“Taking the hardest path in payments”: How Adyen’s new AI platform boosts conversion while reducing fraud

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the financial landscape, creating new opportunities for innovation while reshaping consumer expectations around speed, personalization, and security. As financial institutions and businesses race to integrate AI capabilities, we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how payments are processed, how fraud is detected, and how financial services are delivered.

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Davi Strazza, President of North America at Adyen, a global financial technology platform that’s at the forefront of this AI evolution. Davi leads Adyen’s North American operations, where the company is leveraging artificial intelligence as a strategic growth driver through initiatives like their recently launched Uplift platform.

In our conversation today, we’ll explore how Adyen is implementing AI solutions to enable hyper-personalization, enhance fraud detection, and automate complex financial processes. Davi will also share his insights on the state of real-time payments in the US and what companies need to do to make instant payments a more fundamental part of our commerce and financial system.

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AI as a strategic problem-solver, not just a trend

Adyen’s approach to AI isn’t about implementing technology for its own sake—it’s about identifying specific industry challenges and using AI as a solution. Strazza emphasizes that businesses should resist the temptation to adopt AI without clear purpose.

“I think the approach we’ve taken is to, instead of kind of make AI the end goal… we kind of ask ourselves, okay, what is really our end goal as a business, right? And if we work backwards from what that is, what are the different areas and spaces where AI can make us so much more productive and effective. And so it really becomes like means to an end, like you need to start with a problem, and that’s what we did.”

Data scale as a competitive advantage

Adyen’s platform processes trillions in transaction value and has seen over one billion unique shoppers, creating a massive dataset that powers their AI initiatives. This scale provides unique insights that competitors can’t match.

“We have seen over 1 billion unique shoppers in our platform. So essentially, again, one in every five or six people that are buying products and services on Earth. We’ve seen that in our platform. So you combine, again, the one point the trillions of dollars, the 1.3 trillion euros that we processed last year, with 1 billion individuals in our platform, it’s a data set that allows us to very uniquely separate good shoppers from bad shoppers.”

Payments evolution toward invisibility and recognition

Strazza envisions payments becoming increasingly invisible and friction-free, with AI enabling better customer recognition across channels and significantly improved transaction success rates.

“I think further down the line, payments is really going to be invisible… I think payments is going to go more and more invisible over the years, and consumers will be much more recognized. And there will be great loyalty programs. There will be great applications for fraud prevention. I think the industry has a really interesting opportunity to see like step change in terms of performance and customer recognition.”

The big ideas

1. The holistic approach to payment optimization: Adyen’s uplift platform tackles conversion rates, fraud, and payment costs as interconnected challenges rather than isolated problems, allowing merchants to find the optimal balance between seemingly competing priorities.

“Sometimes we advise our customers to take more fraud for the benefit of much higher conversion and ultimately better bottom line results. And that is really like the holistic approach that we’ve taken with Adyen Uplift.”

2. Direct connections yield superior data: By building direct connections to networks and issuers without intermediaries, Adyen accesses higher quality transaction data that enhances their AI capabilities.

“We built direct connections to the networks, direct connections to issuers, in many cases, to the source of funds, the data that we get back from transactions is of the best quality. We gain unrestricted access to the data in the ecosystem because of our direct connections.”

3. ROI-focused payment technology: Adyen’s business model hinges on delivering multiples of value compared to their fees, positioning payments as a profit center rather than a cost center.

“For every dollar that a merchant pays us in fees, we we made it our mission to return multiples of that dollar in revenue to our customers, in bottom line results to our customers.”

4. Cross-channel customer recognition: Current retail environments struggle to recognize the same customer across online and in-store experiences, creating a significant opportunity for AI to bridge this identification gap.

“When you go to an e-commerce site, you leave something behind, like an email, a phone number. When you go to a store, you check out, you leave nothing behind. You are a ghost.”

5. Payment ecosystem diversity: The future of payments will involve multiple competing technologies and rails, with payment processors adding value by abstracting this complexity for merchants.

“I think there will be competing payment methods, there will be competing rails, there will be competing infrastructure. And that’s really positive. We really welcome that shift… I think our role is to abstract the complexity of dealing with all of those different pieces of technology.”

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