✦ Platforms & the Software ChannelNarrow moat

The fastest-growing part of Adyen is the part that does not sell to merchants at all. In the Platforms channel, Adyen provides the payments — and increasingly the financial products — inside somebody else's software: the booking system a restaurant uses, the marketplace a seller lists on, the vertical platform that runs a whole industry. In the first half of 2026 Platforms net revenue grew 40% in constant currency (37% reported) to €165.5 million, with processed volume up 42% to €135.0 billion, led by financial services, food and beverage and embedded financial products¹.

The economics of a channel are better than those of a customer. One integration with a software platform delivers thousands of small merchants Adyen would never profitably sell to individually, and the embedded financial products — accounts, capital, card issuing — carry margins payments alone does not. It is also where the small-business market, which Adyen deliberately does not chase directly, becomes reachable without a small-business sales force.

The caveats are size and rivalry: €165.5 million a half, 13% of net revenue, is still small against €2.6 billion of trailing net revenue, so the growth rate flatters a modest base, and this is precisely the ground Stripe has cultivated longest with its own platform tooling. Watch Platforms' share of total net revenue over the next several halves and whether embedded financial products keep contributing incremental growth. A channel compounding at 40% eventually stops being a footnote — but only if it keeps compounding once it is large enough to matter.