Adyen Company Growth, Stability & Outlook

H1 2026 Shareholder Letter

Our unchanged mission: Solving complexity for merchants

"H1 2026 was a strong and strategically important half year for Adyen. By expanding our role well beyond payments, we execute our long-term strategy and solve deeper structural complexity for our merchants, which fundamentally strengthens our customer relationships. 

Through high-impact milestones — including the strategic acquisitions of Talon.One and Orb, alongside the launches of Adyen Agentic and Intelligent Money Movement — we build the complete financial operating system for modern commerce to position us for sustained, durable growth."

Pieter van der Does

Co-founder and Co-CEO

The Executive Interview Series provides readers with exclusive insights from movers and shakers in the payments industry. The payments industry is under continuous transformation. This series offers diverse perspectives on everything from strategy to payments technology and the industry’s future.

In this interview between Shep Smith, President of North America at Adyen, and TSG’s Morgan Oliver, Shep shares how AI, unified infrastructure, and payment optimization are shaping the future of enterprise commerce. From embedded finance to transaction decisioning, we cover how payments are evolving from a back-office function into a strategic growth engine for enterprise commerce.

Bio: Shep Smith, is the President of North America at Adyen, leads growth strategy and supports enterprise  operations throughout the region. His prior roles at Adyen include VP of Global Partnerships and Interim VP of Payments and Products. Shep brings a demonstrated history of leadership expertise to his current role, previously serving as Chief Operating Officer at Synctera and leading partnerships and go-to-market strategies at Google.

Q. Morgan O.

Beyond your role at Adyen, are there any personal passions, causes, hobbies, or leadership roles that have shaped how you think day-to-day?

A. Shep S.

I was lucky to spend nearly a decade at Google, where I had the chance to work across many different parts of the business, both functions and product areas. I started in finance supporting what would become Google Cloud and went on to work in partnerships and product go to market, mostly working on operating systems and device ecosystems (Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Assistant, Pixel, etc). Eventually I had the chance to start working on GPay, which was how I first found my way into the world of payments and FinTech. That experience showed me how many things have to come together for a great product to actually work for customers, and was a great foundation as I went into the startup world to help build a payments and banking infrastructure company from the ground up.

I’ve carried that perspective with me to Adyen. Payments sits at the center of many parts of a customer’s business, and I’m energized by understanding how those pieces connect, and helping make the infrastructure simpler, more effective, and more valuable for merchants. On the personal front, I’m a father of three, so that ends up taking up a lot of my time and energy outside of work. But when I’m able to make time, I am passionate about the outdoors and spend as much time as I can skiing and biking.

Q. Morgan O.

Outside of payments, where are you seeing the most interesting innovation happening right now?

A. Shep S.

I spent several years at Synctera before joining Adyen, so I still have a soft spot for what’s happening in banking infrastructure and embedded finance. What interests me most is how the underlying infrastructure is evolving to help businesses do more for their customers—whether that means building financial products, making payments perform better, or connecting payments with billing and loyalty in a more seamless way. It’s still too hard to build financial capabilities into software, but we’re making it so much easier and safer at Adyen, and that is really exciting to me.

Of course, AI is adding another layer to that. The experiences customers see are becoming dramatically simpler but making them work still requires sophisticated infrastructure behind the scenes. There’s a lot of opportunity to make that infrastructure more intelligent, more connected, and ultimately more valuable to the businesses that rely on it. Like most tech companies, AI is fundamentally changing how we build and deliver capabilities to our customers, and that’s super exciting to be a part of.

Q. Morgan O.

Your career has spanned Google, Synctera, Adyen, payments, banking infrastructure, platform ecosystems, and strategic partnerships. How have those experiences shaped your approach to leading Adyen’s North America business?

A. Shep S.

The common thread across all of those experiences that shapes my approach to leadership is that it starts with the customer. I think a primary job of leaders is to deeply understand the challenges and goals of our customers, define a clear strategy to meet those needs in a unique way, and to harness the resources of the company to deliver against them. Setting really clear direction on “what and why” is really important.

Q. Morgan O.

As you look at the North American market, what enterprise payment challenges have become more urgent for merchants to solve and why are those challenges becoming more important now?

A. Shep S.

Merchants, rightfully, expect money to move at the speed of their business, but a lot of the infrastructure behind it still doesn’t support that goal. For a large enterprise operating across channels and geographies, the challenge is often connecting systems, payment methods, and customer experiences in a way that performs reliably and gives teams a clear view of the business. As the money movement and financial offerings become more complex, the effort to build those connections and manage everything can become really high. A big focus for us at Adyen is how we can reduce that complexity and drive the best performance for our customers at the same time.

Kendra Scott is a good example. It’s a billion-dollar fashion and jewelry brand with 160+ stores, so there’s real complexity behind the scenes. After bringing its in-store and ecommerce payments together with Adyen, the company reduced its finance and reconciliation workload by 70% and went from spending days on reconciliation to hours. To me, that’s the big opportunity at hand. The less time a business spends untangling how its money moves, the more time it can spend actually growing the business and better serving its customers.

🔎 Case Study: How Kendra Scott transformed payments into a strategy for growth

Q. Morgan O.

TSG and Adyen recently explored how payments has become an underutilized value-creation lever, especially for software and platform businesses. From your perspective, what separates companies that successfully turn payments into a growth engine from those that leave that opportunity unrealized?

A. Shep S.

Most large companies already spend a lot of time thinking about payments, but the bigger opportunity is to treat payments as a growth lever vs a cost of doing business.

There isn’t one playbook, because we serve many different types of customers. The common thread is that the companies creating the most value are connecting payments to more of the business, like the Kendra Scott example I mentioned earlier. When your payment data can inform fraud decisions, when online and in-store activity gives you one view of the customer, or when reconciliation doesn’t require finance teams to piece together data from different systems, you start finding value that would otherwise be left on the table.

This has always been a big focus for us, and I’m really excited about some of the recent investments we’ve been making in this area. We recently acquired Talon.One., which is a loyalty and promotion platform. When combined with our unique payments data and capabilities, we’re able to offer our customers actionable insights to drive customer retention and maximize customer lifetime value in new ways that haven’t been possible historically, for instance by automatically applying promotions or loyalty signup at the point of sale, based solely on the payment credential.

We’re also helping our customers navigate the challenges to (and opportunities for) their business models as they start to launch AI powered experiences. With our recent acquisition of Orb, we can now help customers rapidly test and deploy new usage-based pricing models that better align pricing with value creation, and that better align to real inference costs that scale with usage.

All of these are examples of how we’ve transitioned from simple payments into the complete financial operating system for modern commerce and our customers — from payments to loyalty, billing, and intelligent money movement.

Q. Morgan O.

Where do you see the biggest gap between payments strategy and payments execution today?

A. Shep S.

Payments infrastructure remains fragmented. A company can have a clear idea of what it wants to do with payments, but making that work across different markets, channels, and systems is complicated.

A global business might be working with different processors and banking partners depending on the market, separate fraud tools, and finance systems that all need to reconcile at the end of the day.

Adyen is so focused on building a single platform because if the data, payments and financial infrastructure are working together, you can make changes across the business without having to solve the same problem over and over in every market or channel.

Q. Morgan O.

Last year, Adyen launched Adyen Uplift, an AI-powered payment optimization suite designed to improve conversion, simplify fraud management, and reduce processing costs. How is Adyen thinking about the evolution of Adyen Uplift as enterprise needs around performance, risk, cost optimization, and merchant experience continue to change?

A. Shep S.

When we launched Uplift last year, a big part of the idea was to support our core notion that you shouldn’t be making decisions about conversion, fraud, and cost separately, because they all impact one another. As an extreme example, you can get online transaction auth rates to the same level as in person transactions if you crank down the controls on fraud tightly enough, but then you’re going to be blocking a bunch of legitimate transactions. Uplift lets our customers optimize across these factors at the same time, to deliver the optimal after-fraud revenue outcome. Over the past year, we’ve been able to apply that intelligence to more parts of the payment journey and, importantly, prove that it works at scale.

Uplift is now used by the majority of Adyen customers, and we’ve continued to build on this offering in a number of ways.

For example, we introduced Dynamic Identification, our technology for recognizing shoppers across transactions and channels, which gives Uplift more context about who is behind a transaction. More recently, we launched Personalize, a new Uplift product that uses that intelligence before someone even clicks pay to tailor things like which payment methods they see and in what order. Thinking about the future evolution of Uplift through the lens of ensuring merchants are getting the most out of their transactions, we will continue applying intelligence to more of the payment journey, while continuing to unify performance, risk and cost decisions.

Q. Morgan O.

Beyond optimization, what role do you think AI will play in shaping the future of payments?

A. Shep S.

We’re already starting to see AI agents discover products, make decisions, and transact on behalf of consumers. That changes some pretty fundamental assumptions about how payments work.

If an AI agent is making a purchase, merchants need to understand who is behind it, whether it has permission to spend and whether they can trust the transaction. I think AI is going to make identity and trust even more important parts of payments than they are today.

We’ve been working on products such as Adyen Agentic to put tools in the hands of our customers to make it as easy as possible for them to participate across the AI ecosystem while giving them control to manage risks like disintermediation and fraud.

Q. Morgan O.

You’ve spoken about your passion for building high-performing teams. As you step into this expanded leadership role, what’s your philosophy on building and scaling teams that can execute at the pace this market demands?

A. Shep S.

I think high performing teams generally have a few things in common. They know the team objective and have a shared sense of purpose and mission. They understand how they’re going to get there together – that is, what’s the strategy. And each team member knows their role, how it relates to the others on the team, and what expectations they will be held to. I try to create an environment that is really strong on these elements, and then let the team get to work.

Q. Morgan O.

As you lead Adyen’s next chapter in North America, what are you most excited to build, improve, or help merchants accomplish?

A. Shep S.

What excites me most is working with great companies and helping them achieve their goals. We already get to solve really interesting problems for businesses like Uber, McDonald’s, Toast, Aritzia and Eli Lilly, whether that’s helping them expand globally, bring online and in-store payments together, or take complexity out of how they manage payments. The bigger and more complex the business is, the more interesting those problems become. This is such a fascinating time to be in payments, and in the world of commerce more generally, and having the opportunity to support our customers through so much change is a ton of fun, and a great privilege.