Hundred Days at Adyen

Hundred days at Adyen! It’s a wrap. All settled, nowadays that means wearing my face-mask while traveling via public transport, and ready for the weekend I thought it would be wise to write down my experiences so far.

It seems ages since the day I opened this laptop for the first time, time flies while having fun I assume. Maybe that’s the essence of these past hundred days, I really enjoyed them despite the looming negativity that comes with a crisis as big as this Covid-19 bomb. So let’s deep-dive in the why of my current état d’esprit and spread some positiveness. 

Adyen is built upon a very simple yet decisive formula, consisting of seven short sentences. Mostly, with these kind of formulas, I tend to be quite sceptic imagining a managing partner is told there’s no 'bigger picture’ at his/her company and so he/she decides to hire an agency that puts him/her in a mirror and the outcome is an ideal image of what the company should carry out. There’s more Rousseau than Hobbes involved and it doesn’t match with what’s really behind the curtain. That’s why this particular Adyen formula is so powerful, it is rooted in every department and it is inherent to every colleague I met so far. It is based on trust and leads to incredible autonomy to make decisions, as long as you involve others in making your decision. It evokes speed and teamwork. 

To highlight one out of seven: “We launch fast and iterate.” The pace of new feature releases is impressive. During these first 100 days, we updated our Magento 2 / Prestashop plugins, helped merchants migrate from Magento 1 End of Life, updated our Customer Area with new reporting, upgraded 3DS to the newest version, redesigned the already revolutionary Terminal Fleet Manager, recently launched our acquiring solution in Malaysia and added AmazonPay as a new payment method. Instead of slapping you with all these niche payment terms, the best way to underline is how we reacted very performant to Covid-19 for the sake of our merchants. We came up with our Pay-by-Link solution for those merchants in need to turn their existing website into a webshop quickly, by suggesting to set up an Adyen-hosted checkout page. Closely related, Adyen Giving came to place and allows merchants to accept donations online, in-app, or in-store. We simplified donation via a two-transaction logic, which means there is no impact on merchants’ reconciliation and there's no compromise on the shoppers’ experience. The donation flows entirely to the charity, processing costs are covered by Adyen (at least if the chosen charity is aligned to at least one of the UN’s sustainable development goals).

But enough about the great business culture, although I still need to mention one colleague who unintendedly made the remote onboarding process so much more pleasant. Mister Brian Mapley who started not one but two amazing podcasts where he invited colleagues all over the world in his virtual recording studio to chat about themselves and their lockdown projects allowing me to get to know my new colleagues without being present. So much genius needs a mention, no wonder he’s a Spurs fan (COYS).

The million dollar question I needed to answer more than often over the past hundred days was of course “So tell me Pieter, what is Adyen actually? And what makes it so different from others?” The day before I started I would always say that Adyen is a company “in payments”. But once inside the lab, you quickly realize that Adyen is rather a technology company than a payments company. It goes beyond the service of handling payments. The luck of working with merchants like Uber, Ebay, Etsy, Spotify, Booking.com, Grab, Van Moof, Levi’s, Rituals, Bjorn Borg, Crocs and Easyjet challenged Adyen to keep on innovating. But the reason a lot of them chose for Adyen in the first place is because its foundations are built upon a completely new contemporary payments platform. Most of the payment service providers originate from 40 years ago, the time when a desktop computer needed 15 minutes to start and internet was non-existent giving them tons of challenges to keep up the pace today. In the contemporary payment landscape, Adyen is able to differentiate because it covers the whole value chain of payments. Not only do we process payments as a payment gateway, we also take the risk management for our account and have the acquiring licenses to communicate directly within the Visa and MasterCard schemes to the issuing bank of the shopper. In short, we kick out all middlemen and simplify the payment process by allowing merchants to work with one confidant and one single platform throughout the land. And that one single platform cannot be underestimated, it has the power to simultaneously bring separate payment flows together like your mobile in app flow, your offline terminals flow and your online ecom flow. This gives you an incredible source of valuable data insights, there for the merchant to unfold. 

So a merchant can easily follow the imaginary shopper Janneman Robinson who recently bought a pair of Winnie the Pooh pyjamas online and later decides to buy a pot of fresh-made honey in the Winnie The Pooh theme park as a souvenir. Even more, when Janneman Robinson eventually falls in love with Michelle Lin and moves to China he is able to buy her an Eeyore onesie birthday gift very easily via WeChat. The merchant will be able to recognize him, reward him for his loyalty and suggest him his preferred Chinese local payment method. If Janneman by mistake bought a Large instead of a Medium onesie, he is even able to quickly return to the Winnie the Pooh flagshipstore in downtown Shanghai to refund his L and change it for an M-onesie. All is seamlessly connected across channels. These little subtleties seem negligible, yet they are decisive for higher authorization rates, more conversion and eventually more revenue. Also in the operational flows (reconciliation for the treasury team, contracting for the legal team, etc.) you will gain with this simplified single platform. Bottom-line, it really is all in the details with regards to payments and therefore I dare to say that Adyen is the way-to-go if your business is ready for harder, better, faster, stronger. 

The agileness and diversity of the product is thus built on merchants’ demand over the years. These merchants situate predominantly in the enterprise segment. Now here is where I come in and this relates to the logical second question that pops up after explaining what Adyen is about: “But what is your role then as a Partnerships Manager?” Well, Adyen is not exclusively preserved for enterprise merchants, on the contrary, it is keen to broaden its horizon (that is what happens when you bring tons of ambitious people together under one roof I assume), to open up for mid-market merchants and offer them the same technology as their industry role models. As a Partnerships Manager I care about this exciting mid-market shift and epitomize the humble approach Adyen wants to take here. By talking to those who know mid-market best, we will be able to serve mid-market best. A 6 ft 6” basketball player wearing his private label shoes once stated that "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” That is exactly what I seek for in partnerships, to align with mid-market caretakers for the sake of the merchant and eventually the customer (and his experience).

So my current état d’esprit has all to do with this new challenge and the gratitude I want to express for the past 100 days. I bumped into a small but great & diverse Belgian team with Lien, Emilie, Benoit and Julien that is growing quickly (PM me if you wish to take part!), met a great Partnerships team located across the globe continuously willing to share experiences and landed into a great company as a whole in a very rapidly evolving payments industry. After hundred days in payments I am quite sure that Covid hugely impacted consumer behavior (for the better). I can speak for myself as I never thought I would be cleaning the kitchen with tech-savvy householding stuff like a Dyson nor that I would find the time to stop every homeworkday with an A or B-side of a vinyl record without hassling towards the next sports/leisure or other duty appointment since the purchase of this Pro-ject T1 Phono in full lockdown. I am convinced that those merchants/entrepreneurs who use Covid to reflect will be better off than those who now sit and wait until business starts to ramp up again. In fact, the reflective minds are already one step behind. You also have those merchants/entrepreneurs who don’t need to re-act because they chose to pre-act and looked beyond the profit of the day or year, those are the ones with the visionary guts that got confirmed and reap the rewards today of unobvious choices in the past. 

Ready to strive for the unobvious. 

Pieter.

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