Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by testfoobar | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

testfoobar

This feels rich. Compare:

Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance.

PayPal: $41.51B right now.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/

View on HN

It does seem like a lot, but if you look at growth rates, the differences are significant.

Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less.

They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.

Adyen is behind Stripe when it comes to small enterprises but ahead on large enterprises and especially global merchants. They also have scaled back on digital merchants which you can lose easily and focus more on unified commerce, their growth is a lot higher quality. They also report growth differently - ex fees to schemes and banks. Stripe will be on the hook if banks and schemes raise their fees. You also dont know what margin stripe has, just say robust which is enough for the crowd on wallstreet of course but I digress. The fact is Stripe is a good company, but its valuation is set in a room while Adyen's valuation is set on the market 80% of which is pods trading back and forth.

Stripe is reportedly proposing to buy PayPal.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/paypal-stock-stripe-acquisit...

I hope they'll execute this one well.

Have been waiting for a wallet product from Stripe for a while, but maybe less juicy margins than on top of credit card fees?

They have Their Link.com product which integrates pretty seamlessly. It just doesn't store balances or anything akin to PayPal, Venmo, Cashapp, Apple Pay/Cash, etc.

PayPal is steadily decreasing in share of web payments, with the one redeeming part of their business being Venmo, which appears to be crushing Cash App.

Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use.

Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".

This is purely speculation on my end but paypal has too much friction from a consumer standpoint for me.

I pay mostly with credit card (debit really but entering the number etc). When paying with PayPal, I need to click through several screens to even be able to enter my details. They almost always show a login screen, then I have to find the small text at the bottom that says I dont want one. Then by default they want my SEPA details, which Im not going to give them, before allowing me to select Credit Card. Even then I still have to double check that the "Create PayPal Account" checkbox is unchecked before paying.

Stripe immediately shows you a form and doesn't ask any questions.

Of course, the thing to note about PYPL is the absolute jump it took today on rumors of a Stripe acquisition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com