Davi Strazza, Head of North America at Adyen, on banking licenses, agentic commerce, stablecoins, embedded finance and more

In this episode, I sit down with Davi Strazza, who leads Adyen‘s business in North America. Davi brings a fascinating global perspective on payments, having spent over a decade at Adyen working across Brazil and now the US market. We dive into how Adyen’s banking license, which they’ve held since 2021, fundamentally changes what they can offer to marketplaces, digital businesses, and SaaS companies that need to embed payments and finance into their platforms.

Our conversation explores the competitive dynamics of the payments landscape, the future of stablecoins as a payment rail, and the five critical boxes that payment companies need to check to scale successfully. We also examine what American fintech can learn from Brazil’s Pix system, discuss whether pay by bank will gain meaningful traction in the US, and look at how AI is transforming everything from personalized customer experiences to fraud prevention. For anyone interested in the infrastructure powering modern commerce, this is a must-listen conversation about what may be the most exciting time to be in payments.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Davi’s journey in fintech from Brazil to here in North America.
• How he describes Adyen today.
• Why they decided to get their own banking licenses in the US, UK and EU.
• How the banking license helps make their payments business more attractive.
• What is driving their momentum in the US.
• What brands get by working with Adyen over the legacy payments platforms.
• Why they talk about “unified commerce” and what it means exactly.
• How Adyen is preparing for a world where agentic commerce is commonplace.
• Davi’s view on the future of stablecoins as a payment mechanism.
• Whether pay-by-bank has a future in this country.
• What the US can learn from the rapid adoption of Pix in Brazil.
• What he is most excited about for the future of payments.

Read a transcription of our conversation below.

Fintech One on One Podcast No. 560: Davi Strazza

We’ve had a banking license here since 2021. It’s been a few years now. And if you look at what it allows us to do, it allows us to offer business accounts to our customers. We have a master account with the Fed and that creates a lot of opportunity for our customer base. It allows us to offer capital, so embedded lending to our customers. It allows us to crucially move money 24 seven off the back of FedNow rails or RTP rails. And so all of those capabilities are really important in today’s world, namely for, again, marketplaces and digital businesses and SaaS companies that are embedding payments, embedding finance. And the banking licenses just really give us the infrastructure to offer those services with incredible uptime and quality and performance.

Peter Renton:

This is the Fintech One-on-One podcast the show for Fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping Fintech and banking today My name is Peter Renton and since 2013 I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with Fintech founders and banking executives on the show today I am delighted to welcome Davi Strazza the president of North America at Adyen Now Davi brings a unique global perspective to payments growing up in Brazil and and leading Adyen’s business there and now heading up their North American operations.

In our conversation, we discussed the importance of banking licenses, the competitive payments landscape. We also explore the future of stablecoins as a payment rail and the five critical boxes that need to be checked for them to scale. We discussed whether pay by bank can gain meaningful traction here and examine what lessons American fintech can learn from Pix in Brazil. We also look ahead at how AI is transforming everything from personalized customer experiences to fraud prevention and why Davi believes this may be the most exciting time to be in payments. Now let’s get on with the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Davi.

DS: Thanks for having me, Peter.

PR: My pleasure. So let’s kick it off by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. I know you’ve been at Adyen for a while, but why don’t you just tell us some of the high points of your career to date.

DS: Sure. So I’ve been in payments in FinTech my entire life. It’s always been my passion.

PR: Since you in kindergarten, right?

DS: Pretty much, pretty much. But yeah, I’ve been with Adyen for over 10 years. I originally started in Brazil and spent a few years working for Adyen down there in Sao Paulo and eventually moved to the West. I’ve been in the West for six years now. Currently running our businesses in North America, which is our fastest growing region. Very happy to be here, very happy to support our customers, which are some of the largest customers or merchants on earth. And very excited about the future of the business. There’s lots going on in theme tech, as you know, and feel like we’re very well positioned in this space.

PR: Yes, indeed you are. we’ll get into all of that in a little bit. So did you, did you grow up in Brazil then?

DS: I did. Yeah. Born and raised in Brazil and had never left Brazil until, you know, high teens or something. But lately, in the US, I like to say that I’m calling the US home.

PR: Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. So how do you describe Adyen today? And obviously we know it started in Europe and has expanded globally, but I’m curious about how you describe it.

DS: The best way to think about Adyen today is we’re global financial infrastructure. Like you’re right, we started in payments many years ago and we did quite well in that space, but we eventually ventured into financial services. We got acquiring licenses, we got banking licenses. And if you look at our business today and the types of customers that we support in our product suite, it goes much beyond payments. And so it is a de facto global financial infrastructure platform.

PR: Getting a banking license is not for the faint of heart, as I’m sure you appreciate. You’ve done it now in the EU, the US, and the UK. Those three of the most developed financial regions on the planet, what drove you to do that?

DS: The short answer is our customers. We are a customer-led business. And then what that means is that our product roadmap is driven by the needs of our customers. But the long answer is we felt like this was a natural evolution of our product suite. We decided we wanted to build a global platform for payments. And we decided very early on that our way, or the way we would do that, would be to build it from ground up and go direct to payment methods and such.

And as we’ve done that, we started to work with a very diverse set of customers, eventually marketplaces. We figured that companies like marketplaces and such, needed more than payments. They needed payments plus payouts plus onboarding capabilities. And when we started to venture into those spaces, we had the same realization that we had in payments. Banking is a very fragmented space, which leads to poor customer experience, leads to delays. It leads to technical challenges.

And ultimately we thought like, hey, like we’ve been successful on the payment acceptance side and the pay inside. Our customers need us for payouts. How do we get there? And that ultimately just led us to obtain and go after the banking license in Europe. That was successful. And for that reason, and with our customers, we eventually got the banking licenses in the US and the UK. But look, this is not about the banking licenses. This is really more about what you can do with banking licenses. And that’s where it gets interesting.

Take the US, like we’ve had a banking license here since 2021. It’s been a few years now. And if you look at what it allows us to do, it allows us to offer business accounts to our customers. We have a master account with the Fed and that creates a lot of opportunity for our customer base. It allows us to offer capital. So embedded lending to our customers. It allows us to crucially like move money 24 seven off the back of FedNow rails or RTP rails. And so all of those capabilities are really important in today’s world, namely for, again, marketplaces and digital businesses and SaaS companies that are embedding payments, embedding finance. And the banking licenses just really give us the infrastructure to offer those services with incredible uptime and quality and performance.

PR: I’m just curious, does the banking license then piggyback and make the payments processing business more desirable?

DS: That’s an interesting question. If you look at the commerce word, it is a fast moving environment. Like commerce is evolving. Whereas historically you would see a lot of businesses in the brick and mortar space, spinning up an e-commerce site. What you see now is e-commerce players, like big digital players, tapping into the physical word space, like opening experience centers. Like even people like Netflix is opening the theaters, right? And so that is an interesting development.

We saw many digital players becoming marketplaces and lately over the past few years, we’ve seen incredible success on the platform economy, like SaaS businesses embedding payments and embedding finance. And so what I’m trying to say is the commerce space is very dynamic. It’s very fast moving and the banking licenses that we’ve got in the US and the UK and in Europe, they essentially give us the infrastructure that gives us the frameworks to support those businesses as they evolve and at the pace that they need to evolve. And so that is ultimately, I think, our vision. And the reason why we built Adyen the way we did, and the reason why we got the licenses is to support our customers as they grow and give them all of the infrastructure that they need to grow efficiently as well as continue to innovate in their spaces.

PR: I didn’t realize how major North America is as far as Adyen’s revenue today. I reckon it was around 30 % of your total revenue and it’s the fastest growing region in the world for Adyen. So what is driving the momentum here in the U.S.?

DS: We’ve been here for over a decade now and many of our largest customers are North American based businesses. Take like Uber, Microsoft, Google. We’ve had a lot of success here. What is driving growth right now is essentially a few things. Initially, we were very successful with global businesses. Over the past few years, we’ve been very successful also winning deals in the domestic market. That means with partner with companies that are operating only within the US that don’t need 200 payment methods, that don’t need global infrastructure, but they really need to be efficient in a very competitive environment. And we’ve been able to meet their needs. So companies like Crate & Barrel and Scheels, I they’re partnering with Adyen right now, and that’s been driving a lot of our growth here. The other area where we’ve seen a lot of growth is, like I said, on the platform space. You take the SaaS industry and how it’s growing fast in the US and how those businesses are competing with each other.

Embedded payments and embedded finance is a big deal. And we’re probably the company that is best positioned to offer these SaaS companies infrastructure to do that. And so a great case is Vagaro. Vagaro is a really interesting software platform that supports salons and spas. They’ve got like tens of thousands of customers in North America. Their software suite is pretty sophisticated and they are embedding payments and embedding finance. We recently launched with them a product called Cashout that gives them the ability to move funds 24/7 and the ability for those customers to see money instantly in their accounts. And they have already received interest from like two thirds of their customer base. They’re getting stickier as a product. again, that is helping them grow, which ultimately helps us grow as a business as well. And so there are many spaces like that where there is a need for more technology, for more efficiencies, for more reach. We’re really well positioned to grow. And those are fundamentally, this is why we’ve been growing in the domestic market in North America.

PR: Following up from that, in the domestic market here, obviously there’s lots of different options and all of the companies that you just mentioned obviously had established relationships, some of them with some of the legacy payments providers. The brands that you’re working with that have switched to Adyen in the last few years, what did they get from Adyen that they weren’t getting from their legacy providers?

DS: I mean, first and foremost, they get one platform, right? With one platform, I mean, not only the product suite, a partner that can help them with e-commerce and point of sale and data and everything in between, like payment acceptance, payouts, one product suite that supports all of those use cases, but they also get one partner to work with. I mean, oftentimes because of the fragmentation in this space, many of these large customers, when things go wrong, they are lost, they reach out to their partners and the finger pointing kicks in and then it’s really difficult to get things resolved. With Adyen it’s the opposite. Like there’s literally one person you talk to and there’s one product suite to support all of the activity. And so it becomes just so much more efficient to run your business. But look, think fundamentally, because again of the fragmentation in the space and the lack of innovation in the space, many of the large companies that are US based, they’ve been forced to make a real hard trade-off between innovation and cost. The macroeconomic environment hasn’t been easy to navigate in the past years. And a lot of these companies, again, they leaned towards traditional players just for the sake of reducing cost. But in result, they were left in a place where they couldn’t innovate anymore. They were not launching products, they were not investing in customer experience. And when these customers come to Adyen and we start working together, we’re essentially helped them understand that there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between innovation and cost. We helped them be extremely efficient, thanks to the one platform. We helped them save cost and innovate and expand and launch a new channel and launch a new payment method and personalize their offerings. So that combination is really powerful innovation and efficiencies. And we’re then very successful in showing to the largest US players that that can be achieved, the payments is a strategic asset and it helps you grow and it helps you be more efficient. Something that the traditional players haven’t been able to, frankly.

PR: So I’ve seen you guys talk about this concept of unified commerce, and I’d love you to kind of explain what you mean by that and how that concept is resonating today in the U.S.

DS: The easiest way to think about this is what does it take for any business to put their customers truly at the center of everything they do? It’s very common today as a consumer that you go shop on Store X or Retail X and if you buy online and try and return in store or vice versa, or if you are in store and the product is not available in store, but it is available online, the experience across channel is really cumbersome. It’s really difficult. And ultimately that leads to poor customer experience. And so I think fundamentally like unified commerce is really a solution that abstracts channel. It doesn’t matter if a transaction starts online and it ends in store. It doesn’t matter if the customer wants to buy online, if they are in store. You really abstract that away and you focus 100 % of your time and energy on your customer. And so, that is number one. And one of the key reasons why our offering is resonating because it truly helps businesses to combine both worlds and offer a streamlined experience to their customers.

Number two is we’re living in a very interesting time where many of the retailers today, they are at risk of disintermediation, meaning they invest a lot of time to own their customers and understand their customers’ preferences and such. But again, in the world of agentic commerce, That is at risk in some respects. And in that scenario, it’s absolutely critical that you as a retailer, you invest to make it so your online channels are extremely sharp and seamless. You invest to make it so you actually know your customer preferences, so they don’t go elsewhere to find products. They come to you because they know you know them. You understand their needs and preferences. And so I see unified commerce as a very strategic strategy for retailers today to retain customer ownership and to remain in control of those relationships. Those are like two reasons why it’s resonating, but frankly there are more, but I’d say those are the most interesting ones.

PR: I want to go back and touch on the agentic commerce. It’s in its absolute infancy. I tried to go buy a bike helmet with ChatGPT over the weekend and I was unsuccessful. I could not get that done. So we’re not there yet. How are you preparing Adyen for a future where agentic commerce is commonplace?

DS: It’s a very interesting industry development indeed. And we’re seeing like really interesting use cases and we’re talking to our customers and we’re getting questions from them. And so it is a fascinating space and one that we are participating in quite a bit. So even in the last few weeks alone, like we announced partnerships with the likes of Visa, we announced partnerships with Google. I think there are many businesses in the industry trying to understand what the future of agentic commerce will look like and what are the protocols, what are the frameworks that need to be in place for agentic commerce to be a viable channel or a viable way for people to buy products and services. The approach we’re taking is twofold.

First of all, we look at the underlying infrastructure that you need for agentic commerce to thrive. And there are a few things there. First and foremost, you need great tokenization capabilities. You need the ability to store payment instruments securely and transmit that payment instrument across different channels or ultimately like make it so it’s secure for an agent to use your card, right? And avoid that that card gets stolen or sensitive details get exposed in the internet. So tokenization is really, really important. In that regard, like we’ve probably been the player in our space that have mastered tokenization more than anyone else, like between network tokenization and optimization of network tokens and so on and so forth.

The second piece that is important foundationally is authentication. In a word where Peter is not going directly to retail X, but Peter is using an agent to buy at retail X, it’s critical that retail X knows that Peter is Peter and it’s not a bad actor that is trying to use a stolen card. And so there has to be a way, or there must be a way for that transaction to be authenticated so it is secure. So there’s high confidence that Peter is Peter in that scenario.

And lastly, you need to check out APIs that are highly functioning and that can perform across the variety of different use cases. so we are investing heavily in those three foundational infrastructure elements. And within those three, we are arguably one of the players that is doing the best job. Number two is you need to build a solution that doesn’t disintermediate those that are key stakeholders in these flows and I’m talking about customers and merchants and businesses. The first wave of agentic commerce solutions, they take away the ability for merchants to receive and understand customer data. So again, they disintermediate businesses and that is problematic for a number of different reasons. Secondly, on the consumer side, the first wave of solutions just puts consumers at a place where they may be very confused because if they’re buying at retail acts and the infrastructure in place for that to happen through agents makes it so their statement, they don’t see retail acts, but they see LLMA or LLMB. mean, it may create confusion for consumers. So our approach, and we laid out those principles last week really, is to build solutions that are merchant centric first, they are secure and they are protected from a consumer perspective. Those three things are there. We feel very confident that there’s a lot of potential in this channel and we’re actively participating in conversations with industry players and building with our customers as well so the channel can really thrive.

PR: So I want to switch gears and talk about payments rails for a little bit. And I want to start with stablecoins. mean, you’re from Latin America. Usage of stable coins is high in that part of the world. What is your view on the future of stablecoins as a payment mechanism?

DS: Stablecoins, I feel like that’s another very interesting industry development that 2025 just gave us. It’s not the first time that we’re looking at a new rail or a competing rail in the industry, something that is rivaling the incumbent rails. The real question you need to ask is, will it scale? And more importantly, what do you need to see? What needs to be true for it to scale, for stablecoins to become a viable alternative to Visa MasterCard or even for stablecoins to be adopted widely by consumers. And there really like five things that need to be true.

First is you need great economics on both sides. If it is more expensive for merchants to accept stablecoin transactions, or if it is more expensive for consumers to pay using stablecoins, forget about it. The incentives won’t be there. You’re not going to see great adoption. Number two, you need ecosystem readiness. Payments is a space where there’s a lot of information exchanged between the different parties touching a transaction and that needs to happen flawlessly. For that to happen, you need integrations in place. And so again, for anything to scale in our space, you need those integrations, you need data exchange to be very seamless. Number three, you need security. If there is a big concern from merchants or from consumers around fraud, if they are using this payment instrument or in the worst case scenario, if there is a lot of fraud associated with this payment instrument, you’re going to see slow adoption. Number four, you need obviously consumer adoption. You need to educate consumers. And number five, you need trust. Consumers need to trust that this works. One of the reasons why people use Visa and MasterCard is they never question Visa and MasterCard. It just works. People just use it and no questions asked. And so I think the industry is going to have to find ways to check those five boxes.

An analogy here is imagine like you have the fastest car in the world, like you really focus on building the fastest car, but then if no one can drive it, that’s a problem. If the roads are not good for it, that’s a problem. If there’s speed limits that prevent it for driving fast, that’s a problem. If you cannot get that car insured, that’s a problem. So you kind of need to make it so that technology can scale. And we’re excited about the possibility. We’re working with our customers, we’re talking to them and we’re agnostic to rails at Adyen. And so should it get to a point where you’re checking those boxes and then there’s great adoption and you’re seeing traction, we’re absolutely interested in ensuring that our customers can participate in that economy.

PR: What about pay by bank as a payment rail? mean, it’s used a lot in Europe. It’s getting used more and more in this country. But do you think pay by bank has a future in this country?

DS: That’s the million dollar question. think it’s been asked for a few years now. Look, I the similar dynamic here, right? What I mentioned before about the five boxes that also applies to pay by bank. And I feel like there’s been a lot of investment and great developments in terms of checking many of those boxes on the pay by bank side. There are certain spaces where we, as Adyen, we see traction with pay by bank. It’s obviously been already pretty big in utilities and in bill payments and things like that. There are compelling benefits for subscription businesses to leverage pay by bank. the average American consumer has like four to five cards in their wallet and those cards expire and get stolen and there are all sorts of issues that will cause churn for subscription businesses. And that is the one thing that they focus and obsess about. Whereas with a bank account, I mean, people just don’t change banks that often, right? People tend to stick with their bank for 20 years if I’m not wrong in average.

From that perspective, again, it can be beneficial for businesses to use it. I think beyond the incentives for merchants, what the industry needs to figure out now is really the incentives for consumers. Why would someone use pay-by-bank as opposed to their cards? And in other parts of the world where pay-by-bank has taken off, that came through merchant incentives as an example. And to be seen whether or not, you know, in the US we’re going to see merchants incentivizing usage of pay-by-bank. Because again, it’s beneficial for their business in some capacity.

PR: I have to ask you about Pix. It’s probably the greatest financial technology success story in the history of the world. Is there anything that the U.S. can learn from the rapid adoption of instant payments in Brazil?

DS: You were not overstating Pix as a phenomenon. We used to say, well, we still say that in Brazil like three years ago, the central bank, believe it or not, was the startup of the year, like biggest launch, massive scale. And frankly, like a brilliant product. Like I use Pix, my family uses Pix, like my grandparents use Pix. And so it’s a really interesting product. Look, I understand how folks would compare Pix and Pay by Bank in the US and instant payments in other parts of the world. I think there’s a fundamental difference between Brazil and Pix and Pay by Bank in the US. And the difference is Pix was a top-down move. It was driven by the central bank. And from that point on, like from the start, like the central bank just mandated that every single financial institution in Brazil adopted Pix or were able to accept Pix. So, out of the gate, you already have the backing off the most important financial authority in Brazil. You have readiness in the ecosystem. You have protocols that protect consumers. You check many of those boxes that in the West we’ve been struggling with. And so it’s a different scenario. Now, does it mean we should not compare? Not necessarily. I think there are great lessons to be learned. my view, the one thing that we should have in mind is this idea that it can be done, right? I mean, in Brazil is one example, but there are other markets where pay by bank has been a success, whether mandated by governments like India or in other places in Europe where it wasn’t the case and still you saw great adoption. I think there’s a lot of questions about consumer protection in the West and open banking and things like that. think the mindset should be how do we create a viable alternative? How do we give options and provide options to the marketplace and just let the pre-markets figure out what is the best product? I think that is ultimately the most beneficial outcome of this whole story. And in my mind, that is really the greatest example that the US can take from Pix. It’s not necessarily like, you know, how we got implemented because again, very different dynamic, but just the fact that it can’t be done if we invest enough time as an industry thinking about how to make it possible and how to make it like a scalable and viable option to other rails, there is certainly a way to do that. And that is, I think, the most important lesson we could take.

PR: Okay, so last question. I know there’s probably never been a more interesting time to be in payments and banking than there is right now. There’s so much change happening, so many possibilities, but I’d love to kind of close with your perspective. What are you most excited about for the future of payments and banking?

DS: That’s a loaded question. There are many things that I’m excited about as a payments geek. You’re right. It’s a very exciting time in payments. feel like payments has become, or ThinkTech I should say, it has become hot again. And so it’s an interesting time. In my mind, the combination of regulatory clarity for fintech to try. So again, the combination of payment acceptance and banking as a service and embedded finance, you have all of the different frameworks for businesses to build along those lines. I think it’s incredibly exciting. What we’re seeing now with AI and how it gives the opportunity for businesses to personalize offerings, to really get to know their customers in a much deeper way, in ways that were never possible before. So really enhance the customer experience to the point that we’ve never seen before. I think that is very exciting. Imagine you’re going online and being presented with exactly the products that you like, exactly the things that we’re looking for, exactly the payment method that you like to pay with. I mean, all of that, I think, still needs to happen in the US and in other places. And I think it’s possible now with AI tools. I’m very excited about what we can do with AI in performance, for example. I feel like we haven’t cracked the code yet. There’s still a lot of fraud. There’s still a lot of decline transactions in the e-commerce space because of technical errors and things like that and risk management.

I think AI is going to help us close that gap and we’re investing a lot on that here at Adyen with Adyen Uplift. Look, many reasons to be excited. I think the industry will continue to move. We’ll continue to change very rapidly. And again, one of the other reasons for us here at Adyen to be thinking about how to support our customers in navigating all of that change. It’s a lot, right? And so we want them to focus on their customers, focus on the growth of their business and let us figure out all of the bits and bytes of payments and financial infrastructure.

PR: Okay, well I have to leave it there, Davi. Really, really fascinating talking with you today and you are in an exciting space at an exciting time. So thanks for coming on the show. Best of luck to you.

DS: Thank you.

PR: As Davi said, a company like Adyen is agnostic when it comes to payments rails. So I really appreciated his framework for evaluating whether any new rail can actually scale. His five critical requirements for a payments rail to scale are worth repeating here. One, great economics on both sides, that’s for merchants and consumers. Two, ecosystem readiness, seamless integrations and data exchange. Three, security, meaning low fraud risk. Four, consumer adoption through education and awareness, and five, and probably most importantly, trust. It just has to work like Visa and MasterCard. This is a great framework to keep in mind when encountering the hype of any new payments technology. You need all five of these elements working together for a new rail to be successful.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.