ADYEY (ADYEY) Q3 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining Adyen's Q3 2026 Business Update Call. My name is Maggie O'Donnell from Investor Relations, and I will be hosting today's call. With me today are Ingo, our Co-CEO; and Hwa, our Interim CFO. We're going to begin with playing the prepared remarks, and then we will open it up for Q&A with both Ingo and Hwa. [Operator Instructions] With that, let's get started.

Let me start how we worked in the third quarter on the framework that we outlined during the first half results. In this framework, we talked about how we implement the strategy, delivering value across the full commercial life cycle because that's what our customers are expecting from us. In the third quarter, this has been very successful. Net revenue grew on a constant currency basis, 22% to EUR 738 million. Processed volume increased to EUR 451 billion. So the financial results are solid. And what I'm very proud of is the fact that the same engine runs as always. We win share of wallet with our existing customers, and we added new logos to the platform. So this combination has always been the core of our growth and it drives on the operational complexity that we are solving for these customers. So that is crucial to me, and that's also that I like to talk about today in these remarks. I'm often asked how we fit in the conversation around AI. And for me what is crucial here is that we have always powered the financial infrastructure for the global tech players. It's been our focus for the recent years. And our core strength has always been that we partnered with the most complex enterprises. Many of the companies that we work for are now building the new foundation for this new technology. It's the major hyperscalers, it's the cloud companies, and they've relied on us for years. Just to give you an idea, about 10% of our volume right now is with these few companies that are so successful. And they partner with us because their commercial models, whether that's subscriptions or use-based billing or complicated enterprise setup, it requires global reach. It requires local payment methods. It requires a very high authorization rate. That's the reason why they work with us. That's also the reason why they continue to grow with us. So in short, when we manage multi-market scale and complexity better than anyone else. And this is exactly why those businesses turn to us and why we have the opportunity to change the models also for the companies that start to implement more AI-related business models. Then there is this next wave of AI companies, AI companies that grow faster than we've ever seen in history. And the beauty is that also their complexity increases as fast as we've ever seen in the history. And we are the company that can solve that complexity for them. And what is the complexity that I'm talking about? It's the complexity of going to multiple countries, having -- wanting to have the highest authorization rates, making sure that global payouts work as you would expect. That's when we start to help them. And what I find very important that it's exactly in line with our strategy. It's a land and expand strategy. So we solve one problem for them, we gain trust. And then over time, we gain more volumes. It is exactly the long-term partnerships that we have built with all the companies that are on our platform and that we have grown over time. So for me, the key thing is also for the new AI companies, we win when the complexity increases. That's the key thing that I have learned also in the recent quarters when we become relevant to them. And we are very well positioned here with our own banking licenses in multiple countries, with our own acquiring licenses and a single platform globally. I'm often asked what our position is in Agentic Commerce. And it's important to make a distinction between Agentic Commerce and the AI economy that I just talked about. If you look at global commerce, it runs today on Adyen and so will Agentic Commerce in the future. It's still early days, and we are focused right now on making sure that we build that right foundation. And that right foundation is making sure that we work with the AI frontier models to get the protocols right, that we work with our merchants to understand what their needs are, making sure that we -- that they continue to have a relationship with the shopper behind the agent. That's what we're focused on. The reason why we're so well positioned is because we have built all the different components that are needed for Agentic Commerce in the past. So we've built authentication layers. We have built fraud systems. We've built ways to make the settlements as efficient as possible. And that's exactly the infrastructure that you need to build. And no one has this infrastructure like we do, and that's why we're so well positioned. So in summary, over the years, we have built the right rails for Agentic Commerce. And the key differentiator for us now is that we've built an open system for our customers. So making sure that our merchants continue to build a relationship with the shoppers behind the agents and also continue to build the right loyalty relationships with their shoppers. Yes. So the other big news of the first half year, of course, were the acquisitions of Orb and Talon.One. And I'm very excited to see how integration is going. It's also one of the reasons why we've decided to double down our investments in this area. So maybe to start with Orb. Orb is a billing and invoice engine focused on user-based billing, which is exactly very relevant for the AI native economy. And what I've seen in the last quarter is that we are now capable of signing up customers at an earlier stage in their life cycle. Examples here are Vercel and Greptile. But also what I've seen in the last quarter that we were capable of signing up customers that were already an Orb customer, but are now starting to transfer their payments to Adyen. And examples here are Route and Wasabi Technologies. So a lot of progress with Orb. Very similar with Talon.One. The moment we announced the acquisition, the feedback from retailers has been very positive. The unsolved problem of loyalty in store is something that they are looking for. And in the past quarter, we have worked together with a lot of retailers to see how exactly we're going to tackle these problems. In a couple of weeks, we have organized an event with 200 global retailers in London to showcase how the future of loyalty will look like. And of course, I'm very excited to see those customers there and to discuss it with them. So we're talking today about operational complexity, and this is exactly how Talon.One and Orb fit into the Adyen strategy, like how can we solve the most complicated problems for our merchants and for invoice billing and loyalty, these are unsolved problems that we are helping customers with right now. Then I'm very excited where we are right now in the year. I'm looking forward to the rest of the year, still a quarter to go, and I have very high confidence in the results for the rest of the year and the direction that we're taking strategically. I'd like to hand over now to Hwa, who is going to give you an update on our financial performance.

Thanks, Ingo, and hello, everyone. In the third quarter, net revenue reached EUR 738 million, up 23% year-over-year or 22% on a constant currency basis, in line with our expectations and full year guidance. Processed volume grew 30% to EUR 451 billion, well ahead of the market as we continue to gain share with our merchants. Three core engines drove this top line performance. First, we deepened share of wallet with existing enterprise merchants as longer-standing cohorts consolidated more of their global volume onto our single platform. Winning a greater share of volumes from these merchants is the largest contributor to our growth. Second, we onboarded a healthy, high-quality cohort of new enterprise customers across our priority verticals. This year's cohort is shaping up to be our largest ever. These customers are larger and many are Platforms. We expect them to ramp significantly over the next year. And third, we consolidated Talon.One and Orb for the first time, which together added about 2 percentage points to our constant currency net revenue growth in the quarter. Commercial momentum remains strong and broad-based across all 3 pillars in every region. Looking at our pillars. In Q3, digital net revenue grew to EUR 387 million, up 16% year-over-year or 14% on a constant currency basis. Volume was up 28%. We delivered particularly strong growth in travel and mobility, which includes major rideshare platforms and online travel agencies, and also across content and subscriptions merchants. This segment includes the major hyperscalers, where we continue to grow our share of wallet. Our tiered pricing is designed so that as our largest merchants scale, they consolidate more volume onto our platform, driving continuous wallet share gains. In Unified Commerce, net revenue reached EUR 250 million, up 29% year-over-year or 27% on a constant currency basis. Volume grew 22%. Net revenue outpaced volume in the quarter following the consolidation of Talon.One, which contributes recurring revenue but no processed payment volume. We now support 499 enterprise merchants processing across both in-store and digital channels at scale. We intentionally target growth from larger, more complex global retailers, and these multichannel implementations represent deep customer relationships where the value we deliver drives substantial share gains. Platforms net revenue hit EUR 100 million, up 46% year-over-year or 44% on a constant currency basis. Volume grew 55%. We now have 46 platform customers processing over EUR 1 billion annually, a significant step up from 37 last quarter and 31 a year ago, with active business customers reaching 312,000, up 48% year-over-year. We're growing rapidly across SaaS and winning share in complex verticals like financial services and insurance, which will be a driver of future growth. Our Platforms business allows us to distribute our payments and embedded financial products directly to smaller merchants at scale, creating a meaningful advantage for Adyen and a durable growth channel. Now let me spend a few minutes on our team and our strategic plan. The momentum we see gives us substantial confidence in the opportunity ahead, and we have decided to step up our investment to capture it. Two things drive that decision. First, our core business continues to perform. We are winning new enterprise merchants. Our existing merchants keep consolidating volume with us, and we see significant runway across all markets. Second, merchant interest in Talon.One and Orb has been stronger than we initially anticipated. Retailers we talk to are extremely excited to unify loyalty across every channel. AI native companies see the value in a single provider for billing and payments. Only Adyen can provide all of these solutions on a unified platform and at scale. That's what gives us the confidence to act now. Serving our global enterprise merchants takes more product, engineering and go-to-market capacity, so we are accelerating our investment. These are growth acquisitions, and we are doubling down to rapidly achieve their potential. On the team, in Q3, we added 177 net new FTEs on an underlying basis, bringing us to 426 year-to-date and 399 colleagues joined us from Talon.One and Orb. We ended the quarter with 5,596 FTEs. For the full year, we continue to expect 550 to 650 net new hires on an underlying basis. Including Talon.One and Orb and the additional hiring we are now doing in those businesses, we expect to add 1,000 to 1,100 FTEs in total. Our hiring remains targeted on specialized engineering and go-to-market roles with a growing share in North America, our biggest focus market. These are competitive talent markets, and we are making greater use of equity in our compensation to attract and keep the people we need. These decisions are reflected in our outlook. For the full year 2026, we continue to expect constant currency net revenue growth between 21% and 23%. We intend to continue investing to win more of our addressable market given the size of the opportunity ahead. When we see high conviction growth opportunities, including the strong merchant pull for Orb and Talon.One, we move decisively. We are deliberately increasing our investment base to capture these platform opportunities, and we now expect our 2026 EBITDA margin to land at 50%. Over the long run, our business model produces compounding operational leverage. On capital expenditures, we maintain our guidance at 7% of net revenue in 2026 and expect to normalize CapEx toward historical levels thereafter. Turning to capital allocation. Adyen generates significant cash flows and has a strong balance sheet. S&P Global Ratings recently upgraded our outlook to positive while reaffirming our A- rating. The positive S&P update gives us a clearer indication of our balance sheet opportunity and ability to use capital to accelerate value. How we intend to deploy capital has not changed. It starts with what it takes to run our business, which includes regulatory and operational capital to settle our merchants reliably every day. Beyond that, our priorities are investing in organic growth, inorganic opportunities like Talon.One and Orb, and finally, returning capital to shareholders. We continue to evaluate the tools available to us, and capital returns are part of that toolbox. To wrap up, we enter the final stretch of 2026 with strong commercial momentum across all 3 pillars, high conviction in our strategic investments and confidence in our unique ability to capture the massive opportunity ahead. We intend to continue to outgrow our market as the scope of what we solve increases across the commerce life cycle. Our actions this year position us to grow our role within customer operations, extend our market leadership and expand our growth opportunity.

We are now going to move on to Q&A. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Fahed Kunwar from Rothschild.

Just I had a couple of questions. My first question really is about kind of the cost of growth for the business. I wanted to kind of step back a little bit on the margins. I know you're getting a lot of questions on margins. But obviously, you've had M&A, which you haven't had before, the increase in CapEx this year. We've had the margin guidance change. How do we think about the kind of long-term cost of growing the business? Do you think that has increased? So perhaps the durability of growth is longer, which is fine, but actual cost of that revenue growth is structurally higher given the competition for people like Stripe and others in checkout.com? Or is it literally just, hey, look, we're going to invest in a discrete period of time, we'll get the revenues, the margins will go up later? Or is there -- has there been a fundamental shift in the cost of growth? That was question one. The second question I had is around the strategy of Orb. I understand it's been run separately. It sounds like you've accelerated the integration based on the opportunity. I wanted to get a sense of how big that opportunity is? I appreciate you won't give revenue guidance, but I look at, again, someone like Stripe and Metronome has gone from nothing to 20% of the ARR in a couple of years, it's been very, very seismic. How big an opportunity do you think it is for yourselves? Is this about selling Orb to your enterprise customers? Is that the main strategic decision? But any kind of sense of the TAM unlock that a business like Orb has given you would be great.

Great. Thank you. Hwa, do you want to take the first one on cost of growth and Ingo, you could take the second?

Sure. So on cost of growth, I don't think that there's been a structural change. As we said, it's a deliberate opportunity and decision to accelerate investment in order to capture the overall opportunity ahead, which is, we think, quite large. Pointing to the business overall, you've seen historically that we've generated leverage -- operating leverage, and we expect that over time, but we do want the flexibility to take actions when we see the opportunity ahead of us. Ingo, I guess, in the second one.

Yes. So on the Orb, indeed, Orb is acquired with the incubator model in mind so that they would run separately. But at the same time, we see that there is a big merchant demand for the services of Orb. So go-to-market teams have started to work very closely together to capture it. And we see basically 2 trends. The first one is that we capture early AI companies early in their life cycle, and that's exactly one of the things that we wanted to go for. That's one of the reasons why we acquired Orb. At the same time, we see that for a lot of our enterprise merchants where we already processed payments as a result of the AI economy that they are changing their business models more to usage-based billing, and that's also where Orb comes into play. For me, it's hard to say like, okay, what is exactly the total addressable market for billing. But I think it's very clear that it's changing rapidly as a result of the rise of AI, and that's why I'm so excited about this opportunity.

The next question comes from Jason Kupferberg from Wells Fargo.

So it's great to hear about all the client feedback from Talon.One and Orb and obviously, there's general momentum in the business. So we get 2027 in February, will you provide us with some details on timing or magnitude of the revenue benefit that comes from these accelerated investments that you're making on the back of these acquisitions? And then if you can just clarify, are we discontinuing medium-term guidance for all metrics going forward? And then I have a follow-up.

So on 2027, what we'll provide is an outlook for the whole business. So we'll provide a net revenue guide as well as some color on EBITDA and CapEx. Your question around -- so with regard to Orb and Talon.One specifically, our intention is not really to break that out as a segment, but we will give qualitative updates around what's going on there. As Ingo said, we look at this as a long-term opportunity to help build a new offering over and above not just loyalty, not just billing, not just payments, but together. So we'll give you that color on a combined basis in February. With regard to the discontinuing of the medium-term guidance going forward, we are -- we will provide an update in 2027 again for 2027. And we are, as we mentioned, discontinuing the EBITDA, the hard EBITDA target. I think that said, we are still very confident in the long-term durability of growth of this company and in the leverage that the company can provide over time.

Okay. And so just given that we're accelerating some investments into this year, are you committed to some degree of annual EBITDA margin expansion off of the reset outlook for this year? Or can we at least -- should we think about 2026 as a floor, just to give investors a general sense of where margins can go beyond this year?

Yes. We'll -- again, we'll provide the update for 2027 in February of 2027. The color I can give you today is like, as we said, historically, we have generated margin expansion. We are intentionally deciding in 2026 to pull forward some of that spend. The other thing that I can say is that in 2026, there are some charges related to the acquisitions and other things that we don't expect to recur in 2027 as well.

The next question comes from Alex Faure from BNP Paribas.

Yes, I had a couple of questions. I think you commented earlier in the year that M&A is now part of Adyen's toolkit, but that the priority over the next few months, or let's call it, shorter term would be about integrating Orb and Talon.One. And if we fast forward to today, you seem to be pleased, and more than pleased with the way those acquisitions have been received by your customers. So how should we think about that? Is this influencing that early reception, the way you think about bolt-on M&A? And could we see Adyen do more of it also in the short term or are bolt-ons becoming part of the algo, I guess, is my first question. And second question, just to make sure that I'm getting the numbers right. I mean you're taking down the margin guide by 2 points for the year. You're telling us that you're hiring 550 more people that you initially intended to. Is there something else outside of people in that 2 points guide down or that's all people related?

Ingo, why don't you take the first one on M&A?

Yes, sure, absolutely. So if you look at our M&A strategy, we indeed have added 2 companies this year to our family. And the reason why we've done that is because we saw the complexity from our merchants in billing and loyalty, and we want to solve for that complexity. So it's a capability game. We've not acquired them for their short-term revenues. It's really about a long-term capability, and that's how we will continue to look at M&A. So if you think about what is important to our customers, the type of challenges that they face, if there is any capability that we think is missing and the time to market is the highest priority, we would consider M&A again. That's how we currently look at it. Our first approach to investment is always organically. That's how we've built. It's also the strength of our single platform. So that's always the first choice. But if time to market is important and it is a capability that our merchants are looking for, we would consider it as a next step.

On the cost?

So on the costs, people is the largest component. There are some of the nonrecurring costs related to integration as well, but it's relatively small. The thing that I -- the color that I would add around people is we're also increasing in a very competitive marketplace, equity compensation. And I'll call out that within our EBITDA margin guide, we don't back out stock-based comp. So that is a material contributor to the change as we go forward in addition to just hiring people. I think the other piece of color around the people themselves, yes, they are related to Talon.One and Orb and the joint value prop that we bring to them. But it's also across the broader business is when we think about, again, not just buying a billing business or a loyalty business, but really what can they all look like together on our unified platform when you combine them with payments and financial products and other offerings. So that's the sort of expertise that we're trying to bring on board.

The next question comes from Russell Quelch from Morgan Stanley.

A bit of a follow-on from the last one. So staying on the theme of margins. I'm wondering a few questions here. So what milestones should we be thinking about to judge the return on this incremental investment? I'm thinking things like attach rates, headcount productivity, anything you can provide. I was wondering how much that stock-based compensation should rise in '27, given the increased hiring you flagged. How much these onetime costs are in '26 that won't repeat in 2027? Maybe I'll stop there. So there's a few questions within that.

Hwa, do you want to take all 3?

Sure. So the milestones to judge return are really around driving sustainable growth and the overall product offering that we are able to deliver. So it's going to be customer adoption. There will be cross-sell associated with it. And then overall, the way we'll talk about it from a company perspective will be on a consolidated basis, ultimately. We don't plan again on breaking out or loyalty or those things individually. But we will give qualitative markers as you go forward. But really, the key thing for us is driving durable, sustainable growth as we move forward. The SBC, I don't have a hard number for 2027. We'll give you the 2027 outlook in February, again, but it will be -- we'll give you that color as we go forward. And then quantifying the onetime costs, we previously said in the first half, we took about a little under EUR 10 million. And we -- when you look at the rest of the year, we think it will -- in total, the onetime cost should be about 1 point actually for the whole company.

The next question comes from Andrew Schmidt at KeyBanc.

Maybe just starting off with a question on Agentic and then a follow-up after that. But we get a lot of questions just on positioning of PSPs, acquirers, commerce enablers in terms of ability to add more value in Agentic commerce. And I think it was well said in terms of complexity being a friend. There's just protocols, there's fraud considerations and things like that exposing inventory to various surfaces. But maybe, Ingo, I know you touched on this in your prepared remarks, just go down a little bit on how Adyen sort of separates itself and adds more value in Agentic commerce transaction. I appreciate the distinction between Agentic Commerce and AI economy. That's a good one. I appreciate your thoughts there.

Sure. So if you think how we position ourselves in the Agentic commerce world is our -- we work with the biggest brands globally. And when we talk to them and we get our feedback, their most important thing is that they want to continue to have a relationship with the consumers behind the agent. So they want to ultimately protect their brand equity, and that's a key topic for the discussions that we have. As I said in the prepared remarks, commerce has always run on our platform, and so will Agentic Commerce do because we've built all the building blocks. And in our discussions with the LLM providers, the key thing that we want to protect is that we build protocols that preserve the important elements for our merchants. So how do we get protocols that protect the information on the shopper. So thinking through what this means on the long run for Adyen. So it's still relatively early days for Agentic. Of course, we have customers live on our platform. We expect to take more live this year. But when it really starts to scale, we are in a great position because we've built the authentication layer. We understand how to analyze fraud, how to block the transactions that are -- that should not go through and get to high authorization rates because that's still a challenge in this industry. How do we make sure that in the past, bots were typically a bad thing to have. Now we have bots that are a good thing to have. How do you distinguish this and how do we make sure that we help our merchants to protect their value.

The next question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein.

Ingo, I want to follow up and ask how you think about guidance framework more broadly. The complication we have is that you provided a margin framework less than a year ago. I understand that you're seeing incremental opportunities for high return reinvestments. This is something we are hearing. We are hearing great things about Orb and Talon.One as well. But you withdrew the margin framework without giving revenue guidance. So kind of widening the range of outcomes on your earnings growth in the medium term. We've had some kind of guidance resets over the past several years. What would you say to investors to make them comfortable with the Adyen growth story, which we believe is remarkable and also your guidance philosophy? And then my follow-up also, maybe talk about capital allocation at a deeper level. What would lead Adyen returning cash to shareholders? Because you likely have plenty of cash on an ongoing basis as well to do both M&A and cash returns and investors probably don't want to see cash accumulating on your balance sheet.

Great. Yes, 2 great questions. So on the guidance framework, I think it's a fair question. I think the philosophy that we have is that we built the company for the long run, and we want to take investors on that long-term journey. At the same time, we want to be helpful how we think that the business evolves. And we are a very entrepreneurial business. So if we see an opportunity, we want to act on it. When we gave the 28% EBITDA guidance, we had not acquired Orb and Talon.One, and we did not have the feedback from our customers to see what kind of opportunity this was. We saw the complexity arising. So it was something in the back of our mind. And we see that we will potentially be hindering ourselves if we would really get to this 55%. Because if you ask me, could we get there, it would be relatively easy to get to the 55%, but that would be at the risk of longer-term growth. So it's really about that longer-term horizon that also what I talked about that we want to create here. That's still also the guidance framework that I apply. If I look back, I think if you want to build a company for the long run, you should take investors along what it will mean for the short term. And that's exactly the shift that we're making right now. So what we want to do is we, at the one hand, want to give the strategic direction of the business, getting from a single product company to a multiproduct company, increasing the total addressable market that we have. And then at the same time, be specific about the growth expectations for the upcoming year and how we think about the operating leverage of the business. Then on capital allocation, the capital allocation framework is unchanged, like also what I talked about. So it's organic growth. First, if we see an opportunity for capabilities that speeds up the time to market, we would consider inorganic growth if it leads to the right capabilities and does not harm the single platform philosophy. And then indeed, if there's additional capital available, we would give it back to our shareholders. The S&P unclarity, I think, has solved, so that gives us more flexibility. And if there is an update on how we look at capital allocation going forward, we will immediately update you.

The next question comes from Hannes Leitner from Jefferies.

I hope you can hear me now. I got also a couple of questions. The first one, maybe you just can give us a little bit more details on where you anecdotally got more excited after those couple of months working with Orb and Talon.One and getting all those customer feedbacks. And related to that, how do you think actually the revenue composition in a couple of years will be coming together between payments and other products and maybe financial services? And then the second question is maybe more short-term related. Your guidance for this year was basically set at the beginning of the year with a range which depended on merchant ramp-ups on your platform, who you already won. So now we are coming -- we are already 1 month into Q4 and the implied growth seems to be of a range of 20% to 27% constant currency for Q4. Maybe you can help us thinking about the scenarios, which brings you to either side of that range.

Yes. So if you think about why we're so excited about Orb and Talon.One is the broad range of commentary from customers for both Talon.One and Orb. And maybe to start with Talon.One. These are large retailers to come to us and say like, hey, if you can solve this in-store complexity of loyalty for us, we are ready to roll out with you globally. That's the discussion that we've had. So we're working on that right now to solve this. Very similar for a couple of F&B merchants that we see. So that's a huge opportunity. I think on the alt side, we already mentioned in the prepared remarks a couple of very specific examples of companies that we have won since the acquisition. And that's why we said, okay, this is a huge opportunity. Let's make sure that we accelerate our investments to help our merchants solve this complexity.

And then so on the second and the third question. So revenue composition in the future, as you know, Hannes, payments is the vast majority today. Our expectation that all of these new offerings will become material in the future. It will take some time, and they are growing off of relatively small bases. But the expectation is that our revenue streams will become much more diversified. The one that we've called out so far is the contribution in the short term from Orb and Talon.One and then also about the expectation that we'll get about 1 point from financial products. All of those, we expect to scale over time. And at the same time, we do continue to expect to grow payments. How that mix evolves will kind of depend on customer demand and how the products actually roll out. But we do expect ourselves to be much more diversified over time. And then on the guidance for Q4, as you know, our business is pretty lumpy. What I can say is that we feel -- what we had said earlier is that we feel like the second half will shape up similar to the first half, which was right in the middle of the guidance on an underlying basis. And then we expect the contribution from Orb and Talon.One to be similar to what it was in the third quarter. And so we -- in that sense, while we've got -- we've put out that range because lots of things can happen and the business can be lumpy, we feel confident in our ability to achieve the guide for the full year.

The next question comes from Fred Boulan from Bank of America.

Fred at Bank of America. So I'm going to try to come back to the kind of guidance question from a different angle. So back in November, we had that vision of around 20% midterm growth opportunity with margins expanding beyond 55% by '28. Now we have those 2 deals. We are doubling down, we're investing. But how should we think about your view on the growth opportunity of the business now versus where -- what you were thinking a year ago? Second, on the margin side. So I appreciate your comment on not giving margins at this stage. But at the same time, we've had a ton of questions today from investors around the profile of margins of that business midterm. From what I can understand in your commentary today, you do flag the operating leverage still being a feature of the business. So should we expect some form of improvement of the margin at one point, even if we don't specify the timing at this stage?

Hwa, do you want to take both of those?

Sure. And then Ingo can comment a little bit on longer term as well. But I do think we feel confident still in the longer-term durability of growth of the overall business over time. The 20% that we put out in November was more kind of a guardrail as opposed to guidance. But I think in general, that does still capture our confidence in the business. And these investments, we expect will support the longer-term durability of growth for the company overall. So I think if we say is our view different now, clearly, we now have these 2 acquisitions in place. So those will contribute. We also have the -- not just the loyalty and the billing pieces, but again, the joint value prop, which we think will be supportive of growth over the long term. And so that's how I would comment on growth overall going forward.

Yes. Maybe if I can add to that, like the way how I look at this, if you just look at the different revenue pools that we're now capable to address, we were only focused on payments. So we were typically speaking to the office of the CFO, whilst with loyalty, we're now talking to marketing team. So it's a completely different revenue pool, and that's why our vision on how long we can grow the company has completely changed. And that's why we're so excited about it. So also to Hwa's earlier point, the revenue pools or the expected revenues from both Talon.One and Orb will be significant in the future because it's going to be an important part of our business.

And then on the point about margin, as Ingo said earlier, if we wanted to, we have a lot of levers in this business where we can achieve much higher EBITDA margins. But we feel that at this point in time, that's not the right thing to do for the business in order to support that longer-term growth that we just talked about. That said, again, the business itself has inherent operating leverage. I think over time, we expect to grow revenues faster than operating expense. And so I think that will remain just a feature of this business. And I would point out that this business is a unique business, right, growing 20%, about 20% with margins in the 50% range is just a very unique opportunity. And it gives us that confidence and it puts us in a unique position where we can invest in order to make sure that we can sustain that growth over time and capture these opportunities.

Unfortunately, we only have time for one more question. That question is going to come from Justin Forsythe from UBS.

Also want to echo the positivity around the incremental customer demand. Obviously, that's a great thing to hear. Just want to get a little bit more explicit on the margin guide. So if we just walk through the historical sequencing and the process behind it. So in 1Q around acquisitions, you guided to 55% ex M&A and then noted some flexibility on that guide. And then again, in August around the 2Q guided to 55%, but that was then inclusive of M&A, presumably a bit of an upgrade there. And then we're sitting here now in 3Q, as you know, and we've now pulled that 55% when we're talking to the lower margin, and it seems like, call it, 5% to 10% uptick in OpEx. I mean, given the price paid for these assets, on our numbers, something like 15x forward ARR, we always understood the expectation to be that there were deal synergies already baked into some of your expectations with the purchase price you paid for these assets. And that would extend perhaps to the headcount that you were required to deliver. So I'm just trying to understand a little bit an appreciation for why this seems to have taken you by such a surprise and the success that you're seeing initially. That's the first part of the question. And then the second would be -- and some of your comments are alluding to this, but maybe you can be explicit to offset the impact of this investment, it appears to us that you're more or less talking to then a future acceleration in revenue growth as a result of the investment to offset the cost to justify what you have allocated.

Hwa, do you want to take this?

Yes, sure. So on the why now, it is because, one, in July, August, we had just closed the deals. While we did, to your point, have -- obviously, we had a model, we had assumptions and we knew that the concept was going to be intriguing to our merchants. What's changed since that point is really getting into those conversations and really, as Ingo alluded to, like really having boots on the ground and understanding what -- one, what is the opportunity, what is the merchant pull and then also what it would take to really deliver what we think is like the ultimate offering that we're going to deliver. We bought these businesses. They're great businesses, but they are not stand-alone. Just adding them to Adyen by themselves won't deliver the opportunity and capture the opportunity that we're looking for going forward. And those are decisions that we've made essentially now. With regard to the point about revenue over time, the key thing that we think about is extending the durability of growth. 20% growth at this scale is adding quite a bit to the business every year. And we don't want to promise acceleration or deceleration, but we think durability of growth around these offerings, around the revenue pools that Ingo has talked about are really the ways that we're thinking about this business over time.

I think that's also how we look at growing going forward. We see these additional revenue pools, and we want to make sure that we deliver on the complexity that our merchants are facing. And if we do that well, if you just think about, for instance, the struggle that retail has with their promotions, how big the part is that if you look at revenues of retailers, how much they price in promotions, that's a huge opportunity if we can solve these type of problems for merchants. And that's what we're after. That's what we're going to solve, and that's why I'm so excited about making these investments in the business because it's just a huge opportunity for us to be relevant for our customers.

Great. Thank you all for joining us today. Have a great day.