Adyen (ADYEN 3.09%) may not be on the radar of U.S. investors, but perhaps it should be. In this clip from "The Future of Fintech" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on June 30, Fool.com contributors Matt Frankel and Lou Whiteman discuss the enterprise payment processing company's profitability and its substantial growth potential.
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Matt Frankel: Adyen focuses on large business payment processing. Their clients are Microsoft (MSFT 2.54%), eBay (EBAY 1.42%). If you remember when eBay ditched PayPal (PYPL 1.11%) a few years ago that was in favor of Adyen. It's possibly my favorite payment processor. Just they are a truly global brand, they are well-known among big enterprise clients around the world.
They still have a lot of growth potential in some of the more highly populated, but emerging markets around the world. They're mostly in Europe and U.S. is where most of their revenue comes from at this point.
I'm a big fan of Adyen. I love the management. I like that they're the most long-term focused of the big payment processing companies. They don't issue any short-term guidance, for example, which is a rarity in the fintech space in general.
Lou Whiteman: They only release results every six months too.
Frankel: Yeah, they only do semi-annual results. All their guidance is long term, we'd like our profit margins to be in this range. That's their guidance.
Whiteman: Which by the way, that range is north of 50%.
Frankel: They're already almost there. They're already very profitable.
Whiteman: I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Frankel: No. I was going to say that people think of Adyen as a small up-and-comer. Their payment volume is about half a trillion a year, which puts them right between PayPal and Block (SQ 3.13%). They're about four times the size of Block in terms of payment volume.
Whiteman: On a market cap, I think only half of PayPal, but a lot bigger than Block. I think, what was it like a couple of weeks ago we did a fintech version of The Rank, there was a pretty good discussion about it in there. I think I put them No. 1 and blew the curve there, but that's what I think of them.
As you said, I really believe that their ability to go downstream from these big customers, it's a lot easier task in a way than PayPal and Square's challenge of taking in an artisanal vendor scanner and selling it to McDonald's (MCD -0.17%). The payment management software they have behind it, this is not a zero-sum game. There's going to be a lot of winners.
But they probably, I agree with you, they are my I think my payments favorite stock, with one caveat, I don't know what metric you want to use on a price-to-book, they are 21 times book. PayPal is at four and Block is below that. By any measure, it is a highly valued company.
I would argue in valuations in general, I tend to look at how quickly can they grow into that value, and in Adyen's case, I'm pretty confident that they can, so it doesn't bother me so much. But yes, it is a highly valued company, and don't think otherwise.
