Adyen has a 50% EBITDA margin while competitors are bleeding. Here’s the "Single Stack" secret. (Deep Dive)

> Most people see payment processing as a commodity business with "razor-thin" margins. But Adyen is proving that wrong by hitting **50%+ EBITDA margins** (targeting 55% by 2028). **How? The Costco Strategy.** Adyen uses "Scale Economies Shared." They charge their enterprise customers the lowest rates in the industry via a transparent **Interchange++** model. This builds extreme stickiness—their churn is <1%. By attracting massive volume at low cost, they gain "operating leverage" that legacy players like Fiserv simply can't match. **The "Single Stack" Moat:** Every other player in this space is a "patchwork" of acquired companies. When you use PayPal/Braintree or Fiserv, you're often running on 5 different backend systems. Adyen built everything from scratch. This means: 1. One engineering team manages the whole global system. 2. Data is unified (H&M can see London in-store and NY online sales on one dashboard). 3. They don't have the "integration tax" that slows down Stripe or Block. **Valuation Check:** After a 75% drawdown from 2021 peaks, Adyen is finally trading at a reasonable **\~20x EV/EBITDA**. For a company growing 20%+, this is an efficiency machine hiding in a "hated" sector. Here's the link to the full deep dive: [https://theproteavault.substack.com/p/the-costco-of-payments-why-adyen?r=76seop](https://theproteavault.substack.com/p/the-costco-of-payments-why-adyen?r=76seop)