ADYEN The Take-Rate Reversal Held All Year — So Why Did the Stock Get Cheaper?

The Reversal Holds for a Full Year, the Multiple Doesn't

H1 2025 flagged a real but suspicious signal: take rate^» rose for the first time in three half-year periods, landing at 16.8 bps, but the increase arrived in the same half a single unnamed mega-customer's processed volume collapsed hard enough to explain most of the move on its own. The second half of 2025 extends the reversal rather than reverting it - take rate rose again, to 17.1 bps in H2 2025, lifting the full-year figure to roughly 17.0 bps, up from 15.5 bps in FY2024. That's now two consecutive half-year increases sitting inside one filing, the first time since this site began tracking Adyen's take rate that the metric has moved the same direction for two periods running.

But the mega-customer story hasn't gone away - it's just gotten less extreme. As explained in the H1 2025 post, a single large-volume customer's shrinking volume mechanically lifts Adyen's blended take rate even without any real pricing-power improvement - and that same customer is still in the mix here, though the gap it distorts narrowed to 13 points for the full year, from 18 points in H1 (see Beyond the Usual below for the numbers), meaning the customer's volume decline moderated in H2 rather than deepening, but it's still large enough that a reader can't yet call this a broad-based pricing win. Two data points in the same direction is more evidence than one, but the underlying disclosure gap - Adyen still won't say how large this one customer actually is - means the improvement is still easier to read as "the drag got smaller" than "the pricing power got real."

The stranger part of this filing is what happened to the stock while all of this was improving. Shares closed FY2025 at €1,375.00, down 4.3% from FY2024's €1,437.00 close (see Stock Price below) - even as net revenue growth accelerated, EBITDA margin hit a new high, and management raised its own long-term margin target. The result: Adyen's trailing multiple compressed meaningfully over the year (see Target Valuation Range), the opposite of what a reader would expect from a company whose own numbers got better on almost every axis this half.

The Prescription

What Adyen should keep pushing: Unified Commerce and Platforms, which grew net revenue 29.6% and 49.8% for the full year respectively against Digital's 8.6% (see One Pillar Is Still Carrying the Other Two below), and the newly-introduced Dynamic Identification layer underneath Adyen Uplift, which the letter backs with real, if modest, pilot numbers - "conversion improvements of up to 6%" alongside "transaction cost reductions of up to 3%." A product that measurably improves both sides of the conversion/cost tradeoff at once, rather than trading one for the other, is exactly the kind of structural moat that's harder for a competitor to copy than a pricing table.

What it should stop doing: talking about headcount discipline right before guiding to the opposite. The letter describes H2 2025's 203 net new joiners as "consistent with the pace of hiring from the first half" and says the company "expects headcount to evolve in a measured way" going forward - then, three paragraphs later, guides to 550 to 650 net new team members in 2026, a 29% to 53% jump over 2025's full-year total of roughly 426 net additions. This is the same whiplash flagged at FY2024 (a near-freeze in H1 2024 followed by a second-half surge) and again at H1 2025 (223 net additions in six months, an acceleration Adyen itself called "similar pace" hiring) - a pattern of describing the current pace as steady right before changing it materially. A company two years into flagging this exact tension should either stop calling its hiring plans "measured" or actually make them so.

Key Financial Metrics

FY2025 vs. FY2024 - consolidated. H2 2025 figures come from Adyen's H2 2025 Shareholder Letter and unaudited Interim Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements (reviewed, not fully audited); full-year figures are Adyen's own disclosed FY totals where stated, or this site's sum of the separately-reported H1 2025 and H2 2025 halves where a single full-year line isn't given in the filing (noted per row)

FX: EUR 1 = USD 1.1747 (December 31, 2025 close).

Metric	FY2025 (EUR)	FY2025 (USD)	FY2024 (EUR)	YoY
Processed volume	€1,394.3Bn	~$1,637.9Bn	~€1,287.8Bn	⚠️ +8% (+21% excl. one customer)
Net Revenue	€2,364.2M	~$2,777.4M	€1,996.1M	✅ +18.4%
EBITDA	€1,245.8M	~$1,463.4M	€992.3M	✅ +25.5%
Operating Income (income before net finance income and income taxes; sum of H1+H2, not a single disclosed FY line)	€1,109.9M	~$1,303.9M	€887.8M	✅ +25.0%
Net Income	€1,062.5M	~$1,248.1M	€925.2M	✅ +14.8%
Free Cash Flow (FCF)» (EBITDA - CapEx - lease payments)	€1,081.4M	~$1,270.3M	€859.8M	✅ +25.8%
Total Cash and cash equivalents	€10,797.4M	~$12,684.0M	€9,965.0M	✅ +8.4%

Balance sheet metric	31 Dec 2025 (EUR)	31 Dec 2025 (USD)	31 Dec 2024 (EUR)	Change
Total Assets	€12,256.8M	~$14,398.8M	€11,425.3M	✅ +7.3%
Total Equity	€5,285.4M	~$6,208.7M	€4,231.5M	✅ +24.9%
Total Liabilities (derived: assets less equity)	€6,971.4M	~$8,190.1M	€7,193.8M	✅ -3.1%
Payables to merchants and financial institutions	€6,371.8M	~$7,485.5M	€6,684.7M	✅ -4.7%

Net revenue growth of 18.4% (Adyen's own rounding: 18% reported, 21% on a constant currency basis) is an acceleration on a constant-currency basis from FY2024's low-twenties pace, though the reported figure was held back by a weaker U.S. dollar against the euro over the year. EBITDA margin reached 53% for the full year, up from 50% in FY2024 (H2 2025 alone ran higher, at 55%, up from H2 2024's 53%) - a new full-year high, and management now targets "above 55% by 2028" rather than the 2026 target it already cleared a year early (see the FY2024 post). Free cash flow conversion held essentially flat at 86.8% (86.6% in FY2024) - still turning nearly all of EBITDA into real cash, though the IFRS cash flow statement itself looks much worse than that: H2 2025 net cash flow from operating activities was negative €1.63 billion, driven almost entirely by a €2.36 billion working-capital swing in payables to merchants and financial institutions - the pass-through funds Adyen temporarily holds before settling to merchants, not company earnings. Adyen's own free-cash-flow measure deliberately excludes this merchant-float swing, which is why FCF still shows a healthy, growing number even in a half where GAAP operating cash flow went sharply negative; a reader looking only at the cash flow statement without this context could easily mistake ordinary settlement-timing noise for a genuine cash problem. Net income growth (+14.8%) again trailed operating income growth (+25.0%) - a wider gap than H1 2025's own version of this pattern - because net finance income fell to €284.1 million for the full year from €338.9 million in FY2024 (a -16.2% decline), as lower short-term interest rates continued eroding the cash-pile tailwind that inflated net income in 2023 and 2024.

Take rate rose for a second straight half, confirming FY2025 as the first full year of reversal after two years of decline - but the stock still ended the year cheaper than it started, on almost every valuation multiple this site tracks.

Key Operational Metrics

• Take rate: ~17.0 bps for FY2025 (16.8 bps H1, 17.1 bps H2), up from 15.5 bps in FY2024 - the first full-year increase this site has recorded, still attributed to "changes in the overall merchant mix" (see The Reversal Holds above and Beyond the Usual below).
• Net revenue by region (full-year, this site's sum of H1 2025 and H2 2025): EMEA €1,360.7M (+18.6% YoY, 58% of net revenue), North America €633.3M (+18.2% YoY, 27%), Asia-Pacific €236.5M (+14.4% YoY, 10%), Latin America €133.8M (+25.8% YoY, 6%) - LATAM was the fastest-growing region for the full year, a shift from FY2024 when its reported growth was flattened by FX headwinds.
• Net revenue by commercial pillar (full-year, this site's sum of both halves): Digital €1,335.0M (+8.6% YoY, 56% of net revenue), Unified Commerce €765.4M (+29.6% YoY, 32%), Platforms €263.8M (+49.8% YoY, 11%) - see the segment comparison below.
• FTE^» headcount: 4,771 at December 31, 2025, up from 4,345 a year earlier (426 net new joiners for the full year - 223 in H1, 203 in H2) - see The Prescription above on 2026's much larger hiring plan.
• 2026 guidance (first annual guidance issued under the cadence management committed to at its November 2025 Investor Day): net revenue growth of 20-22% YoY on a constant-currency basis, EBITDA margin "broadly in line with 2025" (with an above-55%-by-2028 target still in place), and CapEx held at up to 5% of net revenue.
• Shares outstanding: 31,536,692 at December 31, 2025, up from 31,485,187 a year earlier - just 51,505 net new shares issued in the full year, a much smaller increase than FY2024's 452,089 (most of which came from the second eBay warrant tranche exercising, per the FY2024 post).
• Not available this filing: full-stack acquiring share of processed volume (last disclosed at 83% in FY2024), customer Net Promoter Score (last disclosed at 66 in FY2024), and customer revenue concentration (last disclosed at 12% for the top 10 customers in FY2024) - all three were also absent from the H1 2025 filing, making this the second consecutive filing without them (see Beyond the Usual below).

One Pillar Is Still Carrying the Other Two

Adyen still reports three commercial pillars - Digital, Unified Commerce, and Platforms - and this filing again discloses net revenue for each at the half-year level, letting this site sum both halves into full-year pillar figures for the first time.

Digital (still the largest pillar, 56% of full-year net revenue): net revenue grew 8.6% YoY to €1,335.0 million for the year, the slowest of the three pillars for a second straight period. H2 alone grew net revenue 7% on a reported basis (10% constant-currency), with processed volume ex-customer up 11% YoY against a reported decline of 1% - the same mega-customer distortion discussed above, though notably smaller in H2 than the 27-point gap (18% ex-customer versus -9% reported) Digital showed in H1. The letter frames Digital's underlying diversification as continuing beyond e-commerce into insurance and brokerage platforms, and highlights digital-native merchants like iFood adding in-person payment layers - a two-way blur between Digital and Unified Commerce that the pillar boundaries themselves are starting to describe less cleanly.

Unified Commerce (32% of full-year net revenue): net revenue grew 29.6% YoY to €765.4 million, with H2 alone up 29% on a reported basis (33% constant-currency) and processed volume up 30%. Adyen now serves 596 Unified Commerce customers processing across multiple regions (up 22 YoY) and 467 processing across channels at scale (up 50 YoY), with transacting terminals up 92K to 456K. Worth noting for seasonality: H2 - and within it, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, where Adyen processed 837 million transactions at "99.9999% uptime" - is structurally the stronger half for in-person retail volume every year, so UC's H2 numbers shouldn't be read as a new baseline run-rate without adjusting for the holiday season's usual lift.

Platforms (11% of full-year net revenue, still the smallest but fastest-growing pillar): net revenue grew 49.8% YoY to €263.8 million, with H2 processed volume up 28% YoY, or 54% excluding eBay - a pillar whose growth engine is now visibly broader than the single legacy relationship that once dominated its base. Active business customers on Platforms reached 220K (up from 145K a year earlier), platform customers processing over €1 billion annually rose to 31 (from 28), and 31% of Platforms volume now runs through point-of-sale, up from 25% a year ago - platforms are increasingly asking Adyen for the same in-person capability that defines the Unified Commerce pillar.

Which pillar is carrying the business: for the second consecutive filing, Platforms and Unified Commerce are growing on broad-based momentum (50% and 30% for the full year) while Digital - still the majority of net revenue at 56% - remains both the slowest-growing pillar and the one most exposed to a single customer's volume swings. The gap between Digital and the other two pillars narrowed slightly this year (Digital's share of total net revenue fell from 62% in FY2024 to 56% in FY2025) but Adyen is still, on a full-year basis, a Digital-majority business relying on two smaller pillars to keep pulling the growth rate up.

Beyond the Usual

Take rate's second straight increase still traces mostly to one customer - though the gap narrowed

FY2025's roughly 17.0 bps take rate, up from 15.5 bps in FY2024, is now backed by two consecutive half-year increases (16.8 bps in H1, 17.1 bps in H2) rather than the single data point flagged at H1 2025. But the same single large-volume customer first referenced in Adyen's Q3 2024 business update is still cited as explaining most of the gap between reported and ex-customer processed-volume growth: 8% reported versus 21% excluding that customer for the full year (a 13-point gap), against an 18-point gap in H1 alone. The gap narrowing from H1 to H2 is a genuinely positive data point - it means the customer's volume decline moderated rather than deepened - but Adyen still hasn't disclosed the customer's identity, its share of total volume, or a timeline for when its volume might normalize entirely. Two half-years of take-rate improvement, both partly explained by the same disclosed customer, isn't yet distinguishable from "the drag is easing" as opposed to "the pricing power turned structurally real." Worth revisiting again at H1 2026: if the ex-customer/reported gap keeps closing while take rate keeps rising, that's the strongest evidence yet of a genuine turn.

Three metrics flagged as missing at H1 2025 are missing again

Full-stack acquiring share of processed volume (83% in FY2024), customer Net Promoter Score (66 in FY2024), and customer revenue concentration (top 10 customers at 12% of revenue in FY2024) were all absent from the H1 2025 filing, and none of the three reappear in this H2 2025 report either. A single missed disclosure period can be an editorial choice about what a half-year letter emphasizes; two consecutive periods without any of three previously-tracked metrics starts to look like a pattern of narrowing what gets disclosed at the half-year mark specifically, rather than a one-off gap. Full-stack acquiring share and customer concentration in particular were metrics this site has used across multiple posts as structural counterweights to take-rate volatility - their continued absence removes exactly the context a reader would want while evaluating whether this year's take-rate reversal is durable.

A mandatory auditor rotation is coming after FY2026

PricewaterhouseCoopers - the same firm that has reviewed or audited every Adyen filing this site has covered since H1 2024 - will reach the maximum term permitted under EU and Dutch auditor-independence rules following the audit of financial year 2026, meaning a new auditor will be appointed for FY2027, with details to follow at the 2026 Annual General Meeting. This is a purely regulatory rotation requirement (EU rules cap public-interest-entity audit tenure), not a governance concern specific to Adyen, but it's a genuinely new disclosure this filing and one worth tracking forward: a first-year audit under a new firm is exactly the kind of transition where a reader should watch for any restatement, changed estimate, or newly flagged item that the outgoing auditor's long tenure might not have surfaced.

Restricted cash nearly doubled as new banking licenses came online

Of Adyen's €10,797.4 million total cash balance, €372.4 million was restricted and unavailable for general use at December 31, 2025 (€189.1 million held at banks, €183.4 million held at central banks), up from €233.2 million a year earlier - a 59.7% increase. The filing attributes this mainly to deposits required under the US Federal Foreign Branch license, the Brazilian acquiring license, a reserve collateral account with the Bank of England, and guarantee deposits for leased offices. This is the same underlying dynamic - new-market banking licenses requiring larger regulatory deposits - that this site tracked via outstanding bank guarantees in the FY2024 and H1 2025 posts (a metric this filing doesn't disclose at all, see the finding above); restricted cash is effectively picking up where that disclosure left off, even though the two aren't directly comparable line items.

A Dutch-law legal reserve turned negative for the first time, purely from currency translation

Adyen's statutory "legal reserves" balance - which under Dutch company law captures unrealized currency translation differences on foreign participations, among other items - moved from a positive €8.7 million at the start of 2025 to a negative €61.2 million at year-end, driven by a €62.3 million currency translation loss booked directly to that reserve rather than to retained earnings. The company's own capital-management note confirms the restricted, non-distributable balance stood at €(57,335) thousand at year-end. This isn't a governance concern in substance - it's a mechanical accounting consequence of the euro strengthening against the currencies of Adyen's foreign operations during 2025, and Adyen doesn't pay dividends regardless - but it's the first time this reserve has gone negative since this site began tracking Adyen's equity structure, and worth knowing about for anyone reading the balance sheet's "other reserves" line without the underlying note.

Contractor and advisory costs both jumped on unspecified "internal projects"

Advisory costs rose to €21.8 million in H2 2025 from €16.5 million in H2 2024 (+32.2%), and contractor costs rose to €9.4 million from €5.7 million (+64.7%) - both attributed in the filing to "internal projects" without further detail on what those projects are. Neither increase is large in absolute terms against a €1.27 billion net revenue half, and Adyen has previously waved off a similar-looking spike (H1 2025's "miscellaneous operating expenses" jump, flagged at the time) with a specific, mundane explanation. This one comes with less detail than that precedent, so it's worth a light flag rather than a dismissal - two consecutive halves of rising external-labor spend without naming the underlying projects is the kind of thing that's easy to explain away individually but worth checking again if the pattern continues into 2026.

Stock Price: A Second-Half Decline Despite Better Numbers

Adyen's shares closed 2023 at €1,166.60 on December 29, 2023 (start of this post's two-year lookback window) and ended H1 2025 at €1,558.40 (see the H1 2025 post). From there, H2 2025 was a steady grind lower rather than a repeat of H1's sharp round trip: €1,510.60 at the end of July, €1,434.40 in August, €1,365.00 by the end of September (a five-month low), a partial recovery to €1,488.60 in October, a fresh low of €1,340.60 in November, before closing the year at €1,375.00 on December 31, 2025 - down 11.8% from the June 30 close and down 4.3% from FY2024's €1,437.00 close. Over the full two-year window, shares are up 17.9% (€1,166.60 to €1,375.00), a real gain, but one that came entirely from the recovery through mid-2024 and into early 2025 - four of the six months from July through December 2025 closed lower than the month before, with only October and December breaking the slide. No stock split occurred during this window or since; Adyen's only split (2-for-1) remains August 2021, so every price above is an actual nominal close, not split-adjusted.

The pattern is notable precisely because it runs against this half's own operating numbers: EBITDA margin hit a new high, net revenue growth accelerated on a constant-currency basis, and management issued 2026 guidance (20-22% CC growth) roughly in line with 2025's realized pace rather than a deceleration. A stock falling through a half where the fundamentals mostly improved suggests the market was pricing in something this filing doesn't fully explain - plausibly a broader European growth-stock de-rating, continued unease about the unnamed mega-customer's eventual full normalization, or simply a read that "guidance in line with this year" isn't the acceleration the market had been hoping for. Worth keeping in mind reading Target Valuation Range below.

Target Valuation Range

~40.9x P/E, ~26.1x EV/EBITDA. Bottom line: the cheapest this site has seen Adyen priced across its whole coverage window, on every trailing multiple tracked - and the fundamentals moved the other way. Both multiples fell sharply from H1 2025's ~49.1x and ~32.9x, even as EBITDA margin, net revenue growth, and free cash flow all improved. This reads as undervalued relative to Adyen's own multiple history, unless the market is pricing risks - the still-unresolved mega-customer exposure, or a broader payments-sector re-rating - that this filing's numbers don't yet show up in.

Market cap → enterprise value	FY2025 (period-end)
Share price (period-end, Dec 31, 2025 close)	see Stock Price above
Shares outstanding	31,536,692
Market capitalization	~€43.4 billion (~$50.9 billion)
Less: cash and equivalents	€10,797.4 million
Interest-bearing debt	none
Enterprise value	~€32.6 billion (~$38.3 billion)

Peer-multiple sanity check	H1 2025 (TTM)	FY2025 (full-year)	Change
EPS (diluted)	€31.66 (TTM)	€33.62 (full-year)	✅ up
P/E (diluted)	~49.2x	~40.9x	✅ down
P/E (basic)	~49.1x	~40.8x	✅ down
Book value per share	€148.37	€167.60	✅ up
P/B	~10.5x	~8.2x	✅ down
EV/Revenue	~16.8x	~13.8x	✅ down
EV/EBITDA	~32.9x	~26.1x	✅ down

Full-year diluted EPS of €33.62 is this site's sum of H1 2025's €15.22 and H2 2025's €18.40 - both real half-year figures, not an annualized estimate. No peer-multiple comparison against another company is included here - no other global enterprise payments processor is currently covered on this site with a verified, downloaded filing to compare against. A full multi-year DCF also isn't built: this post's usable source documents span H1 2018, FY2018, H1 2024, FY2024, H1 2025, and now this H2 2025/FY2025 filing, with a large early gap that isn't a reliable base for modeling a continuous multi-year trajectory, though four consecutive half-year filings now overlap cleanly.

What the market is pricing in (reverse-DCF logic, directional only): a materially lower multiple on improving fundamentals is either a bet that 2026's 20-22% guided growth (essentially flat versus 2025's realized pace, not the acceleration the market may have wanted) caps the near-term growth story, or a broader re-rating of high-multiple European growth stocks unrelated to anything specific to Adyen. If the mega-customer's volume keeps normalizing (see Beyond the Usual above) and take rate holds through H1 2026, today's multiple looks like it's pricing in more caution than the operating numbers currently justify.

• Bear case: 2026 net revenue growth lands at or below the bottom of the 20-22% guided range, the mega-customer's volume declines resume rather than continuing to moderate, and the multiple - already down sharply from a year ago - has further to fall since the market clearly isn't rewarding operating improvement at the current price.
• Base case: 2026 growth lands inside guidance, EBITDA margin holds "broadly in line with 2025" as management states, and the multiple stabilizes near today's level - a genuine re-rating downward from 2024-2025's richer pricing, not a temporary dip.
• Bull case: the take-rate reversal proves durable as the mega-customer's volume fully normalizes, Unified Commerce and Platforms keep compounding at 30-50% annually, and the market re-rates Adyen back toward its earlier multiple once 2026's actual results confirm growth didn't decelerate the way today's price implies.

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