Adyen has witnessed exponential growth over the last four years and has recently launched its IPO in Amsterdam. Jussi Lindberg, SVP of Business Development in Northern Europe, tells us more WRITTEN BY
CATHERINE STURMAN
PRODUCED BY
JAMES PEPPER
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T
he payment service provider (PSP) market is booming. Mass globalisation has led consumers to demand access to products and services
with the ability to pay across a number of different channels at the click of a button. Tackling the challenges that businesses experience within this space is Adyen. Partnering with a number of popular streaming services, such as Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, and more, its integrated platform enables payments to be undertaken through any channel and processed on a single platform. Such has been the relentlessness of the company’s growth, its processed volume growth has risen from €12bn ($14bn) on an annual basis to a staggering €108bn ($125bn) in 2017. Shares have also surged up to 90% upon the launch of its IPO in Europe. Four years previously, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Northern Europe, Jussi Lindberg, wanted to gain a greater understanding of how Adyen was setting itself apart from other payment providers. “When working at PayPal, Adyen was a partner that had the fastest growth ever when it came to the PSP space. I had to know what the secret sauce was. Why were they giving so much volume to us at PayPal? After working a bit more closely with Adyen I found the company was really something extraordinary,” he explains. “Adyen was building something more quickly than anybody else, but at the same time helping businesses globally scale in a different manner than anyone had been doing previously.” Shortly after, Lindberg joined the company in 2014.
‘What is Adyen?’ Jussi Lindberg, SVP of Business Development explains
OUTSTANDING COLLABORATION Working with businesses as a payments partner, Adyen seeks to collaborate with them to plan how they can successfully scale. “Businesses want to take the next future step to sell anywhere, at any time, via any channel to anyone globally. So, the world is shrinking,” says Lindberg. “We’re also seeing consolidation in the types of vendors. Beforehand, the payment space
Adyen helps maintain the balance between blocking fraudsters and approving genuine shoppers
was very fragmented, where you had one gateway or payment method per country that you had to contract. If merchants were selling in 40 different countries, that equates to 120 w w w. a d y e n . c o m
OMNICHANNEL. REDEFINED. Enable AfterPay and allow your consumers to pay frictionless in any touch point you want. One off transactions, consolidated or subscription based transactions, it’s all up to you. *The image above is a conceptual sketch.
WILL YOUR BRAND BE RUN OVER BY A SELF-DRIVEN CAR? How can a self-driving car affect my brand you might wonder? And it’s a valid question. The answer lies in how everything changes when we move from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat.
No. This level of experience effectively hides all transactions, invisible payments, and to some extent the service providers as well. That can sound pretty scary in a world where the biggest struggle is to not just be seen – but remembered.
Not like the commuting of today – with people going from one place to another with occasional stops in
There is a solution, though. Pay After Delivery, PAD.
between – but in an AI powered vehicle that is perfectly aware of your interests, schedule and needs.
What started as a consumer need driven by skepticism about online purchases, and then evolved to a pre-filled
“That can sound pretty scary in a world where the biggest struggle is to not just be seen – but remembered” Imagine an ordinary day, you leave your home and get into ‘your’ car. You sit down and get into prepping your day at the office, in the car that is fitted to support focused working. Then your car stops by Starbucks and rolls down your window. The staff hand you your freshly made morning coffee, just as you like it. The car rolls away as you finish off the last of your prep as you sip your coffee looking out the window. After work the car picks you up again. As you summarize the day the car quietly stops by the grocery store, and a bag with your home essentials is placed in the trunk. Finally, you are home, work done, shopping done and a nice evening with your family lies ahead.
mobile first conversion driver. Pay After Delivery is now entering its third phase of relevance thanks to its perfect fit for consolidating invisible payments and support for subscription based business models. In addition, it brings with it a new platform for merchants to promote brand awareness and loyalty: the post purchase experience. This gives you as a merchant extraordinary exposure to the consumers’ eye, where others are invisible. Whether it’s the coffee in your car, in a shop or your intelligent washing machine ordering a detergent refill, Pay After Delivery is a payment method that will increase in relevance the more your business addresses the omnichannel challenges. No expiring cards. No 3D Secure validation. No obstacles, and your brand stands out. Can you afford not to employ a PAD service?
Does it sound like science fiction? Really? Remember back in 2006 – before the iPhone was launched – if I had told you that the phone would be the most important platform for shopping…? Today major car companies are partnering up with merchants to provide all of the above and more. Business models are changing. Consolidation and Subscription is the name of the game. So what does this have to do with your brand? Well, did you note any passages saying “and then you leaned out the window to pay”?
Patrik Vikner Head of User Experience – AfterPay
“ When working at PayPal, Adyen was a partner that had the fastest growth ever when it came to the PSP space. I had to know what the secret sauce was” — JUSSI LINDBERG, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Northern Europe
different vendor relations, technical connections, and also reporting lines. “This is just not feasible as nobody
mentation,” he continues. “Whilst the world is getting smaller at one end, local initiatives offering
has the bandwidth to take this on, espe-
new ways to pay are continuing to pop
cially in the payment space,” he adds.
up. Today, I’m based in Sweden and,
“Companies want to be focusing on
for instance, have four or five payment
increasing net promoter scores; ensur-
methods that we have to integrate at
ing conversions go up and be more in
Adyen instead of our customers hav-
tune to what they are actually doing,
ing to do this.
which is taking care of customers
“New regulations are also coming up
instead of vendor relations. This is where
so the world is still fragmented, making
we’re seeing tremendous growth.
it important for us to be a partner where
“Thirdly, we are seeing something contradictory, which is more frag-
we have control and give the best advice to our customers and partners.”
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“After working COMPLEX REGULATIONS a bit more closely with Adyen I found the company was really something extraordinary”
Building a new, state-of-the-art infrastructure, any type of transaction placed through Adyen’s platform is highly secure, but unusually, is not sent to a third party. Instead, the business sends this directly to the required payment method and receives an immediate response back. Through this, Adyen has gained improved authorisation rates against its competitors.
— JUSSI LINDBERG, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Northern Europe
“We can also process pay-
ments in store on the same, single platform. From a technical standpoint, our solution is quite
Adyen have partnered with streaming giants such as Spotify
complex but we’re making it easy on the customer and partner side,” explains Lindberg. Additionally, with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) coming into force across Europe, Lindberg explains that whilst the company is fully up and running and is set to adhere to the vast changes to traditional regulatory requirements, the business will remain challenged. “We are GDPR ready and will
FACT
• Adyen has partnered with a number of popular streaming services, such as Facebook, Spotify and Netflix • Adyen’s integrated platform enables payments to be undertaken through a single platform. • Adyen’s processed volume growth has risen from €12bn
($14bn) on an annual basis to a staggering €108bn ($125bn) in 2017 • Shares have surged up to 90% upon the launch of its IPO in Europe • Adyen is backed by Index Ventures and Silicon Valley giant Iconiq Capital • Adyen has recently launched its IPO in the Netherlands
• Adyen offers every payment method available in China, such as WeChat Pay and Alipay outside of the country, in order to cater to its specific target audience • Adyen uses data and machine learning in its payment routing, optimising authorisation rates
take full responsibility on what is
we only have to do it once per region
put on us as a company at our
because we have a single platform.
end. Then, of course, it is up to
For them, they have to do it over
any company that we are also
and over again, which slows our
partnering with to do their part as
competition down.”
well,” he says. “We are also Payment Service
ENTERING NEW MARKETS
Directive 2 (PSD2) ready. If we are
Providing popular music juggernaut
talking about payments and what
Spotify with a payment processing
is happening in the payment space,
platform for its premiums business,
there are a lot of acquisitions, which
Adyen has fully supported the firm
also house multiple platforms to
to scale and enter new markets.
send payment data through.
With a number of different payment
“Whilst it’s trickier for competi-
details, varying music catalogues
tion to be PSD2 and GDPR ready,
and rights dependent on each counw w w. a d y e n . c o m
try in which it serves, Adyen has strived to ensure that premium users can only tap into the catalogues relating to the country where the card (and user) resides. The business also caters to companies which have complex regulations to deal with. China, for instance, is a particular focus and houses a unique payments market. With this in mind, Adyen offers several Chinese payment methods, such as WeChat Pay and Alipay outside of the country, in order to cater to this specific target audience. “No business without a local or offer Chinese payment methods. Adyen and other payment vendors cannot sell or target Chinese companies. On the other hand, we can help Chinese companies that want to sell outside of China, such as in the US, with this payment method,” says Lindberg.
SUPPORTING COMPANIES TO SCALE Whilst more and more companies are wanting to be on top of their payment data, Adyen’s platform
create better, more personalised customer journeys such as click-and-collect, where customers can order something online and pick it up in store, or endless aisles, where in-store tablets let shoppers order items that are out of stock online while in store. A Unified Commerce approach allows retailers to reshape the purchase experience, making it frictionless. Adyen also aims to simplify and improve the payments experience on the merchant side.
Jussi Lindberg, Senior Vice President of Business Development at ADYEN on Market Pay
Adyen MarketPay, a solution for large marketplaces, simplifies the flow of payments, providing split payouts, easier reporting, driving a complete frictionless experience for both vendors and end-customers. “There is complexity with not only accepting
will provide a better payment
a payment, but sometimes splitting a payment
experience. Its technology has
between multiple sellers. With more than one
also worked to support retailers
vendor, transactions need to be split evenly, and
such as Daniel Wellington as well
sometimes sellers also have different commis-
as ride-hailing company Uber.
sion plans,” explains Lindberg.
Most importantly, delivering
“Before, transactions had to be initiated
simplification for its customers,
not only once, but twice to make sure that
particularly within the physical
this transactional split was happening.
point of sale (POS) space means
Today, we can completely automate this
that Adyen has a unique Unified
with our MarketPay API solution.”
Commerce offering. By having
Such solutions are therefore in significant
e-commerce and in-store pay-
demand for big consumer-driven companies
ments processed through one
such as Etsy or eBay, where payment systems
platform, companies are able to
are becoming increasingly complex. Whilst w w w. a d y e n . c o m
“We’re seeing consolidation in the types of vendors. Beforehand, the payment space was very fragmented, where you had one gateway or payment method per country that you had to contract. If merchants were selling in 40 different countries, that equates to 120 different vendor relations, technical connections, but also reporting lines” — JUSSI LINDBERG, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Northern Europe
there might be multiple sellers in one trans-
BIO
action trying to sell an item purchased by
Jussi Lindberg is the SVP of Business Development Northern Europe at Adyen, the payments platform behind many of the world’s leading companies such as Uber, Netflix, Spotify and eBay. Jussi was previously responsible for partnerships and financial products at PayPal and Ebay, with over 15 years of experience of partnering with hundreds of companies to achieve growth and digital performance. Jussi holds a Master of Science in Business Administration and Economist from UMA.
a consumer, upon completion, merchants then submit the relevant consumer details. “This is unique to Adyen and that’s what’s really driving the market solution and appealing to merchants,” Lindberg says. “There’s no exclusivity, so we can replicate these solutions to other vendors.” Furthermore, to bolster its efforts to reduce potential risks, Adyen uses data and machine learning in its payment routing, optimising authorisation rates. “It’s not only a machine learning tool, it’s also how we interpret the different types of risks that we are associating with different types of transactions,” adds Lindberg. “With just one state-of-the-art platform, we can check transactions once, and then once it gets back from the payment team we also check it again. This supports enterprise merchants who want to be gathering more data and be cross-linking transactions that occur. “They can then detect patterns of crosslinking different multiple email accounts and different cards,” he continues. “If they’ve been associated with card washing, for example, in seconds we can see thousands of transactions with a stolen card number. We can efficiently block this,
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but if we can also show this in a graphical way, this is something deeply appreciated.” Nonetheless, he adds that checking what could be a real transaction against ones which are fraudulent, remains a challenge. “It’s a tricky threshold, but as we’re partnering with our customers more closely we’re getting more insights. It’s about analysing all payment methods, not gathering them. We can have better risk tools and better risk analysis per country and per business vertical where they are selling.” Partnering with some of the largest retailers and enterprise clients globally, Adyen has grown alongside its customers, becoming a key factor to their success. “We have great technology and we’re very
So, I think our journey is still just
fun to work with. From the start, we set out
beginning. Looking at the physi-
ambitious goals to solve global businesses’
cal point of sales space, there’s
needs to simplify any type of sales channel,
still so much to do and so many
wherever they might be present. We have
store initiatives that we are fortu-
gained extensive payment knowledge from
nate enough to be building out
different regions in every office where we’re
together with our customers. It’s
represented today and have local experts in
going to be really fun to see what
these areas,” concludes Lindberg.
the future brings.”
“We can provide so many payment methods in just one integration but the work is still not done. The world is not covered. There’s no need that is 100% fully met.
2006
Year founded
668
Number of employees
Adyen’s Senior Vice President of Business Development on TRENDS in the Payment World
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Simon Carmiggeltstraat 6-50 1011 DJ Amsterdam Netherlands T +31 20 240 1680 www.adyen.com