Dive Brief:

• Dutch payments processor Adyen, which has a growing U.S. presence, said its chief financial officer, Ethan Tandowsky, is exiting the company, effective Aug. 31, for an “opportunity outside of fintech,” according to a Wednesday press release.
• Adyen’s supervisory board will now begin searching for a replacement, the release said, calling Tandowsky a “core member of the leadership team.”
• Adyen’s co-CEOs said they regretted his decision to leave, but valued his contributions to the company. “Ethan has been a constant part of the Adyen journey for nearly a decade,” the co-CEOs, Pieter van der Does and Ingo Uytdehaage, said in a press release.

Dive Insight:

After joining the company in 2016 as a financial controller, Tandowsky became the head of group finance in 2020 and its CFO in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

In Tandowsky’s departure announcement, Adyen credited its soon-to-be-former CFO with steering the company’s worldwide financial operations during high-growth periods. 

Adyen is losing its CFO as the company vies for a bigger U.S. market share. North America has been a key growth market for the fintech in recent years, but the Dutch company faces tough U.S. rivals. They include Fiserv, with its Clover point-of-sale services, and Worldpay, now a unit of Global Payments as well as digital players PayPal Holdings and Stripe.

“Adyen’s infrastructure is built for long-term resilience, and our daily operations proceed without interruption,” a spokesperson for the company said by email. “Ethan is focused on supporting a seamless transition over the next few months while the search for a successor is carried out.”

New York-based financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which follows the company, told its investment clients in a Wednesday note that it confirmed Adyen’s forward-looking guidance remains the same, though it said “the unexpected nature of the announcement is likely to catch some investors off-guard.” 

Cantor Fitzgerald also noted that Tandowsky is headed to a pre-IPO company next and that “the start date was likely determined by the needs of the new company.”

Tandowsky is the latest executive to exit the Dutch fintech. Last November, Davi Strazza, the company’s president for the North American region, left the company. Following Strazza’s exit, Gary Yang, then the senior vice president of global account management and partnerships, stepped up to oversee the region while the company searched for his successor.