- Key insights: Adyen is rolling out Intelligent Money Movement, a treasury product that combines payments, liquidity management and payouts.
- What’s at stake: Adyen is hoping to capitalize on its numerous banking licenses, which allow it to create enterprise bank accounts and have direct connections to multiple central banks.
- Expert Quote: The fintech’s “cloud-native, single-stack architecture and proprietary banking license infrastructure give structural cost and capability advantages that most competing processors simply cannot replicate,” according to TD Cowen analysts.
Adyen has long counted its banking licenses across the world as a competitive advantage and is now looking to put them to work in its business payments unit.
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The fintech’s Intelligent Money Movement combines payments, liquidity management and disbursements. It’s designed to ease the fragmentation that platform companies such as
Adyen’s move comes as more fintechs seek limited charters. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has
“These merchants, as we learn more and more about them, we see on average that they’ve got five or six banks they’re working with,” Trevor Nies, Adyen’s global head of digital, told American Banker, noting that enterprises also manage more than 40 different bank accounts and work with 12 pay-in and payout providers.
“That’s what it’s about, harmonizing this all together, and frankly, making the CFO and the treasury department’s life easier,” Nies said.
The company is hoping companies will ditch some of their extraneous bank accounts and payment providers and consolidate with Adyen, which has banking licenses in the U.S., Europe and U.K.
Adyen’s banking licenses allow the company to create enterprise bank accounts and have direct connections to the central banks to pay out “as fast or slow as a merchant wants,” Nies said. It also allows platforms to further monetize their payout process, such as through fee revenue from faster payouts, or float revenue if the merchant wants to hold capital for longer. Its banking licenses also allow Adyen greater latitude in developing financial products it can sell.
“We get rid of the middle man and for Adyen, that’s one of the most important things,” Nies said. “We always develop direct connections with central banks. The whole goal is to reduce any sort of friction, to ensure reliability, to reduce costs, to reduce latency.”
Adyen’s proprietary banking license infrastructure, along with its cloud-native, single-stack architecture, provide the company with structural cost and capability advantages that most competing processors “simply cannot replicate,” according to TD Cowen analyst Bryan Bergin.
“We expect this to continue driving wallet share gains from legacy and fragmented players across enterprise and platform segments,” Bergin wrote in a research note.
Nies said he is not concerned about other fintechs looking to nab limited charters. “There’s a nuance here too. You’ve seen the news of our competitors now getting charter licenses from Georgia and the United States, as an example. Those aren’t banking licenses,” he said.
“What they do is allow local acquiring, which is super important then they don’t have to rely on third-party banks. But they still can’t do all the things that we do with a true banking charter license,” Nies said.