Adyen co-founder: Europe does not need more ambition. It needs to stop hiding it

The author reflects on Adyen’s IPO success (Europe’s most valuable fintech at the time) and then highlights a new venture: launching Noah in ~2025 (~a little over a year after meeting the co-founder in March 2024) to build “infrastructure for money that moves at the speed of the internet,” focused on stablecoins. The piece argues that Europe should be more open about its ambitions and storytelling to attract talent and capital, implying positive momentum for stablecoin-based payments infrastructure without providing financial figures. Overall, it’s constructive thought leadership rather than a new earnings or market-moving update.

Analysis

The investable angle is not the founder commentary itself; it is the reinforcement that payments is shifting from pure take-rate economics to a narrative + infrastructure race. That favors high-credibility platforms with enterprise distribution and global reach — ADYEY and, more selectively, WIZEY — because they can absorb stablecoin rails without being forced into a race to the bottom on pricing. GPN is structurally more exposed if alternative settlement rails keep compressing merchant economics, since its moat is more scale/processing efficiency than product differentiation.

Near term, this is mostly a sentiment and positioning event, not a fundamentals event. The first real catalyst would be partner announcements, stablecoin settlement pilots, or disclosure that enterprise clients are asking for faster cross-border or treasury functionality; absent that, the trade works only if investors begin to pay for optionality in fintech infra. Over 6-18 months, stablecoins matter most in cross-border B2B payments, remittance, and treasury management, where they can reduce working-capital float and pressure card/acquiring economics.

The contrarian point is that the market may overstate how quickly stablecoins translate into revenue. Regulation, AML/KYC, bank sponsorship, and FX conversion still sit between the concept and scalable profits, so many crypto-adjacent stories will remain pilots. The more durable mispricing is that public-market investors still tend to underwrite European fintechs as "execution stories" rather than platform compounding stories; if ADYEY can keep taking share without hype, multiple expansion is possible even before earnings inflect.

NOAH is not a clean public-market expression here; the listed ticker is not the same as the founder’s private venture, so I would treat it as a watchlist item only. If stablecoin adoption accelerates, the likely losers are legacy processors and cross-border incumbents, not the headline crypto names.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long ADYEY / short GPN as a 3-6 month relative-value pair: ADYEY has more optionality from global enterprise payment flows and can participate in new rails without needing a complete business model reset; GPN faces greater fee compression risk if merchants gain alternative settlement options. Falsifier: any evidence that Adyen growth is stalling or GPN reaccelerates take-rate expansion.
• Add WIZEY on pullbacks as a 6-12 month thematic long: it is better positioned than most incumbents to benefit if lower-cost cross-border settlement becomes a mainstream feature rather than a niche crypto use case. Risk/reward is favorable only if management shows product integration or partner traction; otherwise treat as a watch item.
• Do not chase NOAH as a public proxy for the private venture story; there is no clean listed read-through. Use it only as an alert for broader stablecoin infrastructure sentiment, not as a directional trade.
• Set a catalyst alert on any stablecoin partnership, banking license, or enterprise settlement pilot from ADYEY/WIZEY: if announced, expect a 5-10% multiple re-rate in the following 1-3 months; if absent by next earnings cycle, fade the thematic enthusiasm.
• If the market starts pricing stablecoins as a real substitute for cross-border card/FX flows, rotate out of GPN into ADYEY/WIZEY; if regulation tightens or volumes stay pilot-sized, unwind the pair and keep GPN neutral rather than outright short.