Dive Brief:
- Dutch digital payments processor Adyen promoted an internal executive, Shepherd “Shep” Smith, to become president of the North America operations, according to a LinkedIn post from him Monday.
- Smith, who has been at Adyen for about 18 months, said he expects to keep the company’s “focus on solving complex payment challenges and helping our merchants innovate, scale, and grow.”
- There won’t be a new strategy for Smith that is different from that of his predecessor, a spokesperson for the company said by email. She noted he will be based in San Francisco, as was his predecessor, Davi Strazza.
Dive Insight:
Adyen provides point-of-sale hardware as well as processing software services in-store and online. The company’s revenue rose 18% last year to €2.36 billion euro ($2.77 billion), with the portion from North America remaining consistent at about 27%, according to its 2025 financial statement released in February.
Aside from his experience at Adyen as a vice president of global payment, product partners and partner engineering, Smith’s credentials include being the chief operations officer at embedded payments firm Synctera and working as a director of business development at tech titan Google.
Smith takes over from Gary Yang, the Amsterdam-based company’s senior vice president of global account management and partnerships, who served in the role temporarily while the company searched for someone to fill the job.
The job opened up last November after Strazza exited, following about three years in the role. Strazza is now the chief business officer at the payments services provider Lightspark.
Strazza left the North America post at Adyen after leading the effort to grow the company’s payments processing and merchant services business in the region amid fierce competition. Legacy rivals such as Global Payments, now combined with Worldpay, and Fiserv are top rivals, but fintech startups such as Shift4 Payments also battle for merchant clients.
The fast-food restaurant company McDonald’s as well as movie theater outfit Cinemark Holdings and retailers Patagonia, Etsy and eBay are some of the U.S. clients that have turned to Adyen for payments services. Adyen has also previously named retailers Crate & Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods as customers.
Adyen had 884 employees in North America at the end of last year, with the bulk of them in Chicago, San Francisco and New York and a handful in Toronto, according to the annual report.
Adyen is led by co-CEOs Ingo Uytdehaage and Pieter van der Does, who is also a co-founder.
The company’s chief financial officer, Ethan Tandowsky, said in May that he would leave the company, effective Aug. 31, for an “opportunity outside of fintech,” according to a press release at that time.
