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The road less traveled in AI and fintech is the one built to last
How fintechs can balance innovation and regulation by building AI and infrastructure that last. Insights from Adyen at Money20/20.
At this year’s Money20/20, Adyen’s CTO Tom Adams joined Ayo Omojola, General Partner at Refract Ventures, and Diya Jolly, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Xero, to discuss a challenge every fintech leader faces: how to balance innovation with regulation in a world that’s moving faster than ever.
As Omojola noted, fintech is an industry where trust is the highest form of currency. When technology accelerates faster than oversight, maintaining that trust becomes a design choice.
At Adyen, that balance between speed, control, and flexibility guides how we build—and why we’ve made deliberate choices that others might avoid. Below are some of the key themes from their discussion.
Balancing innovation and regulation
When you build in a regulated space, you’re constantly managing tradeoffs. Move too fast, and you risk crossing compliance boundaries. Move too slow, and you lose your edge. The goal is to operate as close to that boundary as possible, with both control and clarity.
Instead of depending on third parties for core infrastructure, we chose years ago to secure full banking licenses in Europe, the US, and the UK. Owning the full value chain gives us vertical control: fewer dependencies, faster issue resolution, and the freedom to innovate safely.
It’s a long-term investment that pays off for our merchants every day. For example, platforms like Vagaro and Jackrabbit can now embed financial services directly into their offerings, helping small businesses access cash faster or secure financing when they need it most. These products are made possible by the infrastructure and licenses beneath them.
Compliance isn’t about slowing down innovation. It’s the trusted structure that lets you innovate without hesitation.
Data purity: AI’s ideal foundation
The conversation at Money20/20 reinforced something we think about constantly at Adyen: the value of data purity. In the AI era, having more data isn’t the goal. Having data that is clean, holistic, and trustworthy is the necessary plumbing for AI.
In the last year, we processed over $1.4 trillion in payments across more than a billion shoppers using 200 different payment methods. That scale matters because it creates both breadth and depth, the two ingredients that make data truly useful. Our infrastructure connects this information end to end. That means we can move beyond processing data in silos to understanding the full payment flow. This foundation powers Adyen Uplift, our optimization suite that improves cost, conversion, and fraud protection in tandem—showing that precision beats volume every time.
The payoff for building in hard mode
Fintech has matured. The question now isn’t how fast you can launch, but how resilient your foundation is once you do.
Many companies start by assembling multiple systems and partners, a quick way to market, but a fragile way to scale. At Adyen, we’ve built differently: one platform, unified from the ground up.
That control lets us solve complex problems for our customers while removing complexity for them. Whether it’s optimizing authorization rates or simplifying compliance, our infrastructure does the hard work behind the scenes.
And it delivers results.
In a pilot of over 20 enterprise merchants testing our Intelligent Payment Routing offering, including companies like eBay, 24 Hour Fitness, and Microsoft, Adyen achieved an average of 26% cost savings with a 0.22% uplift in authorization rates against earlier debit performance. Across our enterprise portfolio, manual risk rules are down 86%, with many customers eliminating them altogether.
We call this building in hard mode. It takes longer, but it creates lasting advantagesAI systems that adapt at scale, infrastructure that compounds value, and trust that strengthens over time.
Because in fintech, the road less traveled is the one built to last.