Adyen, whose valuation is now close to 50 billion euros, has announced the launch of an alternative credit offer quite different from the traditional bank loan. To grant it, the platform relies on a company's current or future revenues rather than its balance sheet: revenue-based financing.
Financing with a low cost of risk
Founded in 2006 by a group of entrepreneurs including Pieter van der Does, the current CEO, Adyen's aim is to support the growth of companies by providing them with a platform capable of meeting their changing needs.
Present in over 27 countries, Adyen offers a unique platform for accepting payments, protecting business revenues and managing finances. The payments giant recently took a further step into the banking world by launching a business financing service based on merchant revenues.
Adyen's CEO believes that the small business loan market is poorly served by banks, because "you need to gather a lot of information about the business for risk analysis, and worry about recovering the funds", he explains to Les Echos.
For its part,Adyen believes it has the necessary tools to assess a company's financial health and "offer financing with a low cost of risk". It has to be said that the platform manages particularly large transaction flows, enabling it to gather information at source.
This new financing offer will be available across all marketplace platforms that work with Adyen, including Shopify and eBay.
Competing with banks
Adyen is not the only player to offer this type of loan. Irish-American startup Stripe, already present in 46 countries, has begun offering banking services in the United States with loan solutions for small businesses and bank card services. The company has even launched a payment box service for its in-store customers. French companies Karmen, Morino and Unlimitd also offer similar services.
"The difference with our competitors is that we don't proceed by acquisition, but develop everything ourselves. This takes a little longer, but once developed, the solution can be made available to all our customers in an instant", Pieter van der Does tells Les Echos newspaper.
With this new service, Adyen aims to meet the needs of tech players and help them realize their ambitions more quickly. To appeal to small businesses, whose business model is often misunderstood by banks, the payments giant is highlighting its banking infrastructure integrated with its unique platform, enabling it to remove the limitations of traditional financial systems and offer its future customers "unrivalled flexibility".