E-Commerce Processor Adyen’s Volume Jumps 80% to $90 Billion

It’s been the winter of chest-thumping for e-commerce payments providers. Amsterdam-based Adyen, which is targeting the U.S. market from its San Francisco office, on Wednesday announced that its worldwide transaction volume jumped 80% last year to hit $90 billion from 2015’s $50 billion.

On Tuesday, the secretive Amazon.com Inc. disclosed that 33 million consumers used Amazon Payments to make a purchase in 2016, and that its payment volume almost doubled last year. Earlier, online payments leader PayPal Holdings Inc. reported that it processed $354 billion in payment volume for 2016, a 28% increase over 2015.

“The opportunity for disruption and innovation in global payments is like no other market in the world today,” Pieter van der Does, Adyen’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a news release. “Adyen has become the partner of choice for companies looking to expand globally, and we’re now seeing real growth in our next big area of focus, the in-store retail payment experience.”

Adyen’s newest in-store merchants include Tory Burch and Burberry, which join L’Oreal, Kit and Ace, and Scotch & Soda. The company says that more than 2,700 stores in the U.S. and Europe now use its point-of-sale service.

In its core e-commerce market, Adyen’s new customers include Etsy, LinkedIn, Skype, and Twitter. Adyen also counts Uber, Netflix, Facebook, Airbnb, and Spotify among its customer base. The company says it supports 250 payment methods globally.

The 10-year-old Adyen is one of the payments industry’s so-called unicorns—a privately held company valued at $1 billion or more. A year ago its valuation was pegged at $2.3 billion. In the United States, the company began e-commerce acquiring in 2010 and began offering in-store payments early last year after several years in the European POS space.

Digital-payments consultant and researcher Rick Oglesby, president of Mesa, Ariz.-based AZ Payments Group, says global payment acceptance can be extremely complex for merchants, requiring knowledge and technology to manage local regulations, payment preferences, and currencies across. He says Adyen “is one of the select few” that can package the complexity into a simple solution.

“Adyen’s growth is powerful because it’s an excellent company providing excellent service,” Oglesby tells Digital Transactions News by email. “It focuses on the hardest-to-please customers—large, e-commerce, and multichannel companies that are expanding globally—and it delivers with the kind of speed that high-growth firms demand.”

In addition to the United States, Adyen has expanded its local payment card acquiring capabilities to Brazil, Hong Kong, and Australia. It also has added local payment methods in key markets, such as WeChatPay in China and Oxxo in Mexico.