Digitalization happens in many different ways, including in the payment service we know nowadays. From paying with cash, to using debit – and credit cards, to a newer way: Paying online. Many different companies struggle with the online payment process as many different intermediaries are involved: Different payment gateways, providers of the service, acquirers and finally processors. While, globalization helped companies venture into different geographical areas, new problems arose from the expansion as each geographical area demanded different forms of payments (e.g. Mastercard, Visa), making the whole payment process more complex. This ultimately, makes the whole process very costly, since the companies have to pay fees to each of the different involved intermediaries.

Adyen analysed this gap in the market and marked itself on the map. Adyen becomes a one-contract payment step for different companies as it takes over the different tasks from the intermediaries. So far, it serves customers in over 150 countries and accepts more than 200 different types of payment methods. The overall global payment processing market is enormous and accounts for a total of 1.6 trillion US dollars. Adyen’s biggest competitors are Paypal, Stripe and Worldpay. In order to compete, its biggest advantages are its global reach, the centralized data and the unified commerce. The company wants to ensure stability, integrity and security by retaining these components in-house to continue to have full-control over these components ((How Adyen is Disrupting Payment Processing, 2019).

So how does Adyen generate revenue? The company charges per transaction; a fixed processing fee depending on the geographical area plus an additional fee depending on the payment method. This simple formula created a net revenue of $262 million in 2019.

Where to next? It’s not yet entirely clear in what direction Adyen wants to head into. However, looking at where the E-commerce is rapidly growing and where Adyen itself is active, the company can definitely create opportunities developing new partnerships with companies in China and India. However, Adyen will then be more actively competing with its competitor: Alipay. Furthermore, the company mainly operates within B2B relationships, venturing out into C2C payments could possibly create a new source of revenue.

Medium. 2019. How Adyen Is Disrupting Payment Processing. [online] Available at: <https://medium.com/iveyfintechclub/how-adyen-is-disrupting-payment-processing-7e0e261f0ea> [Accessed 6 October 2020].

Artificial Intelligence has an increasing impact on more and more industries. With its increasing impact, AI is applied in various different ways including the new AI-application also known as: AI built by AI. As the name gives away, an AI technology has the arsenal to create other AIs. A leading company in this new concept is Google, specifically their department Google Brain (Galeon, 2017). Google brain created AutoML in 2017 which is the main AI-application that serves as the controlling neural network. AutoML is able to create a “child” known as NASNet. NASnet is able to execute simple tasks like categorizing images and recognizing objects. With this new creation, Google already states that their new AI-application is a lot more efficient and powerful, outperforming most of the best human-designed systems. The accuracy rate by NASNet was 82,7%, which overall outperformed similar models that already exists by 3,1%. The AI built by AI can be used in various different industries, from the transportation industry (where it can improve safety by recognizing objects faster and reacting to it faster) to the health care industry (where it can help diagnose certain diseases by recognizing certain symptoms).

However, there are two main limitations to this concept. Firstly, the rapid pace of change is hard for society to keep up with. Therefore, it’s important that human beings act as the gatekeepers to determine the pace and to oversee the overall process. This gatekeeper-duty is a lot easier, now that the human engineers spend less time actually creating the systems. Secondly, the AI teaches its “child” itself meaning it is much easier to be biased (e.g. negatively associating certain ethnic and gendered identities with each other) (Neff, 2020). That’s why it’s very important to keep an eye on the ethical side of the AI systems. “The Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society”, which includes members such as Google and Amazon, and various governments do a great job protecting the ethical side in the technological industry.

Galeon, D., 2017. Google’s Artificial Intelligence Built An AI That Outperforms Any Made By Humans. [online] Futurism. Available at: <https://futurism.com/google-artificial-intelligence-built-ai> [Accessed 25 September 2020].

Neff, G., 2020. Five Things You (Maybe) Didn’t Know About AI. [online] Google. Available at: <https://blog.google/technology/ai/five-things-a-to-z-ai/> [Accessed 29 September 2020].