Adyen Canada country manager Sander Meijers talks about fintech’s tough years

by James · December 31, 2022

Adyen, the Dutch payment service provider, is not in an easy business right now.

Fintech companies have largely had a bleak 2022, with inflation and high fuel prices forcing companies to rethink their growth plan.

Stripe, a competitor to Adyen, had to let 14 percent of its employees go this year.

But Adyen has managed to avoid this fate through deliberate, careful hiring and a very long-term time frame.

“We hire for a marathon, not a sprint,” says Sander Meijers, country manager of Adyen Canada.

In fact, Adyen is looking to expand its Canadian operations and take up business with major Canadian retailers and platforms, just another part of the company’s global growth plan. Adyen is currently in 23 countries around the world, everywhere from London to (as of 2020) Dubai. Having been profitable since 2011, the Dutch company is slowly but surely taking its e-commerce and point of sale, along with EU and US banking, everywhere.

Meijers himself moved with his family from Amsterdam to Toronto in 2022 to oversee the Canadian team in person. He spoke to the Star in November about the e-commerce/bricks and mortar debate, cycling in the city and how Adyen can deal with an impending recession:

What made you decide to move to Canada?

Apart from the job opportunity, Canada is a country that my family and I have been looking at for many years. We have wanted to go on a motorhome holiday and travel the west coast. It was always our dream, to see BC and have killer whales swimming in the background. We are an outdoor family. We like to ski, we like to ice skate, and we are always near water.

So the opportunity to be in Canada doing a job I really love was a no-brainer. The children are at an age where they can move. So it was a very good opportunity, personally and professionally.

Given that you’re from Amsterdam, what are your thoughts on cycling in Toronto?

I still ride my bike to work every day. I used the bike like a real Dutchman does. The traffic in Toronto is horrible. The TTC cars also travel in traffic, so they don’t work either. I live in The Beach now, with my family, and I use my electric bike to go downtown every day.

It’s actually been great. It’s super fast. I have a great view of the lake at the beginning of my commute. So I hope to do this as long as I can, until winter really comes. But I feel like it’s actually the best way to get around Toronto, to be honest, especially if you’re Dutch.

Many Canadians are very familiar with Stripe. How would you compare what you do to what Stripe does?

Stripe is a competitor, but Stripe and Adyen have the same mission: to exchange payments for cross-income opportunities. The difference between us is from a regional perspective. I don’t think any company is as global as Adyen. Our one platform, which you can use online and in-store globally, is something Stripe won’t be able to do in exactly the same way.

Another differentiating factor is our banking licenses in both Europe and the US, which really help us leverage financial products that other payment service providers cannot offer.

You don’t really think the concept of in-person shopping and e-commerce are at odds with each other. Do you mind explaining why?

If you were to ask many years ago if someone would buy an expensive jacket on the internet, people would say “no way”. Today, people buy cars online. The world changed from only having physical sales to both physical and e-commerce. Every store should think about “omnichannel”, how to reach customers both online and in store

We have now entered a phase where shopping in a physical store and online should have the same experience. These boundaries are really starting to disappear. To be able to do that, you can’t have two different teams handling every aspect of shopping if they don’t work together. How would you ever recognize a shopper who bought ten items in the store if the IT systems have no idea and have never been connected?

It really shouldn’t be relevant to a shopper whether a product comes from a website environment or from a store.

The problem with online shopping is, of course, that you can’t pick up orders right away. Meanwhile, shoppers may find an item online and not be able to pick it up in store. How should retailers deal with this pain point?

Adyen does not work with inventory management. I think it’s a question retailers think about every day, shorten delivery time. What we can do is make sure that the payment is very clear to the store selling a product and they don’t have to wait until the next day to see if the payment has been made. Everything is going to be in the same system, on the same back.

Adyen has existed in Europe for a very long time. You’ve only expanded into North America in the last 10 years. What kind of opportunity did you see here?

We opened offices in North America, first in San Francisco, in 2012. We’ve been around for quite some time. I think the opportunity for us goes back to the idea of unified trade. We have created this one platform where it does not matter whether you use it on a terminal in a store or buy online. It is one platform.

Every company we’ve talked to in signings over the years basically had a shared setup. They had two different platforms. One for store, one for online, and it was just a problem. As e-commerce became more and more common, these companies built out e-commerce teams that never talked to their point-of-sale systems.

It was an opportunity we discovered very early on, which we acted on in Europe. There is no reason why Canada should be any different. It is obvious that the opportunity is huge due to the size of the stores that are going after these challenges.

Are there any brands you’d like to work with that don’t currently work with Adyen?

If you were to go through the top 200 sellers in North America, there are many that we don’t work with. That said, we work with a few big ones like Footlocker and the Gap. In Canada, more specifically, we work with the likes of Bouclair. We also have a presence in the platform space, so companies like Lightspeed. We just announced a deal with Instacart. They are also dealers, but they run dealers. They are the companies behind the merchants who sell their goods.

We also work with digital companies that sell purely digital goods or deliver digital services. Think Spotify or Uber. There are opportunities in all of these areas, and there are major brands in all of these areas across Canada.

Does Adyen have a banking license in Canada? If not, is it in the cards?

Not today. We really want to benefit all our sellers when we build something. It is not a question of whether we want to do it, yes or no. Yes we do. It is a question of when is the right time to venture into the banking space.

Do you see that coming for your Canada operations in the future?

I think so. There are interesting conversations in the Canadian financial market, around real-time rail payment systems to support payments within seconds. Just as an example, I had to move some money around Canada. The bank branch told me to take a check and bring it to another bank.

To me it was the strangest thing. It sounded so old fashioned. It opened my eyes and made me feel like we could make our technology work for the banking space in Canada at some point. They can make banking so much safer, easier and faster.

The coming recession will really affect small businesses. Do you have a strategy in case small businesses start to cut back on spending, and maybe cut out Adyen?

We are here for everyone who runs a business. If you transact, whether through e-commerce or in-store or through digital service, we’re here to help, and we’re here to help our consumers get through a pandemic – like we just did – and to get through a recession.

I don’t think there’s one game plan for it. It is a merchant-to-merchant play. If you are a company with us, we are happy to explore what we can do.

This interview has been edited for length