This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
You can read the complete WIRED 100 here "Someone forwarded me a tweet from a big guy in Silicon Valley saying: 'Today I spoke to four companies who claim to be Adyen's largest customer – wow, those guys are nailing it'," Pieter Van der Does, Adyen's co-founder, president and CEO, laughs. "That summarises it pretty well, actually..."
The Dutch online-payments company's rise has been rapid. Launched in 2006, Adyen now handles 187 different currencies serving 3,500 businesses across the world, including Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify and Groupon. At the end of 2014, Van der Does raised $250 million -- which values the company at $1.5 billion -- to fund a move to physical retail. "For a merchant it's horrible to have one system for online and another for point of sale," he explains. "Historically, point of sale was a hard-coded machine linked to your bank, but it's moving to something very comparable to the internet. So you don't need to sign up for 30 different connections at 30 different terminals. Now you can have one terminal to Adyen."
Clothing stores Superdry and Moss Bros, as well as hotel chain CitizenM, have signed up and several other fashion retailers are on the way.
As a result, Van der Does' vision goes beyond multiple forms of payment to risk and identity management.
shopping online Europe -- is that a fraud alert? There are many Israeli developers working in New York and sooner or later they'll buy something in Europe. I've been to many presentations about big data and they all boil down to: if you have small children and you go to a supermarket, they tell you to get diapers. We're going to prove there's more subtle solutions for big data."
It's a level of ambition Van der Does, 45, has nursed from the start of his career, when he quit the executive-training programme at Dutch bank ING because banking didn't feel entrepreneurial. Prior to Adyen he was CCO at Bibit, the payment service provider acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2004. He left two years later. "The skilled IT people were saying, 'RBS is centralising. They are not so happy about us and we are not so happy about them -- so we're thinking about leaving. Are you guys up for doing something?' We saw the opportunity to get this team together and started Adyen -- which means," he laughs, "all over again."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
