< The 2016 Tech 50

After selling Bibit Global Payment Services to Royal Bank of Scotland Group in 2004, Pieter van der Does took a sabbatical in Brazil. “The total objective was to be bored,” says the 47-year-old Dutch entrepreneur. But he couldn’t resist planning another payments start-up, Adyen, which was launched in the Netherlands in 2006 and has grown rapidly as a service provider to Airbnb, Facebook, Netflix, Uber and other big names in e-commerce. “The first time around, we were doing payments with large companies,” says van der Does, who as Adyen’s president and CEO works closely with chief technology officer — and Bibit and Adyen co-founder — Arnout Schuijff. “We were an interface between the merchant and bank systems to make reconciliation smoother.” With Adyen “we started from scratch and did it in the way it should have been done, building the full stack ourselves,” van der Does explains. An e-payment processor with a global reach, Adyen invites comparisons with PayPal Holdings (see Dan Schulman, No. 29). But Adyen doesn’t work directly with consumers. Its mission is to help merchants efficiently and safely accept all forms of payment, ranging from credit cards to PayPal to government-issued vouchers. The company, which processed $50 billion in payments last year, is directly connected to MasterCard and Visa, so those transactions are faster, and their service levels higher, than if they were routed through an intermediary bank’s network, van der Does says. Adyen employs 400 and has 4,500-plus customers worldwide. With more than 40 percent of its merchants in the U.S., Adyen has had a San Francisco office since 2008; van der Does spends much of his time there, though his home base remains Amsterdam. The company, which in 2014 raised $250 million (valuing it at $1 billion-plus) from the likes of General Atlantic and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, has received buyout interest, van der Does says, adding: “I always have the feeling that this is only the beginning. The market size is almost endless, the opportunity is so big, and the company is doing well, so why look for an exit?”

Visit The 2016 Tech 50: Making Financial Services Faster, Cheaper, Bigger for more.

 
The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp. 2. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange II Communities on Infrastructure Sponsored by IFM Investors May 16, 2025 3. Lance Uggla Markit 4. Phupinder Gill CME Group 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg 6. R. Martin Chavez Goldman Sachs Group

7. Robert Goldstein BlackRock 8. Adena Friedman Nasdaq 9. Deborah Hopkins Citi Ventures 10. Daniel Coleman KCG Holdings 11. Stephen Neff Fidelity Investments 12. David Craig Thomson Reuters

13. Michael Spencer ICAP 14. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. 15. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing 16. Chris Concannon BATS Global Markets 17. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings 18. David Rutter R3CEV

19. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw & Co. 20. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets 21. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings 22. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings 23. Robert Alexander Capital One Financial Corp. 24. Brad Katsuyama IEX Group

25. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp. 26. David Gledhill DBS Bank 27. Lou Eccleston TMX Group 28. Andreas Preuss Deutsche BÖrse 29. Dan Schulman PayPal Holdings 30. Scott Dillon Wells Fargo & Co.

31. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence 32. Craig Donohue Options Clearing Corp. 33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services 34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix 35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma 36. Michael Cooper BT Radianz

37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS 38. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management 39. David Harding Winton Capital Management 40. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group 41. Brian Conlon First Derivatives 42. Jim Minnick eVestment

43. Stephane Dubois Xignite 44. Mazy Dar OpenFin 45. Yasuki Okai NRI Holdings America 46. Kim Fournais Saxo Bank 47. Jock Percy Perseus 48. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions

49. Brian Sentance Xenomorph Software 50. Pieter van der Does Adyen