Techquity
Technology Investor, Fundamental Research
Adyen's Orb acquisition is not bad news because Adyen says it is keeping its single, unified platform. Orb brings a new value proposition and will help Adyen with complex billing while staying fairly autonomous, and the deal adds no debt. Two acquisitions in six months is surprising given Adyen's mentality, as @jarodjmnz noted, but the market has welcomed the latest one. x.com x.com x.com
Adyen wins by being the best rather than the cheapest, so fears of commoditization and price wars are misplaced. Its single, self-built global platform processes payments faster, cheaper and with less fraud for giants like Netflix, Uber and Spotify, driving very high enterprise win rates. Embedded finance and in-person POS expand a huge market, and it has massive operating margins, high ROIC, no debt and long-term management. Valuation drops on short-term fears are a massive opportunity. x.com
Adyen's AI subscription is eating into commodity payment offerings, and its own AI data centers should pay off far better than buybacks over the long term despite a slower payoff. Two-thirds of new customers already take the subscription; only Adyen and Stripe are ready for the future of payments. Morningstar sees a 42% discount to €1,620, a five-star price and a wide moat expected to last at least 20 years. Adyen remains one of the best opportunities for patient long-term investors. x.com x.com … Show more
Adyen trades at the lowest multiple in its history despite compounding revenue at a 36% CAGR over 10 years while sustaining a roughly 40% net margin. The latest 11% drop came on renewed competition fears. x.com
Adyen's slowing growth and hard-to-estimate return on its billing investment make the stock increasingly difficult to underwrite. Management reduced its 2026 revenue-growth outlook twice; the margin cut reflects plans to hire about 1,000 people for billing, but the return on that upfront investment is difficult to estimate. x.com
Marqeta could get a bid as a play on virtual cards for agentic payment flows, and it is cheap at 5x EBITDA with low-double-digit growth. Peers like RingCentral, Five9, Fastly, Akamai and Bandwidth trade at premium multiples relative to growth, and Marqeta could plausibly get the same. Renewal questions remain, and Stripe Link stays the default for some AI apps, but new apps may partner with Marqeta or dual-source. x.com x.com
Shift4 Payments has too many red flags to own, with Jared Isaacman's departure the final straw, and there are many better opportunities elsewhere. The company did too many acquisitions too quickly; Global Blue looks like a mistake for now, though the deal can still work if Shift4 upsells and cross-sells its 300,000+ merchants. x.com x.com
PayPal's large put-selling accumulation now has an explanation: Stripe and Advent have offered to buy it for $53 billion, per Reuters. The stock also fits a hardware-to-software rotation theme. x.com
Mastercard is gradually becoming an enterprise software company built on one of the world's largest payment networks, which makes it very hard to displace. Value-added services, about 40% of sales, grew 20%, twice as fast as payments. Sales rose 14% and EPS 21%, while operating margin widened from 58.7% to 60.2%. It bought back $4.9B of stock and paid $771M in dividends. Debt rose from $18.3B to $22.2B, but its large, predictable free cash flow keeps that leverage manageable. x.com x.com
dLocal sits in payment processing, a sector that 30 years of data show to be dead because margins are low. Fintech is just software, without the asset leverage that banks have. dLocal fell about 11% after EPS of $0.14 missed the $0.15 estimate, per TrendSpider. x.com x.com x.com
Visa and Mastercard run the most powerful business model ever built: operational efficiency wins market share, share lifts profitability, profits are reinvested at high returns, and that deepens efficiency, repeating forever. As a duopoly, they crush the weakest rivals rather than competing with the best, and the market is split only two ways. x.com
dLocal could be the Adyen of emerging markets, quietly building payment rails for the next billion consumers. It combines 25-30%+ growth, expanding margins and solid 2026 guidance with a surprisingly low valuation. x.com
