What An Adyen-ture

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What's going on?

On Thursday, Adyen a Dutch company that helps companies including Netflix and Uber process payments announced its plans for an Initial Public Offering (IPO). The company could be worth as much as $11 billion.

What does this mean?

Adyen works directly with credit card companies like MasterCard moving money from customers card payments into businesses coffers all around the world. Its helped major companies to efficiently handle cross-border and multi-currency payments and recently gained a license to become an acquiring bank in Europe, meaning that it can process payments almost instantly and not wait for large banks.



With a growing number of classy clients plus soaring revenue and profit margins Adyens targeting a share price that will value the company between $7-11 billion (tweet this). At the low end, its nearly three times as high as the company was valued in a 2015 fundraising round.

Why should I care?

For markets: You can go your own way…


In an IPO, companies generally rely on investment banks to manage how the companys shares will be sold and distributed to investors. A company that bucked this trend is Spotify, which opted for a direct listing of its stock (i.e. no investment banks). Adyens route is more traditional but like Spotify, it wont be issuing new stock to raise funds for the firm. Adyens already profitable and says it only needs to spend some 5% of its annual profits to grow the business sustainably.



The bigger picture: The payments sectors having a moment.


PayPal one of Adyens biggest competitors last week agreed to acquire Swedens iZettle, a startup that manages card payments for small businesses, for $2.2 billion. However, this all looks pretty small fry when compared with Chinas main digital payments processor, Ant Financial which just completed a fundraising round valuing the company at $150 billion. It may be a prelude to Ants own IPO.

Originally posted as part of the Finimize daily email.

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