- Key insights: Adyen is powering payments on Uber’s new ride-hailing kiosk at La Guardia airport in New York.
- What’s at stake: Uber has been relying on Adyen to process more of its global payments. The pair’s latest venture presents the fintech with an opportunity to improve payment personalization.
- Forward look: The ride hailing giant is also considering hotels and popular tourist destinations as potential sites to deploy kiosks.
For the better part of 17 years, Uber has sought to gain ubiquity in ridehailing, and in the process, has become a case study in how to effectively deploy embedded payments at scale. For most of those years, Adyen has played a key role in the ride-hailing giant’s payments infrastructure.
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The first kiosk is located at La Guardia Airport in New York City, with plans to rollout additional kiosks in other international airports, as well as hotels and ports.
The kiosk comes on the heels of expanded merchant acquiring services in Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia, the launch of new payment methods such as Pix in Brazil, AfterPay in Australia and WeChat Pay in China, and rollout in new markets such as UAE, Hong Kong, and the Caribbean. All in, Adyen processes payments for Uber in more than 70 markets.
“For Uber… if you’re coming from Latin America or coming from Asia or coming from Europe, they’re trying to make sure that they can support your local payment method, so that when you travel, it just works, Trevor Nies, Adyen’s global head of digital, told American Banker.
Adyen is one of many payment service providers, including Stripe and PayPay that Uber uses to process payments.
Uber prefers to create local entities in its markets because it helps increase approval rates by issuing banks and decrease costs by eliminating cross-border and foreign exchange fees. Adyen can accept more than 100 payment methods, according to its website.
“All these very large enterprises typically have multiple payment service providers. They have redundancy. They have champion-challenger type models they’ve put in place,” Nies said. “With Uber we’ve been continuing to win a large share with them, and so we’re doing more and more volume with them as time has gone on, especially in the last year or so.”
In the fourth quarter of 2024, Uber logged $54.1 billion in gross bookings, a 22% increase year over year, according to its earnings release.
The kiosk represents the latest proof-point in the fintech’s business model and the value it brings the San Francisco-based mobility company, Allen Bond, a managing director at Jensen Investment Management, told American Banker. Jensen is an investor in Adyen.
“The way we look at the Uber partnership is that it is really reflective of Adyen’s differentiation in terms of their payment processing or their merchant acquiring platform,” Bond said. “They have a unified platform built from the ground up… What that allows them to do, and this is really critical to the Uber relationship, is they can tap into different payment networks.”
Being able to plug into different payment methods has been key in attracting businesses that want to expand globally without having to entirely rethink payment processing from market to market.
“I look at this right now as an interesting, beta-testing proof of concept,” Bond said. “If it’s successful for Uber, it clearly can be successful for other types of merchants as well.”
Delivery and mobility was a strong driver in Adyen’s digital growth in the six months ended December 31, 2025, according to Keefe Bruyette and Woods research note. Adyen released its 2H earnings on Feb. 12.
“Adyen saw positive trends, driven by a robust 2025 cohort of new customers and growing demand across each of the core pillars,” the note said. “Digital continued to have strong growth, led by delivery and mobility and also content and subscription
But for Adyen, the kiosk represents an opportunity to potentially showcase its dynamic identification tool as a way to personalize payments, Nies said.
“For example, if we’ve seen you show up on Netflix and Spotify and you’re using different payment types, we know which one typically works best [and] which one you prefer. So, how we share that kind of data with merchants can be become pretty interesting,” Nies said.
“Tying it back to Uber, you can imagine a world where you show up at the airport at this kiosk and we’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve seen you before. We know you have a WeChat Pay. Show that as the very first payment method.”