a chance to hear about our strategy and how we think we have the team that can execute against it, of course, the next question is what does it mean for us financially? And I want to talk you through how we think about our future growth and our performance in the third quarter. But first, I want to reiterate a point I made at the start. It's that we're very much long-term oriented in our decision-making. The opportunity we're going after is a massive one, and it requires this long-term thinking for us to be successful. At the same time, we also understand the needs to provide information about how the business is developing along the way. And so I quickly want to touch upon what we saw in the third quarter. First, on the volume and revenue side, we saw trends largely in line with what we saw in the first half with some acceleration coming from the mix of our merchant base. We saw volumes grow 21% and revenues grow at 22%. If we look a bit deeper into where those volumes came from, on the digital pillar, we grew 21%, where we continued to gain market share also here in the U.S. In the Unified Commerce pillar, we grew 25% this half year with some slowdown from H1 in retail. And notably, we did our first Tap to Pay on Android transaction during the third quarter. In platforms, we touched on it earlier, but we are seeing acceleration here with the overall pillar growing 15% and ex-eBay, we grew at 120%, an acceleration from the first half. On this point, we also saw that North America and APAC continue to be our fastest-growing regions around the world in the third quarter. On the people side, Brooke mentioned, we added 175 people net in the third quarter. We expect to add similar or lower amount in the fourth quarter as we come out of our investment cycle. So that's what happened in the third quarter. But the logical next question I know is what do you think about your growth for the future? And first, if we're talking net revenues, and the way that we think about our growth is with 3 core growth drivers. One is the market growing itself. This is the growth of our customers, which we also benefit from. The second is how we expand in the share of wallet, we do with our customer base. As we provide high service levels and grow with them, we gain more of their business as we go along. This captures the opportunity we have in our existing customer base, which is the biggest part of our growth in any given year. And the third part is how we onboard new customers. New customers are less impactful in any given year, but they are a guarantee of future growth. They are really important for our success long term. So nice. We have these 3 growth drivers, but what does it mean tangibly? How do we quantify it? Well, that's what we've tried to do through a few building blocks as well, which I will talk you through. So first, we have our market volume growth. We're going after one of the biggest opportunities, and not only is it a huge opportunity, but it's one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. As we've expanded our end markets to more regions, into more verticals. We think that a proxy on overall payments volume growth is a good way to think about how our customers will grow over the future years. There is one exception in that our in-store volume is pretty inversely correlated to the in-store volume in the overall payments market. So here, we have applied different proportions to e-comm and point of sale. But for the rest, we think that looking at the overall payments market is a good way to assess our customers' growth overall. That, we've quantified as high single-digit to low double-digit growth for the coming years. The second building block is how we gain wallet share with our customers. This has historically been our biggest building block to growth in any given year, and we think the same about the years ahead. We've -- we expect low double-digit to mid-teens growth from our expansion within our customer base. So why do we believe we can continue to grow with our customers? Well, that's what we've always seen. Even if you look back to our older cohorts, cohorts of customers who've been on the Adyen platform for 5-plus years, we see that they continue to grow with Adyen over the years. We see the same with the newer cohorts that we've also onboarded onto the Adyen platform. Year after year, they do more business with us, as we provide high service levels to them, and they experience the Adyen offering. So the logical extension of this question is, okay, great, but can you still grow with your existing customer base? We've tried to make our best estimates of where we think our share of wallet is today. And we look across it on a -- look at it across pillars. So there's 3 key things I'd like you to take from this slide. One is that across these pillars, there's still significant room for us to grow with our existing customers. Second is that as customers are longer on our platform, we see that they bring more share of wallet. That's logical given the previous slide, but can be seen here when you compare the newer cohorts and the older cohorts. And third, that in Unified Commerce, especially, we see the stickiness of having volumes across channels and across geographies, and that ultimately leads to higher share of wallets than we see on the digital side. And I'm missing 1 pillar, the platform pillar, which is our newest initiative of the 3, and then logically, is where we have the lowest share of wallet and still the most room to grow with our existing customers, where we've quantified it under 20%. But it's not only the share of wallet growth that will contribute to our platform's growth. It's also the attachment of embedded payments that Blake and Karol referenced earlier. They had the same slide. They showed that 1/3 of SMBs get payments from a platform today, but the expectation in our research last year is that 3/4 of these SMBs will get their payment service from a platform in future. That means that as they sell into their customers and attach payments to them, we also grow along with them. And the last point I'd make on existing customers before we go into new customers is that given our little variable cost to doing more business with our customers, we incentivize them to do more business with us by offering tiered pricing. Tiered pricing reduces the per transaction fees as a customer expands with Adyen. So here, we've also incorporated the fact that as we grow with these customer base, we also will see pricing come down on a per transaction fee, which we've quantified as negative low to mid-single digits. Now it's important to understand that as volumes grow faster or slower in a period, this is correlated to the tiered pricing impact that we would see. So if the volumes grow faster in a period, then we would expect a bigger impact from the tiered pricing, and the same is true if they would grow slower. So now that I've covered existing customers, I want to walk you through how we think about new customer wins. We think about it in 2 chunks. One is new wins in any given year. This is the smallest of the building blocks. It's low single digits. But what's really important about new wins is that you land them and then you expand them. That's what we see for the second year that they're on the platform and for the years well beyond that, as I showed in the previous chart, but we see a substantially big growth in the second year that they're on the platform. And that's what we've quantified here. So on the left side, you can see what Brooke and Roelant have referenced earlier, which is how our sales team has developed over the past few years. They referenced that we expanded the teams quite substantially in the last 12 to 18 months. You see that here. But you also see that the team was relatively stable in size in the years before. And as Roelant mentioned, our sales cycles take long. We need to onboard these new salespeople. They need to build pipeline. They need to start closing deals. And only then have we landed a customer, we then also need to expand. That's what we show on the right side. And this is just an illustrative example of what we saw in 2022. The small green bar that was new sales in 2022. The big dark blue bar, that's how our 2021 customers ramped up in 2022. It plays an important role. And so while we're making these investments today, we know that it will take time for this to connect to revenues over the next few years. And these are the building blocks I wanted to explain, but how does it connect to all the presentations that I heard this morning. So I want to take you back to the 3 areas we look at for our growth. The market growth, the wallet share potential in our existing base and our new customer wins. Starting with market growth, how does this connect to the pillars? Because of that attachment effect that we've referenced a few times today, we think that this market will grow the fastest. It's not only them growing their own payments volume, but it's them attaching payments to more of their customers over time. And on the digital side, we see that e-comm tends to grow faster than in-store payments. So we expect faster market growth from digital customers than Unified Commerce. On the Unified Commerce piece, it's important to also remember that about half of our volumes are on the e-comm side as well. Then on wallet share potential and new wins I just want to highlight that it we've been in for the longest time. So in terms of potential to grow also given where the wallets are today, we see tremendous wallet share potential in both, but more in digital, even than in Unified Commerce. And the opposite is true if we think about where new wins can come from with Unified Commerce more underpenetrated, if you think about the in-store volumes we do today compared to where the total market is. So when you add up these building blocks, to our growth, we get to an expectation of low to high 20s over the coming years. And of course, some of these initiatives that we've been talking about today including hiring the sales team and developing the team. That will take some time. So we may start towards the lower end of the range and accelerate from there over the coming years. Now we've had a chance to talk about net revenue. That's the bulk of our focus. I know also the bulk of your focus, but you're also interested, of course, in EBITDA margins in our profitability. So let me share how our costs are made up. If you look at the last 3 years, about 70% of our costs are related to our team. As we've gone through this investment cycle in H1, we saw that number increase to 75%. Now Brooke mentioned that we don't expect to hire at a similar rate in the coming years, a much, much reduced rate to where we've been. And the reason we feel confident we can do that is because we have that single platform. It's highly scalable, has limited additional needs for maintenance, needs for integration between internal platforms. So the ability to run a lean team and a lean company, small teams who make a big impact, we feel strongly we can execute on. That means that as the business grows, the team doesn't have to grow in tandem. And that operating leverage, we expect to start to kick in, in 2024 and to continue for the years ahead. So as you've seen in the Q3 update as well, we've updated our financial objectives. And the reason we've done so is because we listened to your feedback, we heard you. You said, "Can you be more specific around timelines? Can you help us understand how you expect to grow over the coming years?" And we still very much believe in the medium- to long-term opportunity that we have as a company. But we also took that feedback and said, let's be more specific. Let's explain what we expect for the coming 3 years. That's how we get to our net revenue growth ambition, which is that we aim to grow net revenues annually between the low 20s and high 20s, up to and including 2026. That's based on the building blocks in the range that we just discussed. On EBITDA margins, we aim to improve EBITDA margins above levels of 50% in 2026, given that operating leverage inherent to our business model in that single stack solution that we offer. And lastly, on capital expenditure. We've maintained this financial objective of keeping our CapEx below 5% of net revenues in any given year. We think we can continue to do that, again, because of the single platform that we need to maintain. On capital allocation, we talked about being profitable. We've also very much talked about this still very much being a growth story. We want to be able to continue to invest in our growth. And consistent with the approach that we've taken since our foundation, we have plans to continue to reinvest in the business rather than issuing dividends or doing share buybacks. A big reason for that is also to maintain the flexibility that we have in our business and the relationships we have with our regulators and in keeping an industry-leading credit rating that we have with S&P. This will become more and more important as we continue to leverage our banking licenses and offer more and more products. So if I would summarize, if we think about the coming years for Adyen, we very much think we're in the early days. We have a lot of growth still ahead of us. On the net revenue side, that will largely come from our existing merchants in any given year, whether that's them growing quickly, or us expanding wallet share, but it's also about onboarding new customers, of which we're doing -- making big investments today, which we expect to pay off in years ahead. And on the EBITDA side, on the margin side, we really think we've built a scalable solution that doesn't need a team to grow in line with the business. And we expect that to come through in the coming years as well. So with that, I'd just like to thank you all again for spending this time with us either here today or online and look forward to taking your questions now in an FAQ. Thanks.

So thanks for joining us for the second Q&A. [Operator Instructions] We'll start down here with Mo.

Two questions for me. Firstly, just on the sort of the revenue outlook. How should we think of the previous outlook, which is more kind of mid- to long-term -- should we just -- because you've now narrowed the time line? Is that kind of less valid? And how should we think of the kind of the building blocks in terms of that acceleration? Ethan, you kind of indicated potentially low 20s kind of moving to the high 20s. What are the some of the -- perhaps -- you talked a lot about the U.S., you're clearly very confident around the U.S. But how should we think of some of the other kind of growth opportunities either by region or product areas? And are you assuming sort of any significant success from the new product initiatives, is in that '26 scope? The second was just on the margin and building blocks. When you sort of, I think, Brooke alluded to a couple of hundred hires next year. One of the features we saw as you were adding headcount was also -- the cost per head was higher. How should we think of the evolution of that in terms of that sort of margin evolution? And yes, that was it.

I think both for Ethan. I think the first one on the building blocks of revenues.

Yes. Yes, sure. So I think there was a couple of parts of your question. One was what regions do we think will play a role. The other part is how do we expect that acceleration to come in over the coming years? So maybe if I start with the acceleration, in general, we always say that things in payments take time, right? And that's what we see. We see that these discussions with our long-held customers. They still happen over a long period of time. They built trust with us. They gain what we gain more wallet share with them, and we're able to grow with them longer term. We think that a lot of the things that we've talked about day will also contribute to us being able to gain more and more wallet share with our customer base over time. So that's on. That's on the existing side. On the new side, we talked about the sales team growth, it takes time for those as team members to contribute to our revenues, right, long sales cycles, they need to onboard customers, then those customers need to grow with us. And so those investments that we're making now -- investments we've made over the last year. They won't show up immediately, and that's part of the acceleration that we expect as well.

Second question on margins and headcount costs.

Yes. Happy to take that one. So when we think about how we pay our talent, we have a pretty clear and simple strategy, and that strategy is consistent across any market we hire in. So we really look to pay in line with the companies that we're competing for, for talent. So of course, 1 location can differ from another. So it's definitely something that we always think through -- our team has become a lot more diversified in loan over time as you can see in how we've grown. So we continue to kind of approach that in the same way and pay people really fairly in the market where we're hiring. I think the good news is that we're -- we've been investing in different markets. So there's some balance to that. And it's important that we like retain the great talent that we hire because it's also very expensive to replace them. So I think that's kind of what we balance when we look at our compensation philosophy.

Adam, [indiscernible].

It's Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Maybe just on the shorter term and the improvement in the third quarter. I mean I think you alluded to the pace of growth slowing during the first half, so you're probably below the 19 constant currency. You've come in at 26 in Q3. Could you just talk a little bit about what drove that really strong acceleration in the third quarter? Was it earlier success of training and onboarding the sales teams, maybe some lumpy merchant onboarding any changes in pricing? If you could just help us sort of understand that acceleration? And would you be willing to comment on was the end rate better than where you started that in Q3? And then secondly, on platforms, there's a lot of business offerings in there, there's payments, accounts, payouts, lending, issuing. Could you just help us understand a little bit what the business model is for you in terms of getting paid? What are you going to monetize -- what's the business model in each one of those areas? Just to give us a bit more of a feel for how well you can monetize that platform opportunity over time?

Ethan, do you want to take the first one. Then Ingo, you can take the second one.

Yes, sure. So I think there was a few parts of your question. Second -- the last part I'll start with, which is -- did we see differences coming in and out of the quarter. I think we saw relatively similar underlying trends throughout the quarter. And I wish it was as easy as pinpointing one thing like we made a pricing change or our pitch changed and it led to a totally new outcome. I think in general, these things take a bit more time. So what we saw is that the acceleration was relatively broad-based and also had to do with the merchant mix and which merchants were growing faster than others, that led to us accelerating in the third quarter.

Yes, on the question on how we want to monetize the embedded financial products. It depends indeed on the product. Ultimately, we've always been a fee business, and we continue to want to be a fee business. So making fees is most crucial for us. And if you look at the different type of products, including issuing and accounts, we will monetize and grow standard fees for using that product. Issuing is very similar to acquiring where we get part of the interchange. We share that interchange with our customers. But of course, we also take our part for capital, it most logical to monetize this through a fixed fee per account. Capital is slightly different, of course, because for capital, it is a balanced product, but we have never the intention to be like a big loan book. It's not our type of business that we're in. So we try to find a way if the capital product scales that we continue to make mostly fees out of it. And I think that is the long-term focus that we will have. Of course, there's always a bit of a balance play there, specifically in the beginning, where it's relatively small. But longer term, we don't want to build a big loan book. That's never been our intention.

Just go behind to Sandeep.

Sandeep Deshpande, JPMorgan. Actually, going back to your presentation, Ethan. Talking about these different verticals and their contribution to your future growth. You didn't have Unified Commerce as -- whereas digital and platforms was considered a bigger driver than Unified Commerce. You put 2 dots on those Unified Commerce whereas you've got 3 on the other. I was trying to understand why you're saying that given the market feedback is that your Unified Commerce product is probably one of the most differentiated products you have. And given your market share in store, for instance, is so much lower than where it is online today as such? That's my first question. And my second question is actually follow-up to this response Ingo gave on these new products. You talk about the big blocks, which is very useful. But in terms of the new customers, you talk about new customers, you don't talk about new products. And how do those new products contribute to your growth trajectory in the midterm?

Yes. So you asked a good question because it's not how I meant the 2 circles compared to the 3. What I was trying to explain is that for Unified Commerce, most of the growth opportunity, while still important in existing customers, as I showed in the share of wallet, most of the growth opportunity is that there are so many new customers to win in that space. Given the exact example you mentioned of so much of the point-of-sale in-store volume still not being on the Adyen platform, right? So if you -- if we had to compare new wins with existing base, we say the potential for new wins is bigger on the Unified Commerce side than we see on the digital side, which we've been in for a long time, share of wallet is lower. So also the expansion opportunity within our existing base is higher in the digital space than on the unified commerce side. So that's how we thought about it. It was trying to show where the bulk of the growth opportunity comes from in any given pillar. On your second question around how the new products influence our growth trajectory. I think there's a really important point that I want to make, which is that while our embedded financial products today are not meaningful to our net revenue growth on a stand-alone basis. They're very meaningful to our success today because they're a big reason that we're able to grow that platform business 120% ex-eBay. These are the -- this is the journey that a platform is trying to go down. They're looking how do they future-proof themselves with a partner that can develop along with them. And so while it's not meaningful today and actually, our expectations are that it continues to be less meaningful even in the coming years, it will become meaningful at some point, but there will still take time for it to be on a stand-alone basis really driving our growth. But today, it still really impacts our platform sales pitch. It's a big driver of the success we're having in the platform pillars. That's why we haven't separately included it as a building block, but it's still very relevant today.

Maybe we'll go to someone over here.

Thanks for putting this extraordinary event on. I'm Dennis Hong from ShawSpring Partners. I have 2 questions. The first is a little bit more straightforward and mechanical and maybe this is a question for Ethan. On share-based compensation, the story has been a very, very clean one for much of Adyen's history. On a go-forward basis, what sort of dilution can we expect from potentially share-based compensation, especially given the different payment practices of U.S.-based talent? And then -- the second question is probably related more to the platforms. What sort of contribution do you expect on your growth from the Shopify partnership on a go-forward basis?

Can you talk to Shopify?

I'll first talk to share-based comp, which is that to Brooke's point earlier, we look to compete at market for our talent. So they should have a package where they feel like they're being paid what the market delivers. And historically, that's been more weighted towards cash for us than maybe other companies, especially here in the U.S. We don't expect a significant change in that regard. So we don't expect the mix to change too substantially to what we've seen in the past.

Yes. I think on your question on Shopify, I think Shopify is the fact that we have this partnership. I think it is a very strong proof point for us that we have the right enterprise solution in the U.S. in the digital space. So I think exactly where we want to play. I find it hard to quantify exactly how much that will be as a percentage of our growth. But I think it's crucial given the fact that -- we want to double down on our U.S. digital strategy. So it's a crucial part of that strategy.

Front here on the left-hand side.

This is Harshita Rawat from Bernstein. So Ethan, going back to the building blocks of your revenue growth algorithm and kind of looking at wallet share gains within that in digital, if you look at it, you have less than 40% share even within your older cohorts, how hard it is to address the kind of the remaining 60%. And I know it varies by customers. Is it like geos you're not in? Is it a fragmented set of customers? Is it merchant choice, they want to have different players? Can you just zoom in on that?

Yes. Good question. So -- what we've tried to show is the volumes that we see as addressable. So we don't do domestic China volumes, for example. That's not part of the remaining 60%, right? So we really tried to show what of the volumes are adjustable for us. That's the share of wallet that we think we can go after. It's about working together with our customers. I think the trend that we've seen, right, it's an average. Many customers we see are well above 40%. We even have customers on the digital side that do 100% of their volumes with us. So in terms of -- do we have the ability to continue to grow even with those longer-term customers? Yes. Many times, they do have a strategy of wanting to employ multiple providers, whether that's globally or per geo. So that will always play a role -- but I think in general, we have the feeling that we have a long way to grow even with those longer customers on our platform.

Let's go to on this side to the front.

All right. I was just curious if you can dig in a little bit on the point-of-sale side, especially in the U.S. I'm just curious if there's anything different that you're finding in this market versus Europe, just easy deployment, harder, et cetera, which would be helpful.

Ingo, do you want to take...

Yes, sure. I think if you look at the point-of-sale side in the U.S., I think it is, in some ways, very similar to what we have learned in Europe, of course, because a lot of the payers that choose us here domestically, they chose us for the Unified Commerce experience, so optimizing customer journey. So in that sense, it is very similar. At the same time, if you look at specific verticals like F&B, for instance, dipping flow here in the U.S. is completely different. So these are the things that we have, of course, learned over time that we have implemented to make sure that we have a product that is really a tailored to this market, for instance, also why we have an engineering hub in Chicago to always make sure that we close to the market that we're active in. And I think that's the benefit at the one hand of having a global platform, but also with a local expertise to make sure that we adjust the offering to what's relevant in a certain market and in a certain vertical.

Why don't you go back down the front -- right at the front here.

Appreciate the event today. My name is Colin Ducharme, I'm with Sterling Capital. One of the market narratives has been that the space is just commoditized. And one of the pushbacks to that thesis as it pertains to Adyen is where you can offer differentiated functionality. And so I want to dig into 2 of the product highlights today, one banking and the other data to get a little bit more color on the banking side. You talked, Ingo, about capital as an emerging product. You've got the banking licenses, which is a clear differentiator, yet -- as far as I know, you haven't elected to offer the FDIC insurance, and we've seen other fintech platforms offer that primary account and partner with financial institutions in part to offer just that very thing that insurance because they view cross-sell as -- the friction to cross-sell lower, and therefore, the embedded financial services can therefore be stickier across the platform. If you could just -- maybe talk a little bit more about the vision and the role that FDIC kind of plays into that, especially some of the CFPB news that we're getting this week on increased scrutiny there. And then I'm sorry, I missed Davi earlier on the data question, but I was interested in a little bit more color on that pilot you talk about with a big issuer and a large merchant with Adyen kind of data brokering there, that's very interesting because when you normally flow payments data through the schemes and you go from like a granular kind of Tier 3 data very specific, up to kind of a Tier 1. There's signal loss there, and it inhibits the ability to roll out new products, advertising and open up these new revenue streams. So I just wanted to better understand that embedded financial strategy with data and with banking because those are clear differentiators that help offset the entire space is commoditized. You guys are kind of uniquely positioned there to offer those services.

Well, thank you. I think that's indeed the vision that we have, if you think about embedded financial products and a way how we want to help platforms to offer this, I think they're -- indeed, we are in this unique position. The reason why we are in this unique position is that we build everything in-house. So we have the full flexibility not being dependent upon third parties. And I think that is, I think, a real strength in our offering. If you specifically touch upon FDIC insurance, we work with a third party that has to do with the type of banking license that we have here in the U.S., but we can offer it when it's needed. And I think that's always how we try to build products, making sure that we -- where we can have full control and where we need sometimes work with third partner. Then on the data set, I think if you think about the importance of data in payments, that is -- I think we've proven in the past also in the focus on uplifts of old rates, data is just crucial. And I think with, for instance, new products like network tokens, we saw uplift in old rates. And now we're at a stage where we think like what can we do additionally to work with issuers to further improve the authorization rates and -- but also combat fraud at the same time. And I think having full control of our stack building connections directly to issuers. We have way more flexibility than the traditional players. So I think these are examples where we keep innovating with our merchants to basically bring that combination of high authorization rates with low foot rates at the lowest cost. I think that combination is very strong.

Maybe just doing a couple of questions on the webcast. We've got one for you, Brooke, around the dynamics on hiring. So can you talk about the drivers that made you decide or made us to decide to slow hiring? Is it response to macro? Or have you just figured out how to operate with a leaner workforce?

Yes. I would point to a few things. I think, one, it was also never our intention to be hiring super fast and then 1 day they just completely stop, right? I think -- it's also a much more natural way to build teams to go through a growth phase and ease off the gas a little bit. So one, I think that is the right way to go through our growth phase. So we're intentional about that. It's important to us that we get everything we can out of those that we've hired over the last few years. We have made this big investment. We spend a lot of time on onboarding our new hires. And I always see the onboarding phase in kind of 2 chunks. There's that immediate onboarding where we spend a lot of time with our new hires to understand our strategy. We spend a lot of time on our formulary culture, a way of working and then really making sure that everyone has the same baseline on payments knowledge because we hire some folks that are payments experts and some folks that are newer to the industry. So -- we go through that onboarding, but we also spend a lot of time throughout the first year to 18 months, upskilling. We have functional-based academies where we really train people, we give them opportunities to practice things before they may be even encountered in the real world. I use the example of our sales academy. All of our sales managers that join us, they go through a full program throughout their first year, where sometimes they're joining e-learning. They're practicing their pitch in front of sales leaders and they go through these different things. And that onboarding journey really doesn't just last for 1 month, but it's throughout someone's first year. And in onboarding the team that we've built, we see more and more efficiencies. We see more and more that we can get out of the hires that we made even 2 years ago because they're becoming more impactful, and they're seeing those opportunities for automation. We've had automation as one of our themes for the year. Where do we have processes that are too dependent on manual inputs, let's automate those away. Let's make sure that we can speed up with every cohort that joins us. So I think that mentality does take us quite a far away. So -- we always knew that we would be slowing down the pace of hiring, but I think we're continuing to see really good signals from the team that we've hired in the last few years that they can do more and more. And so we're excited to see where that continues to go.

And then one view for you, Ethan from James Goodman. So you're now targeting 50% -- above 50% EBITDA margins in 2026. Can you provide some color around the 2024 margin expectations and the shape of how we get to above 50%.

Yes. So in 2023, we hired -- it's been a big part of our investment phase where we've hired a lot of people to the team. Typically, we see that hiring plays out with a trailing impact for another year because people that you hire in May, they have 7 -- 8 months of salaries in 1 year and the next year, they have 12. So still some of the hiring that we've done this year will play out over 2024, which means that the EBITDA margins we expect to increase next year, but not at the same rate that we expect to increase in the following years after that.

Go back to the room. In the middle there. Right, in the middle.

With the announcement today of the medium-term margin target of 50%, is your longer-term target of 65% still intact? Or are you withdrawing that?

Yes. So we still very much believe in the operating leverage in our model. So if the question is how do we -- how do we expect our business to develop over the coming years? We absolutely still believe that 50% -- above 50% is where we'll get to in 2026, but that there will be further operating leverage along the way. The reason that we changed it is because we got the feedback that it would be helpful to understand what the next few years look like and being specific about that would be most helpful to, especially this group. And so that's why we wanted to give some insights, especially into how the next 3 years will go but we also believe very, very strongly that the operating leverage will continue beyond 2026.

Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. Ethan, I like the build-up chart. Just a quick question. How should we think about competition, like if there's competition and the negative impact on pricing, like how has factored into that buildup of revenues?

Yes. So I think to the earlier points, we typically look at pricing from a value perspective. And of course, we're not immune fully to competitive dynamics. But I think lower pricing has always been a competitive approach that we faced. So our position still remains, let's price for the value we provide -- let's make sure that when we're having discussions with our customers, it's about the strategic importance of payments. And so therefore, we don't expect a major shift in our pricing strategy. That's why we haven't factored it in as one of the building blocks.

And then just a follow-up on the cash. I mean you guys have a good amount of cash. I understand you don't want to do a dividend or share buyback. What else can you do with the cash? I mean, is it -- is it time to even consider maybe M&A or some other use of cash?

Yes. So I think the biggest benefit to us having the cash on our balance sheet is that we have a very strong balance sheet, which means we have an industry-leading credit rating. It means that when we talk to our regulators, we spend much less time discussing our financial position. And while that's important today, we expect that's going to get way more important over the coming years as our product offering expands. And so -- for the coming years, we want to make sure that we retain that flexibility to be able to expand our product offering with the least operational constraints to doing so and remain flexible. So that's why we think that this is the optimal use of cash for the coming years.

Question at the front.

This is [ Anish ] from [indiscernible] Capital. Thank you for putting this event together. I think one question on the product side that would be very helpful as you have the 3 pillars. And of course, the platform ones growing rapidly. Over the medium term, how do you see the sort of the contribution to net revenue evolving across those 3 pillars? And does it change by geography? Because I imagine the U.S. platform will play a lot better than some of the other products. So curious about sort of that piece? And then is the margin profile of the 3 different businesses and products kind of different because the platform one, you're onboarding a lot of small clients. So I'm curious to kind of understand that bifurcation.

Yes. So on the pricing side per customer, we typically see that the size of the customer most drives the outcome on pricing rather than the specific pillar. And you are right that we are going after the SMBs. But we're going after them through a large enterprise, that's what gives us the exposure to it. That's also in their benefit, right? That's they get their enterprise pricing, and then they have their SMB customers. So where we typically see from a pricing perspective is that based on the size of the opportunity, that's where we see the price kind of landing. And then your question is very fair. Like how do you expect the pillars to grow in the future years? How does that play a role in the building blocks? We've explicitly tried to build up the building blocks based on exiting new customers because we don't actively try to manage 1 pillar or the other against each other or -- there's a lot of synergies to the business, and there's a lot of flexibility in how we go after customers and even how they can move between pillars. So in our planning, we don't build out our growth by pillar. We build it out by the building blocks that we've explained.

Time for one more question. At the back there.

This is Sam Jada with Galileo Investors. I had a question on your sales cycle. So if we compare your sales cycle to the lead times, how does that compare to a few years ago? And what can you do to shorten that in the future?

Ingo, do you want...

Yes, sure. If you look at the sales cycle, like the -- it really depends on the type of customer. I think typically, if you talk to enterprise merchants, it takes a bit to really talk about the value. So I think at the one hand, if you look if you compare us today with a few years ago, the fact that we have pillarized our business, that really helps because you get more expertise per pillar in the sales teams and that makes you more efficient as a team. At the same time, it can still happen that the sales cycle takes relatively long. We've seen sales cycles take multiple years. We have seen sales cycles that are typically a few months. So it really depends on the situation. That's why we continue to invest in the sales teams, building relationships with prospect and making sure that we -- yes, we basically gained their trust over them. And I think in summary, the pillarization should help us to accelerate.

Okay. Well, that's the end of the presentation. So all left to be said is thank you very much for joining us both here in person and also on the live webcast. And now we can head out for some refreshments, which we have waiting outside the room. Thank you very much.