When was the last time you thought about the code that verifies your identity during checkout? You didn’t. You just expected it to work. Most payment processors are still stitching together acquired systems built in different decades, on different codebases, with different databases.  As Marc Andreessen predicted, “software is eating the world.” In payments, that world is being consumed faster than anyone anticipated. Every transaction now carries more intelligence than most checkout pages reveal. Most payment processors bolt AI onto fragmented, acquired systems. Adyen took a different path. The company built a single global platform from scratch, which it calls the “build-over-buy” philosophy. This architectural choice now means that for a typical retail merchant on Adyen, there is a high chance the platform has already seen and verified the shopper before the merchant even knows they’ve arrived. The AI knows the customer better than the merchant does, and the merchant benefits from day one. AI Is Becoming the Economic Engine AI at Adyen serves three goals: increase authorisation rates, reduce payment costs, and power agent-led commerce. The company builds AI capability from the foundation up. Private LLMs, applied research hubs, and proprietary ML models form that foundation. Four distinct use-cases […]