Fast-Growing Adyen Bolsters Its North American Market With a Move Into Canada

Adyen N.V. has had a busy year, and on Tuesday it made yet another significant move by announcing it is now doing business in Canada.

The Dutch payments company, which already operates in the United States and Latin America as well as Europe and Asia, also announced four brands as initial users of its Canadian gateway service, which as elsewhere enables in-store as well as mobile and e-commerce transactions across an array of more than 250 payment methods. The four include Germany-based Adidas AG and U.S.-based Dollar Shave Club as well as Busbud, a Montreal-based site for choosing and paying for bus tickets, and Toronto-based Canada Goose, a seller of coats and other winter gear.

Adyen says its service in Canada will include acquiring for the major card brands for in-store as well as digital payments, and acceptance of the Chinese wallets Alipay and WeChat Pay as well as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

For Adyen, the expansion means more than the business it could potentially do with Canadian merchants inside Canada. “Eliminating boundaries across channels and geographies will help our customers expand within Canada and as they grow abroad. In addition, Canada is now easily accessible for businesses from other countries,” said Kamran Zaki, president for the company’s San Francisco-based North America unit, in a statement.

Adyen’s shares, which have soared since the company went public in June, dropped slightly following news of the Canadian expansion and were trading at 531 euros ($604) at mid-morning. The shares trade on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange.

The move into Canada follows in the wake of Adyen’s announcement in August that it is the first processor to offer 3-D Secure 2.0 as a commercial service. A security standard for e-commerce transactions, 3-D Secure 2.0 represents a more sophisticated successor to an older version that had been in the market for more than a decade. The new standard comes from EMVCo, the standards body controlled by American Express Co., Discover Financial Services, JCB, Mastercard Inc., UnionPay, and Visa Inc.

North America represents a fast-growing market for Amsterdam-based Adyen. Even without Canada, the company reported in August its volume in the region for the first half of the year reached $25.2 billion at current exchange rates, compared to $10.4 billion in the first six months of 2017.

E-commerce volume should benefit from a deal Adyen struck early this year to serve as a gateway for a so-called managed-payments platform being developed by eBay Inc. for its big online marketplace. PayPal Holdings Inc., which for years has filled the role of processor for eBay, will become one of a number of payment methods to run through the platform, according to eBay’s plans.