Adyen first-half 2026 results show processed volume rising 24% to €803.8 billion, but the subtext is more telling. As detailed by PYMNTS, the driver wasn't a flood of new customers. It was existing merchants sending Adyen more of their business, with a surprising 28% surge in in-person volume. This is a story about platform stickiness meeting a physical retail rebound, while a new threat reshapes the landscape. The urgency? A merchant fear voiced by CEO Pieter van der Does: “How do I make sure that in an age of AI, I do not see a disintermediation?” For Adyen, the answer now runs through a newly acquired loyalty engine.
The 28% In-Person Rebound Is Powered by Deepening Roots
Adyen's growth engine is firing on a specific cylinder. Two-thirds of its first-half growth came from merchants onboarded in 2024 or earlier. These established relationships are maturing into deeper revenue streams, where Adyen's share of a merchant's payments can rise from below 20% in years three through seven to above 40% after a decade.
The standout performer was in-person payment volume, which jumped 28% year over year to €175.7 billion. That outpaces the company's overall 24% growth. The hardware footprint expanded too, with transacting terminals up 27% to 838,000. This suggests a core clientele, global retailers and food & beverage merchants, per the report, are not just processing more online sales but are actively investing in physical channels and routing that volume through Adyen's unified system.
XOOMAR Interpretation: This data hints at a post-pandemic rebalancing. Physical retail isn't just surviving; it's being re-engineered as a critical node in a data-collection network. Adyen's growth from existing clients indicates they are successfully selling a vision of the store as a tech hub, not just a point of sale.
From Marketing Afterthought to Transaction Core: The Loyalty Pivot
Adyen's acquisition of Talon.One, a promotions platform for over 300 global brands, is the strategic counterpunch to the disintermediation fear. The move reframes loyalty from a separate marketing program, a batch-processed points update, into a feature embedded within the payment gateway itself.
The logic is defensive and potent. As shopping fragments across channels and AI agents promise to "start the shopping journey," merchants risk losing direct customer relationships. By stitching payments and loyalty into a single data flow, Adyen offers a moat. It makes the merchant's own checkout and POS system the irreplaceable source of truth for customer identity and value.
“What is top of mind for them is, ‘How do I make sure that in an age of AI, I do not see a disintermediation?’” Adyen Co-Founder and Co-CEO Pieter van der Does said. “Loyalty is top of mind for them.”
This pivot turns Adyen from a payments facilitator into the central nervous system of omnichannel retail. It's a direct response to the "headless commerce" trend, aiming to ensure the "head", the customer relationship, remains firmly attached to the merchant, powered by Adyen's pipes.
Where Legacy Systems Created Silos, Adyen's Unified Platform Wins
The historical failure that Adyen exploits is the silo. Traditional retail tech stacks often treated online and in-store as separate kingdoms: different payment processors, different loyalty databases, different reporting. Legacy point-of-sale giants built hardware-centric models that struggled to natively unify these channels.
Adyen's rise mimics broader platform shifts where integrated software eats disconnected point solutions. Their Unified Commerce volume, covering merchants processing across both online and physical channels, rose 27% to €240.9 billion. This single-platform promise solves a costly, clunky problem retailers have faced for years. Attempts to stitch together disparate systems in-house were fraught with integration lag and data inconsistencies.
Adyen's success here is a lesson in solving for the future state of commerce, not just digitizing the past. It capitalizes on the retailer's need for a single customer view, a need that legacy providers were too slow to meet natively. As we've seen in how embedded finance works, the winning strategy is often to become an invisible, essential layer within a business's operations.
A Defensive Play Against the AI Intermediary Threat
Van der Does's comment about "disintermediation" is the Rosetta Stone for Adyen's strategy. The perceived rival isn't just another payments company; it's the coming wave of AI shopping assistants and aggregator platforms that could sit between retailers and consumers, owning the relationship and commoditizing the merchant.
Adyen Agentic, the company's developing AI environment, is being built for a world where merchants must connect to multiple AI shopping protocols. The loyalty acquisition is a preemptive strike. If an AI agent is shopping for a customer, the merchant's best defense is a powerful, real-time incentive system tied directly to their payment stack. The AI might initiate the search, but the personalized offer and seamless redemption keep the transaction, and the data, inside the merchant's ecosystem.
XOOMAR Interpretation: This creates a fascinating paradox. Adyen positions itself as the merchant's shield against external AI disintermediation, while simultaneously using AI internally to make its unified payments-loyalty data actionable. The race is to become the indispensable, intelligent data layer before an external AI-powered super-app does it from the outside.
The Investor Bet: Platform Depth Over Transaction Breadth
The market reaction, shares up 16% on the report, signals investor alignment with this strategy. The bet is not on Adyen simply processing more transactions, but on increasing its revenue per merchant through deeper integration and added services.
Key financials from the half support this:
- Net revenue: Increased 19% to €1.3 billion (21% at constant currency).
- Customer concentration: Improved, with 300 merchants now accounting for about 60% of total growth, down from over 70% three years ago.
- Acquisition impact: The Talon.One and Orb deals are expected to add about one percentage point to 2026's constant-currency net revenue growth, guided at 21-23%.
Investors are rewarding the shift from pure payment volume growth to becoming a more entrenched, high-utility software partner. This is a higher-margin, more defensive business model than competing on swipe fees alone. It mirrors strategic shifts we've analyzed elsewhere, like when Paysafe's profits avoided its main wallet product, showing the value of focusing on embedded, essential services over consumer-facing fronts.
What to Watch: The Battle for the Commerce Stack
Adyen's move is a declaration in the war for the unified commerce stack. The next five years will be defined by how competitors and the market respond.
Watch for a wave of bundling. Rivals will scramble to acquire or build loyalty, inventory, and CRM capabilities to match Adyen's depth. The definition of a "payments company" will stretch toward "commerce infrastructure provider."
Monitor the in-store tech evolution. The 28% in-person volume growth isn't nostalgia; it's a roadmap. Technology that turns the physical store into a real-time, data-rich engagement channel will attract investment. The retail manager's role will increasingly pivot toward orchestrating these cross-channel experiences.
The ultimate test is invisibility. The success of Adyen's loyalty play won't be measured by points balances, but by silent, automatic personalization. Can it use its unified data to generate and fulfill relevant offers in real-time, across any channel, making loyalty feel less like a program and more like being known? If so, it will have built the precise moat merchants are desperate for. If not, the door remains open for the AI intermediaries van der Does fears.
Disclaimer: This XOOMAR analysis is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not financial, investment, legal, tax, or professional advice. It does not provide buy, sell, hold, price-target, portfolio, or personalized recommendations. Verify information independently and consult qualified professionals before making decisions.
The Bottom Line
- For merchants, Adyen's deep integration shows how payments data is becoming central to customer loyalty and in-store technology investments.
- Adyen's 28% surge in in-person volume signals a strong physical retail rebound, with stores evolving into critical data-collection hubs.
- The shift of existing merchants routing more volume through Adyen highlights competitive 'platform stickiness' and the race to avoid AI-driven disintermediation.
Originally published on XOOMAR. For more news and analysis, visit XOOMAR.
