Payments 3.0: Stripe And Adyen Vs. The Others

Ask any fintech or payments analyst and they will tell you: all eyes are on Stripe and Adyen. But with a continually delayed, yet always ‘just around the corner’, IPO for Stripe and a recent 40% decline in stock price for Adyen we must ask ourselves – is the future of payments actually somewhere else? My money is on the field.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote Why Software is Eating the World. Fast forward to 2022 when lead Credit Suisse (now UBS) payments analyst Tim Chiodo and his team published their comprehensive report on all things Payments, Processors & Fintech where you can see the evolution of this trend and its extension into the world of payments with their fresh take “If Software Is Eating the World…Payments Is Taking a Bite”. Yet while cloud computing and API services have exploded in recent years making a distributed systems approach to architecture the de facto for most cutting-edge organizations, payments has remained mostly centralized – until now. We are about to enter a critical period where individual payment-related services get unbundled and when, where, and how they get rebundled is going to shape the future of the payments ecosystem.