Pivot: Cross Border Commerce Podcast Series Adyen, from RBS Worldpay to today and beyond. Hosts: Mike Robertson - Head of Transactional FX Trading, Global Banking and Markets, Bank of America Douglas Houser - Head of Transactional FX and Payments Strategy, Global Transaction Services, Bank of America Guest Speaker: Roelant Prins - Chief Commercial Officer, Adyen Mike Robertson (00:00): Welcome to Pivot, the Bank of America Cross-border Commerce Podcast Series. Pivot refers to a moment where, due to an impactful event within the business environment, one is set on a new path and a new series of possibilities arise. In this series, you’ll hear competing discussions with industry leaders and key figures in the cross-border payments ecosystem and learn how they pivoted when the situation demanded it. I'm Mike Robertson, Head of Transactional FX Trading, Global Banking and Markets at Bank of America. And I'm joined by my colleague, Doug Houser, Head of Transactional FX at Bank of America. Hi, Doug! Doug Houser (00:36): Great to be here as always, Mike! Mike Robertson (00:38): Yeah, good to have you. For today's podcast, the topic is 'Adyen from RBS Worldpay to today and beyond.' And we're joined by our guests Roelant Prins, who’s the Chief Commercial Officer at Adyen. How are you doing Roelant? Roelant Prins (00:51): Hey, I'm great! Nice to be here. Mike Robertson (00:53): Yeah, great to have you from, all the way from Amsterdam. So that's awesome! So the topic today Roelant is, as I said, Adyen from RBS Worldpay, where of course, I knew you back in the day, to today and beyond. And, you know, I learned just recently, with Peter on starting the business way back when, that Adyen means in Sewanee, 'start over again', which I find it fascinating understanding a little bit about the story from before. So perhaps that's a good place to start really, you know, what, what was the story of start again, and what was your personal journey within that? Roelant Prins (01:24): Yeah, that's correct. So briefly my story was, I started my professional life back in early two thousands. And at that point in time, there was only pretty limited Internet activity going on across Europe, but it had really fascinated me. So, after starting with a consultant, I ended up being quite disappointed with being in Excel sheets all the time. I ended up, you know, seeking more adventure and seeking the Internet space. And as there were so limited number of things going on, I ended up with this payments company through a guy I knew, which was called Bibit. I'd never heard of it, but I thought, hey, this is an Internet payments business. And let me check it out. There was a start of fantastic journey. I joined there fresh out of uni, started at customer support, you know, a whole new world, but fantastic adventure. And then I ended up working in the commercial side there. I worked closely with Peter, who was responsible for all the commercial activities at Bibit, which was really a first generation payment service provider, you know, enabling a credit card payments and other payment methods across Europe for the first generation Econ businesses out there. And that company was quite successful and then got acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland Group in 2004. And then there was a great acquisition for RBS because they really wanted to grow internationally in e-commerce. And I think for Bibit, as you know, early startup really new to this, it was a good moment to do this. There was a lot of uncertainty in the market around regulation. And for me personally, it meant I moved to London. I worked there, that's where we met. I worked in the city within RBS payments, wider payments team for quite some years. And I find that truly fascinating because I really learned a lot about the other side of payments being, how do acquirers work? What does risk mean? How does it fit into the wider banking space? And then, you know, what did happen is being part of a, at that time, 110,000 people, large bank, you know, this tiny 90 people payments operation. I got overwhelmed and not only by the size, but also by group, IT managing all the IT of the business, which had basically had a very limiting impact on the innovation. And as a result, quite a few people at some point left, you know, a lot of customers got a bit upset over time because a lot of the innovation came to a standstill, and they were used to getting a lot of new features being shipped to them all the time. So, then after a few years, about two and a half years, three years later, we, Arnot and Peter felt like, hey, that they'd left already a bit earlier. They felt like, hey, there's still so much demand and need for innovation in this payment space. It would be really fun to see whether we can deliver that because we felt like there was nobody really doing that. And that's how this company got started. So, you know, Adyen, at that time already, a lot of dot-com domains were gone, Adyen was available. We didn't want to go to a boring, global payments, blah, blah, blah type business name. So we felt short and sharp make sense and Adyen means indeed, in part of Sewanee language, to do something all over 2 again with a group of people. And we had worked before, and we felt, it would be fantastic to try and do this again in a different angle. And that's how it started. Mike Robertson (04:58): That's super fascinating, frankly, because, you know, back in the day when I was at RBS when they acquired Bibit and I can't recall exactly whether Bibit came first or Worldpay came first in terms of acquisitions. But it ended up being, of course, this combination. And I do recall at the time being very excited because Bibit for me was a company which was very agile and was able to, as you said, innovate quickly and deliver quickly. It felt almost like you would do a sales call, head back to the office, and then, you know, many weeks later, the actual production of that sales call would arrive with a customer, which I thought was astonishing. Is that really then what you saw as the key differentiator, did quote unquote, Big Bank effectively kill that agility? Is that what you think happened? Roelant Prins (05:45): Yeah, that's what happened. And, you know, it's all to do with the fact like Big Bank is not used to run technology the way smaller tech company does it. So, in our way of working, which we still run today, you are able to try, test, push something through life quickly, see whether it works, and then you optimize. And we call that within Adyen, we launched fast and iterate. That's of course completely opposite on how they think about development of functionality within a bank. It's, you know, risk management first, you figure out like, hey, what's the potential impact here. We gotta make sure we understand all different angles, and then typically projects take six months, you know, through business cases and all sorts of studies. And by doing it that way, you basically limit all the different functionalities for which you are not hundred percent sure what the impact is. And for us, a lot of things we build, we don't know exactly on day one, how big it will be. You know, you have to try a lot of things and solve them, become really impactful, and then you improve them. Some of them you launch and you feel like, hey, in the end, doesn't really do what we were expecting it to do, and then let's pause. And that ability to constantly try things and see what works and sticks and improve it that just doesn't fit with a risk management approach the Big Bank has. And that's the limiting factor. Mike Robertson (07:12): I get that. I get that. Doug Houser (07:14): Before we bad-mouth the Big Banks, totally, I will say one thing about Adyen and the banking expertise that Adyen has, which is, what we see, really it's a, you know, in the last 15, 20 years in the Fintech space is lots of tech, not as much Fin sometimes. And by that, I mean, the frontend piece is very, very sharp, but the backend piece is where innovation is a little bit less likely to happen, but also more impactful. Adyen is actually different in that way, right? Adyen has always focused on being able to innovate on the backend, the actual process. So, talk a little bit about, was it helped by the fact that, sort of had people who had grown up in banks a little bit 3 that had exposure to the banks, while agility is important, was some of that DNA for the risk and backend piece helpful as Adyen grow? Roelant Prins (08:14): Yeah, absolutely, it was very helpful. And, you know, I think everybody has their role to play, and a tech company is good at tech and a bank is good at managing risk.