Before exploring the competitive concerns that have sent shares cratering nearly 60%, it’s worth reflecting on what it is that got people excited about Adyen in the first place. In a typical online transaction, a shopper’s credit card details are picked up and encrypted by a gateway before being routed to the appropriate merchant acquirer. […]
Related posts [MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 1 [MELI – MercadoLibre] Digging the Moat (Or Is It A Grave?): Part 2 In 2016, six years and several pro-competition pieces of regulation after the Central Bank of Brazil and antitrust authorities first pried the merchant acquiring market open to […]
If you follow the payments space even casually, you are no doubt aware of the sequence of the mega mergers that have taken place between merchant acquirers and core processors this past year. Source: scuttleblurb and public filings The bolded companies in the table above are the surviving merged entities, their market caps and enterprise […]
Having covered merchant acquirers and card networks, I’m down to the final part of the payment edifice – issuer processors. Issuer processors are to card issuing banks what merchant acquirers are to merchants. They authorize and process transactions on behalf of card issuing banks under long-term agreements and recognize revenue based on a combination of […]
In the payments space, the difference between a distributor and a competitor can be so blurry as to lose functional meaning. Mercury Payment was a significant ISO for legacy acquirers before Vantiv acquired it from Silver Lake. Stripe offers many of the same services as the legacy acquirers to whom it outsources transaction processing. Ditto […]
Related posts: [V – Visa; MA – Mastercard] Expanding the rails, Part 1 [V – Visa; MA – Mastercard] Expanding the rails, Part 2 How many companies are still posting consistent double-digit organic revenue growth doing essentially the same thing that they’ve done for the last 60 years? I can only think of two. Visa […]
Related Post: [V – Visa; MA – Mastercard] Expanding the Rails, Part 1 The most enduring companies, as the old bit goes, obsess over timeless universals: “paying for stuff should be easy, fast, and safe”. Sizing a market helps to scope the problem that a product is meant to attack, but fixating on any given […]
