欧洲科技行业-全球支付产业：在不断变化的商户需求中比较Adyen和Stripe的价值主张

abGlobal Research | 16 April 2021Expert call affirms our view of Adyen's strong tech stackOn 30th March, we hosted a call with a former Square (Not Rated) employee on "Comparing Adyen's and Stripe's value proposition amidst changing merchant needs" to help us frame the payments landscape (traditional vs. neo-players) and help us understand who fits best to different merchant verticals (quick-service, marketplaces, etc.), but also puts Adyen (Buy) in context with privately-held Stripe, post the latter's $95bn valuation (link). In this note, we provide our key takeaways and the full transcript. Post the call, we feel affirmed in our Buy thesis on Adyen, which is based on continuous success in e-commerce, but with the narrative slowly changing towards unified commerce, where we see Adyen's offering being ahead of its competition validated by wins at complex merchants like Subway, Footlocker and latest win H&M. Key challenges today's merchants are facing and how neo-payments providers answerAccording to the expert, merchants are facing the following challenges from changing consumer behaviour: (1) the shift to e-commerce, which saw another boost due to the pandemic last year; (2) the rise of omni-channel solutions (combination of e-commerce and in-store experience) with consumers demanding full flexibility regarding shopping experience; (3) the rise of mobile-shopping has increased the customized sales approach, which current payment solutions cannot meet - traditional payment data does only include basic payment data, while new solutions providers (Adyen, Square, etc.) connect the tokenized card details to the CRM tool - "clienteling". Adyen and Stripe received a very strong review on their capabilitiesThe expert spoke highly about both neo-payments players suggesting both are liked by their customers, but it depends on which type of customers and what preference one has. In the expert's view: Adyen "typically acts as an account syndicator", where it creates an account for the merchant, while Stripe is "an aggregator", meaning it acts on the merchant's behalf as the merchant of record. As such, Stripe takes over various responsibilities from the merchant, which makes Stripe more attractive to smaller merchants, while Adyen appears to the expert as "more customizable" allowing merchants to fit payments to their internal processes ideal for enterprise merchants with a strong technology focus. What the expert said about different payments playersThe expert emphasized that the world is a very big place hosting multiple businesses with individual strategies and needs. As such it allows different payments companies to coexist. However, he pointed towards the need by traditional players to "accelerate innovation" or "to consolidate" to close the product gap. On Square, he thinks it "has the best omni-channel solution [among US-players]", while Shopify offers by far the best online store solution in the world...". On Stripe, the expert said "is by far the