CompetitorsNarrow moat

Market-share tables make Adyen look like a minor participant: Stripe at roughly 34% and PayPal at about 32% of payment-management installations, against Adyen's 9%¹. Those numbers count merchants, and counting merchants is the wrong way to measure a company that deliberately serves very few of them.

Adyen's pricing explains the strategy. It sells interchange-plus from roughly 0.6% plus €0.11, against Stripe's headline 2.9% plus 30 cents; for most enterprises processing more than $250 million a year, Adyen is the lowest all-in cost. Below that threshold the economics do not work for either party, which is why Adyen has one-ninth of Stripe's merchant count and a comparable position among the largest ones.

The Stripe rivalry has its own root threat and is not restated here. What these pages add is that Adyen's four competitors are four different kinds of thing: a rival that won the developer market and is moving upmarket; a consumer brand that Adyen must support inside its own checkout rather than displace; a direct enterprise specialist competing for identical accounts; and the legacy acquirers whose merchants Adyen has spent fifteen years taking.

Watch net revenue rather than processed volume or merchant count. Volume grows with the merchants Adyen already has, and merchant count is the metric that makes the strategy look like weakness. Net revenue is where winning accounts shows up.