Adyen Says It Looks to Expand as Payments Rivals Cut Jobs

Payments firm Adyen plans to continue a hiring spree that has hindered its profits.

“Adyen is operating at an increasingly global scale,” the Dutch FinTech said in its half-year earnings report Wednesday (Feb. 8). “To sustain this rate of expansion, we spent H2 building our team at an accelerated pace.”

The company reported earnings of 372 million euros (about $399 million) for the second half of 2022, up 4% from 2021. However, that figure was markedly lower than the consensus of $477 million, causing its stock — down 29% in the last year — to fall again Wednesday.

The company reported operating expenses of 665.4 million euros (about $714 million) in 2022, up 64% year over year.

“These increases were mainly driven by investments in growing our global team as we prepare to further scale,” the report stated.

Adyen said in the report it plans to slow hiring in 2024, when it expects its team to have reached “its next maturity level.”

PYMNTS noted last year that Adyen was one of the rare European FinTechs adding jobs during a wave of layoffs in the sector. The company hired 400 workers in the first half of last year, half of them for tech roles.

At the time, Ingo Uytdehaage Adyen’s chief financial officer, said these hirings were an investment in the company’s future.

“It is a longer time horizon before you see a product like the embedded financial products turning into significant revenues, but that’s an investment that we want to make because we have seen in the past … that it really pays off,” he said.

In all, Adyen said its headcount grew from 2,575 to 3,332 in the second half of the year, according to the report. It doesn’t plan to stop this year.

“While the wider tech industry engages in headcount reductions and hiring freezes, we remain committed to the hiring plans that align with our long-term ambitions,” the company said the report.

Payments firms including Klarna and Stripe cut staff in 2022, blaming factors such as “overhiring,” inflation and the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

Based in Amsterdam, Adyen is a global payments platform offering end-to-end financial services, including mobile payments.

PYMNTS spoke last year with Rehman Baig, the company’s vice president of product, data and partnerships, on how retailers can attract and retain customers.

“Today’s tech-savvy shoppers want more than just a sales pitch,” he said. “They want companies to understand them, allow them to shop on several different devices and, most importantly, they expect checkout and payment experiences to be seamless and frictionless, or they may decide to abandon the purchase or go to a competitor.”

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