Hi, everyone, and welcome to the H1 2021 Adyen video call. Hope you've all been well, and thanks for joining us today. My name is Ethan Tandowsky, and I'm here live from the Amsterdam headquarters of Adyen, together with our CEO, Pieter van der Does, and our CFO, Ingo Uytdehaage, who will talk you through our first half results. To start, we have a short video which will cover some of the trends we've seen on our platform and in the broader industry. Enjoy. We've seen a half year of strong, profitable growth despite the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to impact the day-to-day of many of our merchants and their shoppers. Within this shifting landscape, many historical platform trends persisted in the first half of 2021. We saw merchants already on the platform again contribute over 80% volume growth, and volume churn remained low. We also saw the regional diversification of net revenue contributions again increase. Macroeconomic trends were consistent with previous periods, too. Some of them were even accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Economies around the world are evolving from cash to cashless societies, and commerce continued to move online at an increased pace. The consistency of these trends and our continued strong execution led to a solid half of results. We processed EUR 216 billion in the first half of 2021, up 67% year-on-year. Of these volumes, point of sale volume was EUR 22.8 billion, accounting for 11% of total processed volume. Despite a turbulent period for in-store, POS volume growing in line with overall business is a testament to the strength of our unified commerce offering. Net revenue was EUR 445 million, up 46% year-on-year. EBITDA was EUR 272.7 million, up 65% year-on-year. EBITDA margin was 61%, as we continue to see increased operating leverage as we grow the business. If you look at these results, you can see we're becoming a more global business every cycle since we went public. These results are a consequence of our long-term approach to investing in our solution. One such space is platforms, an increasingly dominant business model. For merchants in this space, we've built Adyen for Platforms, a solution that we're seeing significant traction with as platform business models are adopted in more verticals. We saw merchants continuing to adopt our unified commerce solution as commerce had to largely move online throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to this reality, multi-channel shopper journeys are now ingrained in shopper behavior, and shifted from being a nice-to-have to a need-to-have for businesses around the world. The Adyen team totaled 1,954 colleagues at the end of H1, as growing the team continues to be a key focus. We're proud to see that we are continuously able to add top talents to the team, now growing with a larger base in more offices and largely remote. Management still sees every new hire prior to joining. We maintain the same outlook as we continue to build Adyen for the long term. Great to see the continued growth of our business, and major shout-out to the design team. Another really well-done video. Thanks for that. We'll now move into a short discussion with Pieter and Ingo, which will be followed by a Q&A from you all. You can now use the Q&A functionality at the bottom of your screen to ask your questions. When doing so, please leave your full name and firm you represent. Maybe to start with a short discussion with the three of us. Pieter, to start with you, anything that you'd like to highlight in the first half of the year, and is it really true that the board still meets every candidate that comes into Adyen? Well, I'm very pleased to see that more than 80% of our growth is again from existing merchants. At the same time, we have a very low churn in sub 1% of merchants. That proves that we service our merchants well and that they want to grant us more business. This is an engine that has been running now for years, that we signed up new merchants. They start small with us, we gain their trust, and they give us more and more volume. I'm very happy to see that that trend is also the case this year. Regarding employees, do we still see everyone? Yes. You cannot be hired by Adyen without having seen one of the six board members. It's very important for us to keep the bar high and also to be very accessible. That means that everybody who works for Adyen has at least spoken for half an hour with one of the board members. We have a very deep bench. You see that we promote internally. At this time, we're now over 2,000 employees, but 1,954 when we closed the half year. We are a growing business, and we're investing heavily in our employees. Wow. To summarize, you would say we're focused on our merchants, we're focused on our team, and we continue to grow in both during the first half. Yeah. Yeah? Great. Ingo, I'm sure you have something to add. Anything else you'd like to highlight? Yeah, thanks, Ethan. I think very much in line what Pieter just said. I am mostly proud of the fact that we have this growth at scale. I think the land and expand strategy that we have with our merchants really pays out. We start to work on projects with them, gain their trust over time, and as a result, we get more volume. Of course, that's something to be very proud of. At the same time, I think I am very proud of the fact that we become a more global company every cycle. We become more global from a team perspective, with more than 20 offices around the world where we've added new team members over the past six months, but also more global from a revenue perspective. The way how North America now contributes to total net revenue is getting more and more significant, and I think that's a strong proof that we're building the right offering in the U.S. U.S. is now total 22% of net revenues, and I think that's a great achievement of the team in the U.S. Yeah. Some long-term payoffs we've seen from some investments in the past, I guess? Yeah, absolutely. I think that is absolutely what you see right now. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. If we talk about our merchants, of course, Pieter, a number of them are still dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Are there any trends or macroeconomic things that we've seen on the platform in the first half of the year? Well, what you see on the macroeconomic level is that the stores that were capable of unified commerce now becomes even more important. Stores that were closed could sell online. Yeah. Having those channels, it's more ingrained in shopper behavior, so there's more an expectation, of course, to be able to return in store, endless aisle, all those services have become more ingrained. Of course, there are tailwinds, the move from cash to cashless. That's a trend that we see persistent. If you look on the platforms, you see that certain verticals are impacted. Of course, first travel was heavily impacted, airlines. Now for the first time, airline at the end of this half, it was at the pre-pandemic level. No growth, but at least back at the level where it was before. You see that point of sale volumes doubled year-over-year. That's quite significant. It's now 11% of volume. We have proven that we can run the business from home. Working from home works very well for us. Of course, offices play an important role in keeping our culture. We make them a very attractive place to work, but we have always been very flexible. Also pre-pandemic, people could work partly from home. What we look at is how we can make sure that with maximum flexibility, we run this business going forward. Yeah, clear. There's been a number of changes, but looking to help our team and our merchants get through it. Clear. Thanks. Ingo, if we would move to the product side, to innovation, I'm sure a lot has happened this half year. Do you care to explain? Yeah, absolutely Ethan. I think, first of all, we continue to iterate on our full-stack strategy. We added Japan to the acquiring mix, which basically is a next step in our ambition to become a full global player and basically follow our merchants to the countries where they think it's relevant. Of course, yeah, if you want to have this global position, you need to add to the portfolio. Really pleased to see that this is live right now. Also more on specific products like Issuing, for instance. Issuing, we launched that last year in pilot mode. We've added now new use cases to the offering, which I think is very much a proof that it is a very flexible offering, where it's relatively easy to add new use cases to it. In this case, it's about expense management, which we launched for customers like Visma. Also today we announced Just Eat Takeaway.com that's going to use it for increasing their revenues and also optimizing their cost basically. We're very pleased to see that. Also on the platform side, we continue to iterate. Platforms has been very important for us over the recent years. It all started off with marketplaces, of course, with eBay as a huge win. We have now also shifted more towards the software type of businesses. We've won hospitality verticals, for instance, a company like Cloudbeds, which is using our platform now to sell to their sellers. I think that's for us, the way to reach the long tail, and of course, we're very pleased to see the huge pickup there. The last point I want to mention is all the iterations we've made on our Impact offering. We try to use our technology for the good. That's how we launched Giving last year, where merchants are helped to give donations to charities. That's being picked up by a lot of merchants. We also added this year a product which we call Restore, where we help merchants to offset the carbon emissions during transaction. All kind of great additions and iterations to our product offering, where we're very proud of. Great. Well, Issuing, Platforms, and Impact, helping our merchants with their initiatives, all sounds good. There's a lot going on. There clearly must be many questions from you all. As a reminder, you can use the Q&A functionality at the bottom of your screen to ask your questions. We'll move into that right after this. First up, we have Mo Moawalla from Goldman Sachs. Mo, please ask your question. Good afternoon, Ingo, and Pieter, and Ethan as well. Can you hear me okay? Can hear you well, Mo. Thanks. Great. I had actually a couple. First of all, just coming back on unified commerce, you've clearly had a head start in this area, even before the pandemic. I think, on the previous call, you talked about the whole mindset shifting. In the past six months or so, how much of a shift have you seen at the customer end? How has that translated for you in terms of the pipeline, in terms of the momentum, and how quickly you are able to ramp up your customers? It's interesting, the LVMH, that you talked about in the shareholder letter was quite fascinating. Keen to get your insights on how far of a competitive edge you have in this area to keep driving growth. My second question was on Issuing. I think issuing, as we are seeing from your customer wins, is very multifaceted. Be curious to understand how you see these sort of different use cases unfolding and then the cyclical effect this has with more and more additional customers. The Visma one is particularly interesting because here you're indirectly approaching the mid-market here through a kind of a technology partner. Keen to understand that, and when do you think this could start to contribute to your growth and your revenue over the medium term? Thank you. Maybe Pieter to start with the unified commerce question. What are some of the trends we saw this half year? Yeah. What you see is that unified commerce is now, it was a trend that was there, which is now even more widely embraced. It's becoming need to have. It's a reason why we win merchants. Think about The Body Shop, American Eagle. It's so much more ingrained in the expectation. What is more difficult is to prove that we don't really influence the rollout schedule of our merchants. It's more difficult to say now we see that this merchant, which was single channel, now became multichannel because of this trend. On the macro level, yes, that's what we see happening, and we see that therefore our positioning is really good. Yeah. The difference between was the timeline accelerated or did this happen where it wouldn't have happened otherwise? That's tougher to tell, but we're seeing that acceleration. On the merchant base, it's more difficult, but on the general portfolio, we see it happening. Yeah, clear. Ingo, maybe on Issuing, is there anything you want to add about the use cases that we mentioned in the shareholder letter or other use cases potentially that we could utilize? Yeah, absolutely. I think that we built Issuing for the flexibility. I think there was also large feedback from the potential merchant that we talked to back then when we started to develop, that they were looking for flexibility, so different type of use cases. We developed with, for instance, OTAs in mind, but also, on food delivery. You see now that we're all kind of new use cases. I think it's not specifically like we have a target list of five new use cases. I think the flexibility, that is key to us. That's why we strongly believe that we have something unique in hands. The fact that you can issue cards based on location, time, type of store, where you want to spend it, these are very important aspects of the product. It's a strategic play for us, so we're not expecting a lot of revenues on the short term, but of course, we're doing this to make sure that we build a stable portfolio in the long term. It's absolutely a key topic. If you look at investment from our side to further develop the product. The flexibility you talk about, that comes from the single platform, I guess? Yeah, indeed. We built this on our platform. It has potentially global reach, where we start off in Europe and U.S. Of course, we will continue to add on it. Great. Thanks. We have Sandeep Deshpande from JP Morgan. Sandeep, you'll be asked to unmute yourself, and then you can ask your question. Yeah. Hi, can you hear me? Can hear you well, Sandeep. Thanks. Hi. Thanks, Ethan. When we look at your growth, your growth was incredibly strong in the enterprise part of the business in unified commerce. When we look at that in mid-market, which has been one of your target areas, it's not as strong. What do you think you need to change there to be able to get that growth to the level you have in your core areas in enterprise and unified commerce? Is it technology or is it go to market? I have one quick follow-up on POS, which is that clearly you've been very successful in POS unified commerce. Initially, at least when at your IPO, a lot of that growth was coming from European customers. Are you seeing this POS unified commerce success in the U.S. as well? Thank you. Pieter, you want to give a comment on what we're seeing with mid-market, whether it's commercial or technical challenges that we see? Yeah. In mid-market, we're investing in a few markets, and we are growing there. It's true, it's not at the pace at where the full company grows. That's also because we're looking at what's the best strategy to execute there. That means that for those smaller merchants, we want to have them through platforms. Through those platforms, we can also provide them, say, with unified commerce. We do that with Lightspeed or Epos Now. It's early days in that market segment, so it's not something that worries us. Switching to point of sale, which was the second question, he mentions that we were focused on Europe at the start. I guess it's a global offering that we have now? Yes, that is great to see that we sign up U.S. domestic merchants for unified commerce, so for all channels. When there's complexity, that makes Adyen very attractive, and that's why you see the U.S. merchants choose for us. Yeah. Definitely a global initiative we have on the point of sale unified commerce side. Yes. True. Great. Well, thanks, Sandeep. Next up we have Hannes Leitner from UBS. Hannes, please go ahead with your question. Yes. Thank you for letting me on. I got a couple of questions as well. On the growth initiatives like Issuing, could you talk about the different use cases and economics for Adyen, and will you provide volume breakdown going forward? I'm aware that you mentioned that you don't expect too many revenues over the near term. On the unified commerce, you stated in the past new interest from supermarkets. Could you provide us with an update on that engagement? Lastly, on the acquiring license wins like in Japan and other countries in the first half, and the stated comment around airline volumes being almost back to pre-pandemic volumes. I think the full-stack contribution is quite of a surprise. Maybe you can there dissect the contribution from, for example, Japan. You stated Microsoft was one of your first customers there. How much of that was basically impacted by the existing volumes and then just like in sourcing the acquiring bit of it actually to charge through settlement? Okay, three questions. Maybe to start, Ingo, with Issuing. Maybe you can talk us through some of the use cases and how the economics work. That's okay. I think if you look at use cases, we have several use cases now live. It's for food delivery, for instance, where Glovo has been the most important example, where couriers go to supermarkets to pick up goods, and we issue a virtual card or a physical card with a specific amount for a certain period of time. We just talked about expense management for Visma and for Takeaway.com. These are now use cases. OTAs is another use case where we could issue virtual cards. With the travel industry now still not completely rebounding, that's more a longer-term play, but we certainly think that our platform is very well suited for it. The good thing is that if you look at the economics, it's very similar to how we make margin on the acquiring side. There is a number of basis points that we earn on the interchange fee. Interchange fee typically goes to the issuer. We're issuer now. We share those revenues together with our merchant. Depending on the type of the deal, the location, the number of cards, et cetera, we agree a certain rev share basically with the merchant. On top of that, we charge a fee for our platform, which is very similar to a gateway fee on the acquiring side. I think from an economics perspective, there are a lot of similarities with acquiring. Currently it's still early stage. We haven't given any forecast for Issuing specifically, but of course, on the long term, we hope that this will contribute to our revenues in a significant way. On unified commerce, you mentioned supermarkets specifically. Do either of you like to share something on an update there? Yeah. I can say a few words on supermarkets. I think the supermarkets also with the current pandemic have started to think about, okay, what else can we do to make sure that we have the right touchpoint with consumers? You get all kind of different customer journeys, curbside pickups, in-app ordering, and that's exactly where we're good at. That's why we started to work with supermarkets to help them out. Of course, the high volume processing in supermarkets is typically not the first thing they talk about. If you want to have an integrated approach to payments, that's the long-term objective, of course, to get that on our platform as well. We're very excited in this area, and so far I can't announce any new deals, but it's of course given the fact that payments is so strategic for this vertical, we're the right partner to work with. Yeah, the trend towards unified commerce in many verticals we're seeing there as well. Yeah, exactly. I think for me, that's the key learning from this pandemic, that payments, I think a lot of businesses have seen how strategic payments is to basically enable their business. That's where we like to help out. Great. On the last question about our increasing full-stack percentage? Yeah. Is there any color that you'd like to give maybe, Ingo, about why that's increasing and what's driving that? The most important factor that is driving the full-stack percentage is of course that we have more acquiring on our platform. I think the question that Hannes just raised around, okay, but how does that work with travel if travel is back? I think it's fair to say that we were just talking about the last week of June is almost the same now as the last or the first week when the pandemic started. If you look at the full half year, travel volumes are still very low, but we see it picking up again, both on airline side in the U.S., but also OTAs globally, because a lot of people have local travel, go to hotels, et cetera. That's what we see returning right now. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, the rest of the platform did see growth. Absolutely. Yeah. Great. All right. Next up, we have a few questions from Adam Wood of Morgan Stanley. He's unable to join our call, but I will ask the questions on his behalf. There are two questions. One is that there are a few licenses which have been added, especially in the U.S. What do they enable for us? Is it about customer service, our cost to deliver, our breadth of our offering, or something else? Maybe we can start with that one, Pieter, and then we can go to the second question. If we look at licenses, this is about customer service. We're looking at what's the best way to service our customer, and I think that the cost of working with a partner for the license, that is not that significant. That's not the reason to do it. When we look at our licensing structure, we look at what is the best way to service our merchants, and you should look at it in that light, not in a cost-saving light. Makes sense. Great. The second question he had was, will you have all periods where investments go up more, or should we broadly expect you to be able to offset a large part of take rate degradation with the operating leverage you have in the business? Maybe for you, Ingo? Absolutely. I think if you look at our business model, there's a clear split between how we basically earn our revenues and the cost side of the business. On the revenue side, we have always had this approach where if you bring more volume as a merchant to our platform, your price per transaction goes down. We want to make sure that absolute margins with that customer grow over time. Of course, if you bring more process volume, the take rate indeed declines. That's a positive outcome of our business strategy. On the cost side, the cost side is mostly related to building the team, paying for our housing, the IT infrastructure, and that's unrelated to the revenue side. The marginal cost of a transaction is basically zero, and therefore, we think that we have a lot of operating leverage in the business. Of course, on the CapEx side, we continue to invest in building out our platform. Over this half year, we initiated a couple of new projects to do this. But if you look then on the ratio between basically EBITDA growth and volume growth, that's very much in line, and that's something we're very proud of. Clear. Thanks. Next up, we have Timothy Chiodo from Credit Suisse. Timothy, please go ahead with your question. Great. Thanks, Ethan. Appreciate you taking the question. My question relates to some of the platforms comments and the dominant business model comments. When you think about the underlying SMB payments opportunity that resides within or underneath those platforms, what is a rough percentage that you think about in terms of SMB volumes running through platforms versus being sold either SMB direct or otherwise separately in terms of the payments? The follow-up to that is, in addition to you already have payments, you have payouts, you have Issuing, what are some of the additional embedded financial services that you could offer those platforms longer term? Things like capital, payroll services, bank accounts, tax prep, et cetera. Maybe Pieter to start. Think about our approach to the mid-market or the long tail, and we talk about platforms or going direct. How do we see those two playing into our strategy? You see that platforms become very attractive way for SMB businesses to operate. You see that we invest in that, and they have a large take-up. This is a moving area, where indeed you do see that it becomes more attractive to run over a platform. Would you say that both of those are important to our business, or? We, of course, have an enormous track record in servicing larger merchants and being an invisible partner, and that's exactly what we do with the platform. We make them excel without being visible ourselves. Yeah. Clear. Ingo, maybe on the embedded financial services question, any plans? Yeah. No, I think we continue to work with our platforms to see what is next. At the moment, we have nothing new to announce. Of course, these are the logical questions to ask, like what kind of products could you potentially offer to sellers? We want to make sure that we have the flexibility to offer new products. It's absolutely an area where we closely look at, and once we have things available, we will let you know. Yeah. Clear. Thanks. Next up, we have James Goodman from Barclays. James, please go ahead with your question. Oh, good afternoon. Thank you very much. Yeah. Maybe a couple from me, please, as well. Firstly, just on the employee, the headcount ramp. I think you added just over 200 employees in the period. That's actually less than you added in either of the last two six-month periods. Presumably, the rate of absorption you speak to in terms of employee onboarding is a little higher than currently. Basically, have there been some challenges to hiring there or something in employee churn, or is it simply the case that Adyen doesn't need to continue to hire at the rate at which you were doing in the second half last year? Then just maybe coming back to the top line development and from a regional perspective, North America, extremely strong. Clearly a couple of specific client ramps there. Specifically on the domestic U.S. opportunity, you call that out in the shareholder letter as well. Just wondering if you can add some context there in terms of sort of broad competitive displacement or specifically outline the drivers that are now helping you on the domestic opportunity as opposed to helping U.S. merchants internationally? Thank you. Pieter, maybe if we start with how we're building the team, and then we move to the U.S. afterwards? Yeah. We keep the bar high. We've been able to attract talented people. We don't specifically guide on how many people we hire per quarter or per half year. We do see, though, that some people who need to move couldn't do that because of COVID. There is some impact there. They'll come later, so that will be post-pandemic. The second part of the question? It's on our U.S. business, and why now can we start to win domestic when we couldn't with Adyen before? It's a timing question, because that's a service which we first had live in Europe, and then it only came later into the U.S. The majority of our business is, of course, Well, we matured as a business, so we are now such a logical partner for that you see that happening now at scale. It's, from my point of view, pure timing. Yeah. Of course, we grew an office there, we grew a presence there, we grew references there. You cannot hit the ground running from day one. You wish, but that takes time. Yeah. Ingo, looks like you have something to add? I wanted to add, I think what you see in the U.S. is that the unified commerce leads to additional complexity, which we can solve. I think that's having all those different type of customer journeys is a key topic also for U.S. retailers. We're one of the few potential companies that could actually offer this, and that's why we see traction. I think on the online side, I think there is also more complexity with all the local U.S. debit networks where we have an offering, so we can optimize routing in U.S. That's why you also see more and more U.S. players to route domestic traffic to us. Yeah, clear. While we've been working with U.S. companies for a long time, the complexity in the domestic market is rather new, and that's giving us a chance to win there as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Clear. Great. Next up, we have Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW. Sanjay, please go ahead. Hi, this is Vasu Govil for Sanjay. Can you guys hear me? Yes, we hear you well. Go ahead. Thank you. Thanks for taking my question. I guess first I wanted to follow up on the question about the banking license approval in the U.S. Could you maybe give us a little bit more detail on how your product roadmap in the U.S. might evolve as a result of that license? The second question I had was just, you've seen pretty strong growth. You called out travel volumes are rebounding. As we think about the other verticals where COVID sort of pressured volumes, what have you seen in terms of where we stand now in terms of normalization of those volumes? Would that continue to be a tailwind into the back half as some of those volumes come back? Thank you. Yeah. Ingo, maybe the U.S. banking license, or branch license rather, how that impacts our product roadmap there? Yeah. I think one of the main reasons to apply for the banking license is what Pieter just mentioned, is to improve our service levels for our merchants. I think the key thing, what we can do is settle directly to merchants, so having no dependencies on any third-party banks. I think that's a very similar thing that we have done in Europe, for instance, over the past years. That's, of course, part of our product promise, that we want to have full control over our value chain. That's really appreciated by our merchants. That's the first thing that we going to do, and probably also, well, that's why I'm CFO, probably one of the most important things, because if you have full control over the payout of your cash, then of course you're in a way better position than if you're dependent upon third parties. Yeah. Makes a ton of sense. Yeah. If we think of some of the more macroeconomic trends, Pieter, you mentioned travel, but could be in-store volumes we saw specifically in retail. Anything that you can add to give context there on what we've seen on the platform? Well, what I think is amazing that we have seen how point of sale now doubled. Yeah. That's despite that not all stores around the world are open. You see that the team has been very flexible in helping merchants to roll out. Other macroeconomic trends, do you have things to add? I think if you typically think about the retail sector, they are one of the sectors, together with travel, that are mostly hit by the pandemic with all the stores closed. I think one of the strategic discussions we have had with a lot of retailers, like how can we further implement a multi-channel strategy? I think that's what you see right now also for the upcoming period, like how can we do more implementations? How do we make sure that we add another channel to the mix? I think if the pandemic is over, of course, we expect in-store travel or in-store traffic to be back at original levels. At the same time, we strongly believe that we have added our install base quite significantly. That makes the total pie way bigger than pre-pandemic. Clear. Yeah. Thanks. Next up, we have Jeff Cantwell. Jeff, please go ahead. Hey, can you hear me? Yep, can hear you well. Go ahead. Hey, great. Thanks so much, and congrats on the results. It seems to be one of the key topics. Can you talk a little more about North America right now? The region's now 22% of the net revenue of the company. Maybe just talk a little more about the reasons why you think you're getting those volumes, either from competition or from new use cases, so to speak. Do you see any further opportunity to do that with other Adyen customers beyond those which you are currently processing? The second question is, just to kind of piggyback on that last one, can you just discuss a little more about the U.S. banking charter in terms of where those impacts will show up in the financial model? I was under the impression there might be some impact to your cost, for example. Just curious if you could discuss that a little bit. Thank you. Ingo, maybe on both, on the net revenue contribution in the U.S. and the U.S. banking license? Yeah, sure. I think for the U.S., we will continue to work with our current customers to add new channels to the mix. I think if you have more and more showcases that unified commerce works, it's easier to sell it to other existing merchants. At the same time, also a lot of new retailers we're in talks with. Of course, we also have the platform business that is becoming more and more important in the U.S., where we are one of the few companies that can actually offer unified commerce through platforms. Having a point-of-sale offering on platforms is also a very strong offering in the U.S. That's why we expect to further grow our U.S. domestic volumes in the next years, and that the investment that we have made over the past decade will further increase. On the banking charter, I think if you look at the economics, in the end, it's more about service levels than economics. Acquiring, we're still working with BIN partners in the U.S. Even if we could get that ourselves, that's not going to make a huge difference in the economics because we have huge volumes in the U.S., so we have quite attractive pricing already with our BIN sponsors. They're great partners. It's all about making sure that we get from a settlement perspective to the best service levels. If you grow at the pace that we do, that is a very important factor. You can't miss out a payment because you're relying on a third-party settlement bank. Specifically in the platform business, that's a key thing that we have learned. Those are all small sellers. They're waiting every day for their cash. They want to pay out, for instance, their wages. You need to make sure that you never miss a settlement. By having full control over settlement, it sounds like a silly thing, but it's very important. Clear. Yeah. Much more about service levels than about a cost driver that we should expect. Exactly. Of course, there's some cost optimizations possible. Yeah. That's not a key thing. That is, I think, very similar to what we have done in Europe. Also, when we applied for the banking license in Europe, we never thought, like, okay, this is going to be a huge cost optimization. It's mainly because we wanted to improve the service levels, and that's also the feedback that we have gotten from merchants that, yeah, payout has become more stable than in the past. Clear. Thanks. Well, next up, we have Jamie Friedman from Susquehanna. Jamie, please go ahead. Hi, good afternoon, good morning. I wanted to ask, directed to Pieter and your recent comments on point of sale and the strategic significance of point of sale. I was just wondering, does point of sale from your experience always follow e-commerce and omni, or do you have any instances you're seeing where the point of sale comes first and the others actually follow? Yeah, we have seen many examples where the merchant said point of sale is so complex for us to run that in multiple countries that first we'll migrate point of sale to you and then online volumes will follow. It's not always omnichannel or unified commerce, but it indeed is our separate choices. What I like about it is that we have such a track record in e-com that you now see how we build our track record in point of sale, that makes us the unified commerce player. Great. Ethan, if I could just sneak in one more? Yeah, no problem, Jamie. Go ahead. It seems like there's such a proliferation of wallets and funding sources in the world. I know there's a fair amount of detail on your website about what funding sources you accept locally in places like Brazil. I was just wondering, is that a technological challenge for the company and the industry, or is that, in the scheme of things, relatively easy to address? It's a form of complexity that we're good at solving. What you see is that different shoppers have different preferences to pay. You see people traveling now again a little bit more than the year before. That means that they want to pay with that payment method, and that increases conversion. For us to be able to supply those services, that helps merchants choosing for us. It's complexity that we take away. We don't see it as a challenge. We see it as a specialism that we're very good at. Thank you. Thanks. Next up, we have Paul Kratz from Jefferies. Paul, go ahead. Hi. Thank you very much for letting me ask a question. I guess for ROLLER and Lightspeed, these are both vertical specific software kind of dash hardware vendors. How should we think about those relationships in terms of exclusivity and how they go to market with your product? Maybe then also to what extent do you tailor your offer for these platforms, or is the innovation really more led by the platform themselves and leveraging, I guess, your API documentation and everything to kind of come up with new features using your platform? Thanks. Ingo? Yeah, if you look at those players, we work closely with them. We are the party in the background, so they typically manage the relationship with the sellers. They have a good integration, they understand the needs, but they're often lacking, yeah, the best payment implementation. That's when we are going to help, but we're often not visible. That's also the type of role that we like. It's a very good implementation of our Adyen for Platforms implementation. Yeah, we will continue to focus on this also for other platforms or other verticals where it is relevant. It's a very generic implementation, so if we build something, we want to make it available for all merchants. That also means that we want to make it available for all platforms. We don't do any tailor-made work for those players. We just use the standard functionality of the platform. I think that's also the strength of our platform. Yeah. Clear. Great. Next up, we have David Togut from Evercore ISI. David, please go ahead. Thank you very much for taking my question. One of the main themes of the pandemic and payments has been the increased demand for liquidity for many participants in the payment ecosystem. In certain parts of merchant acquiring, for example, in Brazil, acquirers actually charge a premium for liquidity. You've had a lot of success with same-day settlement to cash in Europe through your banking license, and you don't seem to be charging for that greater liquidity. Should we expect that feature to roll out in the U.S. once you have your federal bank license? How important do you expect that to be to your future growth in the U.S. if, in fact, you offer same-day settlement to cash without a charge to the retailer? Ingo? Yeah. The same-day settlement started basically as a reconciliation product. To basically make the life of our retailers easier, that basically today's sales, you immediately get paid out, and that you fully understand which transactions are in, and that is partly pre-funding. If it is really the same day or next day, it comes with a fee. We don't do that for free because it has this pre-funding. If we do it the next day or the day after, we offer it for free. It depends a bit on also the liquidity pattern of our merchants. Typically, we have the philosophy that if we have to attract funds for it, we need to charge for it because we want to have profitable business in our books. I think that's in Europe, that's in each region where we offer this product. Of course, we were just referring to Brazil. Brazil is very specific with the 30-day settlement delay and all kind of products around that, including anticipations, where I can talk hours about. I know you can. That's a lot of fun. Great. Thanks. Now we're up with our last question. We actually now have Adam Wood back in the call. I asked a couple of questions earlier on his behalf, but he's now here. Adam, do you mind going ahead with your question? Are you here? Yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, we hear you well. Perfect. It's very kind of you to take a couple of extra ones from me. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Maybe could we just talk about the U.S., first of all? Another period of very strong acceleration in that business. Obviously, we're aware of a big merchant ramp-up there. Could you give us a feel in terms of maybe from both a net revenue standpoint, but also more importantly from a pipeline standpoint, X that merchant ramp-up. Are you seeing a similar kind of acceleration in the U.S. business in terms of the business that you're doing and the pipeline that you're building in that market? Maybe a second one that you alluded to in the financial statements, you talked about Strong Customer Authentication in Europe being a major driver. Where are we on that, do you think? Are merchants kind of at the early stages of dealing with this? Are we actually kind of midway through it? Do you see competitors coming up with anything similar to what you've managed to come up with to deal with that Strong Customer Authentication issue in the European market? Thank you. Let's start with the U.S. Is that single merchant-driven, or is that across the width of the platform? Yeah, it's across the width of the platform. I think that's the most important thing that we have seen over the first half year. The growth is from big merchants. Adam, you're referring to as the single big merchant is eBay. eBay has been important to us. They also announced in their earnings results that they are happy with performance so far. Also we benefited from this. That's not the reason why we're growing at this pace. It's across the width of the merchant base, and that's also why we're so pleased with it. If you look at the pipeline, that's, I think, very similar. We're working on a lot of potential new deals. We're adding new merchants to our platform, we feel very comfortable in that position. Great. Moving to the next question on PSD2, and then specifically Strong Customer Authentication. Are there any trends that we've seen already playing out here in Europe as it's being implemented? Yeah. Well, it is being implemented right now, or it is live now. We see that it's a great way to get in touch with new customers because they see the flaws if it doesn't work well. I think everyone that lives in Europe knows those situations where you want to pay something online, and you get to the second factor, and second factor doesn't work as you expect it to be, or you route it and it doesn't work. I think our technology, because we have everything in-house, is built in a way that you get to the highest conversion levels. That's what leading merchants in Europe now see, and that's why they start to work with us. Will this have a spillover effect to next periods? Absolutely. I think that more and more retailers realize that if you implement it in the wrong way, that you actually lose a lot of conversion. Yeah, in the end, if you run large volumes on the platform, conversion is very important. Yeah, that's how we hope to change this into a benefit for us, to help merchants get better conversion. That complexity word comes up again, another area where we're seeing more and more complexity to solve for. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Great. Well, that wraps up the Q&A portion of today's session. Thank you all for your questions. Thank you, Pieter, thank you, Ingo, for spending time with us today. Thanks, Ethan. Yeah. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks. It's been very enjoyable. Hope you've enjoyed your time with us. Goodbye from Amsterdam. Take care.