Adyen NV

AEX:ADYEN

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Josh Masser, executive]

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining Adyen's Q3 2024 Business Update Call. My name is Josh Masser, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm happy to be joined today by our CFO, Ethan Tandowsky.

In today's call, we'll discuss Adyen's financial and business updates from the quarter, followed by a Q&A segment. [Operator Instructions]

So with that, let's get started. Ethan, can you speak to the progress made throughout the business over the last few months?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. Thanks, Josh. It's great to see that over the past few months, we continue to drive value for our customers through ongoing product innovation on our single global platform. Adyen's ability to meet customer needs was ultimately reflected in our net revenue, which was up 20% year-on-year or 21% on a constant currency basis. We're proud of this growth and the progress we've made towards our expectations for the full year, which was achieved despite stronger comparables and demonstrates the strength of our core offering.

Key drivers included gaining wallet share with existing customers, further diversifying our merchant mix and winning new business across all of the 3 pillars. This net revenue growth is a great representation of the value we are able to create for our customers.

[Josh Masser, executive]

Thanks for that summary, Ethan. It's clear that Q3 was a period of strong but business as usual delivery as we continue to focus on the long-term outlook. And now that we have the high-level picture, can you also touch upon how growth look within the pillars?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Sure. We continue to see solid growth across the pillars, which led to process volume being up 32% year-on-year. When we exclude a single large volume customer in the digital pillar, our process volume growth was up 27%, slightly higher than in H1. This is not only a testament to our global appeal and our ability to continually innovate but is also very promising when you look at the runway ahead for our newer areas of the business.

Starting with our most established pillar, digital. It was a key contributor with volumes up 29% year-on-year. We saw consistent underlying trends compared to the first half of the year. And excluding the single large volume customer Here, too, we saw a slight acceleration versus H1. We again saw strength in digital content and subscription as well as in our delivery and mobility vertical. We also further advanced our U.S. debit offering with the launch of intelligent payment routing and partnered with some of the world's leading companies to bring this to market, delivering on our promise to provide our customers with a subscription to innovation.

We also continue to win wallet share and had strong performance in our other pillars. Unified Commerce was up 33% with strong contributions from verticals outside of our historic core with our more recent strategic verticals of large-format retail and hospitality remaining among our fastest growing. We expanded our terminal range with the launch of SFO 1, which creates a more tailored experience for shoppers, while also lowering costs for our customers. And finally, platforms remained our fastest-growing pillar with volumes up 44% year-on-year.

As of Q3, we now have 25 platforms processing over EUR 1 billion over the last 12 months compared to just 17 at this time last year. This is a clear signifier, both of our Adyen for platform's value proposition and the strategic importance for our customers of embedding payments within their broader offering. All in all, we're very pleased with the progress made so far this year. We are progressing as expected, and our guidance remains unchanged.

We continue to expect to be towards the low end of our net revenue growth range for the full year and do not expect to fall below the low end of the range in the second half. Looking ahead, we remain confident in the vast opportunity and in our ability to continue executing on our long-term vision.

[Josh Masser, executive]

Great. Thank you very much for that recap. We'll now transition to the Q&A segment. We'll get to as many questions as we can. And otherwise, the IR team will be available for follow-up after the call. Thank you.

The first question comes from Harshita Rawat from Bernstein.

[Harshita Rawat, analyst]

Ethan, I want a follow-up on digital. You mentioned kind of, I think, volume growth ex the large customer accelerated. That kind of suggests that your large customer volumes may have downed a little bit. Any color there would be helpful. And then just as a follow-up, Ethan, can you just remind us of the building blocks of revenue acceleration into next year with respect to kind of new sales pricing, your underlying product momentum and also volatility.

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes, sure. So first, I'd like to speak to the large digital customer you referenced. So here, there is a limit to what I can share, but I would like to cover the most important points. And I think there's a couple that are relevant. One is that we've been talking about this customer for the last few quarters because it's visible in our process volume growth.

We saw a couple of things in the third quarter this year. that made it again visible in our overall platform process volume growth. One is that we started to annualize some of the volumes from last year. So there were some volumes from this customer in the third quarter. they fully ramped in the fourth quarter. So it wasn't their full volumes, but we are starting to annualize some of their volumes. And the second is that in the third quarter of this year, we saw lower volumes from this customer than in the first half of this year.

It's important here to remember a couple of things. One is that while it's very visible in our volume growth number, it's not very visible in our net revenue growth number, which is where we manage. We talked back in August that this customer had around 1% of our net revenues. And therefore, any movements with this customer and to be honest with any other customer, given where our concentration is at has a limited impact on our net revenue growth.

So if this customer has a relatively limited impact on our net revenue growth, and I think the obvious and logical question I would also ask is, does this also relate potentially to other customers on the platform? And here, I would like to be clear, each customer on the platform has different characteristics and circumstances related to them. In this case, in these circumstances, there is no correlation to other customers on the platform. And so while I can't share everything, I think those are the most important points I would like to share. And with that, I can't share more specifically on this individual case.

Now the second question is what is -- what about the building blocks of revenue acceleration for next year? There's a couple, right? The biggest area of growth in any period for us is how do we expand our share of wallet with our existing customers. I think there, we see nice traction. It is diversified. It's across each of the pillars and the regions, but especially prominent in a few verticals that we highlighted in H1, both in digital and especially in our larger markets being Europe and U.S., North America rather. So we see real strong potential in our ability to continue capturing wallet share at an accelerated rate in '25 compared to where we were this year.

And the second piece which we've also talked about for the last year is how do new sales ultimately come in to impact our growth trajectory. Of course, we've done a lot of hiring throughout 2022 and 2023, especially. And given our sales cycles and our land-and-expand strategy, bringing in new customer wins takes time to play out in our net revenues, we're seeing strong signs there in the pipeline that this investment will also start to help us drive that acceleration into next year. So those are the 2 key things that I would highlight.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley.

[Adam Wood, analyst]

The first one is, I don't -- specifically don't want to ask about the big merchant you're talking about, but wanted to ask about big merchants in general. I guess people could come in and undercut you and that could be a reason for people shifting volumes. And we saw with eBay last year that they moved some specific scheme volume direct to those acquirers as opposed to routing it through you. Would they be the main reasons that you would see volume shift away from you as opposed to, for example, poor performance on the platform that would lead a merchant to move. So just helping us with reasons why that will happen, but that I guess could be seen as good or bad.

And then secondly, just on the platform ramp. I appreciate the volume growth is very strong, but it has slowed a little bit over the last couple of quarters, but we've seen good growth in the merchant numbers. Could you just talk a little bit about the timing of ramps there? I appreciate we probably should expect it to be lumpy. But should we expect that customer number growth to start translating into volumes over the next few quarters, please?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes, sure. So I want to be sure that I address this directly rather than trying to -- rather than trying and creating a bit of confusion. So you ask about the single customer. Like I just mentioned, I think each customer has its own unique circumstances and situations. And in this circumstance, there is no correlation to others, right? So to answer it in a generic way, I think wouldn't be connected to, I think, the direct question you're asking.

If you are in -- if I can answer the more generic question, I would say what we talked about last year, especially in the digital space is that it is ultimately on performance and cost to win share of wallet. We still have lots of share of wallet to gain, especially on the digital side. So ultimately, it's through our ability to optimize for our customers. which drives that share of wallet. We talked about our intelligent payment routing this quarter. That's an improvement on our U.S. debit offering.

This is certainly an area where we can add value both by driving authorization rates up and by reducing costs for our customers. So it is, in the end, the performance game like it's always been. But I don't want to get this confused with the earlier question that you just asked, where I would say this is a specific circumstance and doesn't correlate to other customers on the platform.

Then the question on platform ramp. So in terms of volumes and how to look at that. So I would say generically that platforms is very much an area of growth for us. It's both because of our ability to provide strong value in that space, but also because this is a direction that the payments world is going. Platforms are embedding payments, and they're being very successful in that, and we can be a really important player to help them do that. So for multiple reasons, this will be a key growth area for us.

In terms of translation, Again, we're showing volumes here, right? So there will be some lumpiness in it also given it's our smallest pillar to date. But we absolutely think over the medium to long term that this is probably our fastest-growing pillar given the tailwinds we have in this space.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Justin Forsythe at UBS.

[Justin Forsythe, analyst]

So a couple from me. First one is it seems like there will be in 4Q or already has been in 3Q, a meaningful amount of potential volume in digital coming to market relating to Braintree's positive pricing actions. Given the client overlap, is there an opportunity for you to take some of that and how are you pitching to your merchant clients to win that volume back to the extent any was lost in the first place?

The second question is, would you consider reevaluating your medium-term EBITDA margin guide given you are running at 72 full-time hires for the year-to-date and revenue is growing at 20% plus. It seems like you will quite easily exit 2024 above that range with more leverage coming in 2025. Why is 50% the guide for 2026? Are there some large expenses or slower lower revenue growth, we are not appreciating.

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. So first, on your question around how we're winning volume. To be honest, nothing really has changed here. We keep focusing on how do we drive value for our customers, right? In the digital space, that global platform to solve their needs both to drive authorization levels to drive cost down to offer local payment methods. That pitch is the same as it's always been. In some parts, there's different emphasis depending on which customers we're talking about and where their focus is at that moment. But I would say, overall, the pitch is exactly the same.

And is there meaningful volume still to win? Absolutely. We still are the minority player across our customer base on average, right? So there's a lot of volume for us to win still in our existing base, also in digital, even though it's our biggest pillar of the 3.

And then in terms of medium-term EBITDA margin guide, yes, there's a couple of things I'd say here. First, we are still very much building this business. This business will be much bigger in the years ahead than it is today. And in doing that, we want to be sure that we have the right flexibility to invest where we can accelerate that growth. And therefore, we've been very much focused on how to drive net revenue growth at the same time, showing the operating leverage that is inherent to our business model. So there's nothing that I'd like to change at this moment. I think we are making good progress. We still plan to hire the people that we've planned to hire. We've made no changes there. And we're very much focused on how do we build a bigger a gen supporting our customers and providing the ultimate value we can provide.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs.

[Mohammed Moawalla, analyst]

The first one is just a you alluded to kind of the productivity of the sales hires. But when you sort of wait to different kind of contributors around the acceleration you expect, is it still primarily the land and expand and essentially the productivity of the sales force is kind of a more variable factor as you look at that sort of medium-term period? And secondly, with regards to that large customer, is the bulk of the sort of the ramp down, so to speak, completed? Or are you expecting any kind of residual impact that could impact your kind of exit into this year?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. First, how do we compare the sales hires to the existing piece, the wallet share gains with our existing customers is again the biggest part. And therefore, it has also the biggest impact on our acceleration. I think we see really strong signs that over the next year, we have the opportunity to continue to expand within that existing base to drive acceleration in our net revenue growth into 2025.

And at the same time, we have good insight into what the sales pipeline is doing. We track that from the start of talking to a prospect, through to them onboarding onto the Adyen platform and then, of course, ultimately seeing them ramp up over the coming years. And given our investments are now a year or 2 years now with us, we will start to see some of the signs, the early signs of that net revenue coming in. But the biggest piece certainly is still going to be from existing as we still ramp up that new sales piece.

The second question is, is there still some ramp down to come? It is our expectation still that there will be lower volumes coming in the next couple of quarters from this customer.

[Josh Masser, executive]

Next question comes from Hannes Leitner from Jefferies.

[Hannes Leitner, analyst]

So the first question is on Q4. And so how do you plan to achieve that uplift. It's a similar quarter-over-quarter growth rate expected for like around 14%, but it's a higher base. Now when you're thinking that the large volume customer is ramping further down and then also your largest platform customer potentially also continued to ramp down. You -- I think you called out a partnership with a large Buy Now, Pay Later customer. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the different moving parts, how to achieve Q4?

And then the second one is maybe then on the geographic drivers. You didn't mention the U.S. Is that maybe because of the platform and the volume customer that it's not the fastest-growing region. Maybe any trends there in terms of pricing and growth?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes, sure. So first on how we plan to grow in Q4, I think you raised a very important question because on one hand, we're talking about an individual customer because of its impact on volume growth, whereas the way we guide the business, the way we manage the business is all down to net revenues. And there is no single customer on the platform that ultimately determines our outcomes from a net revenue perspective. So ultimately, we see strength across the board in the portfolio with -- even if we look from a volumes perspective, we even see slight acceleration if we exclude one individual customer, which is large on the volume side, and as I mentioned, very limited on the revenue side.

So it's not about one customer making or breaking any individual period. I think we're far beyond that given where our concentration has come to over the last years. it is really about us executing and delivering with our customers across regions, across the pillars to drive that growth. And there, I feel very confident that we will deliver growth, which doesn't fall below the low end of the range for the second half.

In terms of regional growth, we see that our 2 largest regions, being North America and EMEA, are our fastest growing so far. EMEA was our fastest growing in the third quarter. But it's difficult to assess a region on any specific 3-month period. It's really important for us to look at this more holistically over time. We see really strong growth still in North America, and we expect that to continue. It's absolutely our key target market, and we've been really pleased with what we've seen in the third quarter as well.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Sandeep Deshpande from JPMorgan.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

I have 2 questions. I mean Clearly, I mean, you've got some volatility from some customers. So I'm trying to understand in another way. Do you have different contracts with different customers that allow them to pull volume from one quarter to the other because in the digital space...

[Josh Masser, executive]

Sandeep, your line is quite bad. Do you mind just repeating that question?

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

[indiscernible].

[Josh Masser, executive]

We're struggling to hear you, Sandeep. Maybe we can come back to you.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

Hello.

[Josh Masser, executive]

Yes, try again, Sandeep. We can hear you now.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

So my question is, given the volatility you're seeing at some customers, do you have different contracts with different customers that allow them to change volumes from one payment service provided another easily in the digital space? Or are your contracts very similar, which means that your customers are the ones who are acting differently.

And then my second question to you is about your growth into '25, again, I'm sorry to get back there. You've had some pretty [indiscernible] wins in the last couple of quarters in terms of new customer announcements. Are you going to see those ramp up into any significant volume next year? Or is it, as you just said, mainly driven by your existing customer base that is going to drive volume.

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. So first, on the volatility in some customers. I'm just going to say it one more time just to try to make sure that I have the point clear. I think if you look at the volatility, it's really only visible in the volumes, right? If you look at it from a net revenue perspective, the there is not a lot of movement there. I think we're actually underlying accelerating if you compare it to the comparable periods that we had last year. In terms of the way that we operate with our different customers, it's always our ambition to win volumes through performance right? So it's not about tying customers into long-term contracts where they get stuck with us. No, it's about providing the best service that we can provide and the best product around the world that they bring us that additional volume.

And that's been super successful for us, right? We've talked about where most of our growth comes from in any given period, being from existing. We've talked about our low churn levels. I think those are all a testament to that model and how we can drive success for our customers. And I think from a net revenue perspective, that is very clear. It's worked really, really well for us over the last years, and it continues to work really well for us.

In terms of 2025, are there critical wins? Of course, there are critical wins. There are always important wins for us, whether it's because of a market that we're in, a new vertical we're getting in or the size of a customer, but still no individual customer given where we're at from a concentration perspective, ultimately decides whether we're going to accelerate next year or not. This is much more broad-based than that. This is growth across many different customers across each of the pillars in the regions, right? This is about us being diligent and working closely with our customers to make sure that we're providing them the best value. And when we look out to 2025, now that we're getting towards the end of 2024, we see great opportunity to further expand with our existing customers, and that's not going to be down to 1 or 2 customers. That is going to be much more broad-based.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Josh Levin from Autonomous.

[Joshua Levin, analyst]

Two questions from me. As you think about revenue growth accelerating from low 20s to mid-20s, how much of that will be driven by higher NII from lending in adding capital? And then second question, it looks like just looking at LinkedIn data, some of the sales people hired in the last 18 months have gone back to their former legacy payment company employers. Is this normal when you ramp up, you just have some churn? Or did you perhaps overhire.

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. So first, how much of the acceleration is connected to NII. I think it's still going to be minimal. We shared it for the first time in H1. We see absolutely a lot of opportunity in embedded financial products. But that is really driving the acceleration in the coming years. We still think that's too early. So this is still going to be an important piece for us, especially as we sell into platforms. But in terms of really driving that net revenue growth, I think it's still going to be too early in 2025.

And then in terms of the salespeople that you mentioned, I would say there's no real trend there. When you're hiring and growing a team, you're always looking at, do you -- are you able to bring in the right people? And then are they able to succeed in this business? And for the most part, we're really, really happy with the people that we've been able to bring in. And of course, from time to time, you need to do some performance management and you need to make some adjustments. But it's nothing abnormal. We haven't seen any strange levels related to this, and it's not that we've overhired. We're still hiring in these areas. We still believe there's further investments to make.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Alex Faure from Exane.

[Alexandre Faure, analyst]

I wanted to come back on an earlier question around sort of Braintree retrenching quite fast in the U.S. since in Q2. I was a bit surprised that you're talking about a slight acceleration ex this large customer, but not a more material one. So should we understand that maybe there are some U.S. digital volumes that you're not interested in and maybe more focusing on the more sophisticated and complex transactions. How should we think of that?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. Well, I think I would look at that a bit differently in that, of course, we're building a bigger scale each year, and we're -- we've been able to accelerate our underlying digital growth in Q3, if you would exclude that customer. So I think it's a strong sign for us that we are able to grow much faster than the market is growing, and therefore, we gain market share with these customers.

Of course, things take time, right? It's not like an overnight switch that things go from one day to the next differently. So it's about staying close to our customers, helping them where their main pain points are. And I think to see a bit of acceleration is a strong proof point that we are doing the right things in that even at this scale, we are able to gain significant market share as we move forward.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Darrin Peller from Wolfe Research.

[Darrin Peller, analyst]

I just want to hit again on the examples you're seeing. We're hearing in the market some success stories of you proving out TCO in just a more material way, a more tangible way with some customers of yours. And so maybe just hit again for a few examples, if you don't mind on what you're seeing, where it's resonating in which parts of the business and what kind of savings you're providing? Anything you can provide more light on would be great just because it seems like it's something that's incremental even now versus what maybe it was a year ago.

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. Good question. There's one that we touched on in the update, which I think is maybe relevant. It's not the only one, but it's our intelligent payment routing, which has essentially also helped us to improve our U.S. debit offering. We did a pilot with some of the world's leading companies, and we saw that there was a 26% reduction in cost, but not just by itself also with an increase in authorizations of 22 basis points. And that might -- 22 basis points might seem small compared to the 26% cost savings. But again, remember, the 22 basis points is on the total value of those transactions where the cost is just on the payments cost, right?

So these are really impactful numbers that we're seeing with our customers. And if we can drive traction in these areas with the biggest customers, the leading customers in the world, then of course, there's many other customers that can benefit from it. That's one example I can make concrete. There's many others, whether it's implementing new payment methods, whether it's global offering, there's a range of different ways that we help our customers to manage their total cost of ownership.

I think one other maybe that I'd highlight is we talked about a new terminal, our SFO 1 within Unified Commerce. It's again the same concept, right? How do we help improve the customer experience so that they can make more sales over time and at the same time, help them reduce their costs. I think this is another good example where we can help streamline the in-store, the in-person payments flow to improve the customer experience and help them drive down their cost of those terminals at the same time. And so I think it's not just about driving costs down. It's about driving costs and increasing top line at the same time and driving that overall total cost of ownership, which I think is where we are seeing traction.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Pavan Daswani from Citi.

[Pavan Daswani, analyst]

I've got a couple, if I may. Firstly, you gave us some very useful color on digital volumes, excluding the large customer. Could you maybe share any color on take rate trends, excluding this customer? And then secondly, you talked about wallet share being the most important driver for growth acceleration. Can you maybe touch on the visibility you have in terms of confidence on that ramp timing in 2025?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. Sure. So first on take rate trends. I would say this is even broader than digital. But across the board, we see that there's been no structural change in the way that we price deals, right? Deals are mostly driven off of the size of the volumes that we can win, given that we have little incremental cost to those additional volumes. And we see that on a like-for-like basis, those have stayed very much similar to where they've been in previous years. We shared back at our Investor Day, the building blocks. And if you exclude this large customer, the trend we saw of low single digits to mid-single digits, impact from tiered pricing. So really from growing wallet share with our existing customers continues to be the trends. There's no real shift here. So we are seeing similar pricing for similar sized volumes as that's the biggest differentiator.

And then talking about visibility. I would say, in general, we have a pretty good idea of the way we're able to gain wallet share over time. On a more short-term basis, we probably get good visibility 6 to 12 months out with our -- each of our individual customers because that's also how they're building out their priorities and their own product road maps. And so as we get towards the end of 2024, it then becomes quite visible what we should expect throughout 2025. And that's what our account management teams are spending a lot of time on understanding where the priorities are of our customers and how we can best execute and meet them to deliver on those priorities.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Sven Merkt from Barclays.

[Sven Merkt, analyst]

So first, I wanted to quickly ask on APAC and LatAm. They were a bit softer in H1. And has this continued in Q3? And if so, what is driving that? And then secondly, I just wanted to ask on issuing as well. The last time you disclosed the volumes there, they were at EUR 100 million. I think that was in H2 last year. Since then you had a number of interesting wins such as Bill.com, can you just give us an update on the current issuing volume run rate and if you have made significant further progress there?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes, sure. So I think from a regional perspective, again, I mentioned earlier about North America and EMEA were the fastest growing of our regions this period. One thing I would highlight is that in LatAm, we are seeing some nice underlying acceleration. Having said that, the currency has had a really big impact so far in this quarter. So I wouldn't expect that that's materially changing the growth trajectory in the second half.

And then for issuing, you're right in that we did last disclose the hundreds of millions. We're making nice progress here, and we'll plan to update the market soon about that progress that we're delivering on. But we very much are excited by the traction we're seeing here.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The next question comes from Andrew Bauch from Wells Fargo.

[Andrew Bauch, analyst]

I wanted to ask about the regulatory environment in the U.S. There's been considerable discussion around how this is impacting certain providers, particularly in the Banking as a Service segment and some struggling to meet these complex requirements. With the licenses you have in place in the U.S., how are you seeing your prospects really developed in the U.S., particularly around embedded finance?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. I think this is exactly why we've gone the path of trying to get -- trying to be fully licensed, like we've done in the U.S., in Europe and in the U.K. Because we have that end-to-end responsibility and can rely on ourselves in our processes to ultimately deliver the products that we want to deliver it puts us in a really, really strong position to be able to help our customers. And it's something that our customers also appreciate. Not only is it the end-to-end technology that we can provide, but it's also that regulatory experience those licenses. That means we can be fully in control of the process. And I think that is going to be -- continue to be a really important differentiator for us in the way that we're approaching this part of the market.

So I think as regulations and as regulatory environments change, we are in the position to be able to move most quickly with that and to be able to deliver for our customers as it's all within our own hands, all within our own court.

[Josh Masser, executive]

Next question comes from Sanjay Sakhrani from KBW.

[Sanjay Sakhrani, analyst]

Just following up on the take rate question. It seems Ethan, even like you're saying the pricing is pretty stable across your merchants. So as we think about that large merchant stepping down its volume, should we expect some stabilization in the take rate going forward from here? Maybe you can just help us think through that.

And then secondly, just -- and I'll ask my 2 questions upfront. On Apple and sort of the NFC opening up, do you see that providing an opportunity for you guys in terms of doing other strategies as you spoke to end-to-end? Just curious.

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. So first, take rate, right? We show an aggregated take rate, that's entirely driven to merchant mix. Again, bigger customers having lower take rates and smaller -- relatively smaller customers having higher take rates. If you isolate just that individual customer that helps the take rate, but ultimately, it's just one customer amongst the mix. It will come down to the overall merchant mix, which will drive the take rate outcome and ultimately why we prefer and think it's much more useful to focus on how our net revenue growth is developing.

In terms of the second question, yes. I would say a couple of things. One is that I think you do see that there is a lot of change in how people look at what a payments terminal is. There's a lot more optionality and opportunity to create different experiences. We have been very quick to market to offer tap to pay on iPhone. We also expanded in certain markets on the Android in the third quarter. And I think as that ecosystem continues to develop and shopping behaviors change, there will be more opportunity to further disrupt how in-person payments operate, and that's something that we're absolutely playing a role in.

[Josh Masser, executive]

Next question comes from Bryan Bergin from TD Cowen.

[Bryan Bergin, analyst]

First question on Unified Commerce. So nice acceleration in volume growth. Just given this one is more macro sensitive, though, can you just talk about the key drivers that allowed that outperformance there? And then the second question on platforms, understanding solid growth there, too, but can you just comment on the level of expansion in 3Q versus that first half level ex eBay? Should we expect platforms to be relatively lumpy in the earlier stages here of you scale in the business?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. So first, on Unified Commerce. I think the trend we've seen in Unified Commerce, which has been helping us in supporting our growth over this year is that we've expanded outside of our historic core verticals over the last few years. So into things like large-format retail into hospitality. And I think the benefit of expanding into a more diversified set of verticals is that we are less macro driven by any one vertical, given that diversification. So I think we're really seeing the benefits of that expansion to other verticals throughout the past years, helping to support and drive this growth.

From a platform side, I would say, yes, both because it's the smallest pillar. It's -- so it's more concentrated, but also because platforms can be very large in scale and size, right? They're ultimately embedding payments to their broad customer base. And depending on where they are in their journey of ultimately attaching payments to their customer base. They can get to some pretty large-scale customers. And so I would say that combination of it still being earliest days of the 3 pillars and the fact that there are just very large volume platforms in this space, then you do -- you should expect a bit more lumpiness here in this pillar. The last thing I'd say is that, that's much more visible from a volumes perspective than what we see from a net revenue perspective, again, given how we price these deals.

[Josh Masser, executive]

Next question comes from James Friedman from SIG.

[James Friedman, analyst]

First of all, thank you for doing this call. It's very helpful cadence. Ethan, I wanted to ask, with regard to your prior answer about take rate expansion, I think the punchline was that it's mix related. I was just wondering if you could unpack that a little. Is that merchant size or cross-border something more?

I'll just ask my second one upfront. In your answer to Darrin's question earlier, when you were saying -- I'm doing this [ primarily ] 22 basis point improvement in authorization, do you think of that as an issuing solution? Or is that something on the merchant side?

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Sure. So first on the mix related to take rate. We see the characteristic that most determines take rate is merchandise. So when I speak to mix, there, I'm speaking mostly to where the growth comes from whether that growth is mostly from large volume customers or from relatively smaller volume customers. Maybe just one example, for instance, in the second half of last year, we talked about growing faster with our relatively smaller enterprise customers, which had a size mix impact on our overall take rate. So when I say mix, it is usually down to size.

And then in terms of the 22 basis point uplift that I mentioned, of course, everything is working in tandem with your customer. So we've built out what we think is a world-class leading debit proposition in the U.S. that drives this outsized performance of both increasing authorization and reducing cost. We tried to pull as much of the complexity of this underlying setup onto our own so that we can pull it away from the merchant side. But in the end, you need to work together with your customer to make sure that you're optimized and set up right, based on their individual needs. And so it also requires working together with them to drive that value.

[Josh Masser, executive]

The final question comes from Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank.

[Nooshin Nejati, analyst]

Two from me. I'm sorry again to push on the take rate. I'm just trying to understand as we -- I mean I appreciate managing the company on a net revenue basis. And given that the move we have seen in the take rate, and I know that we talk about the size of the mix of your merchants and the size of them. Is it now makes sense that we think that the mix is kind of similar to H1 last year before this large volume customer that was ramping up and now that they are ramping down. And -- so I'm trying to see if we're going to see further upside over here. And then when it comes to hiring should we expect similar trends as we saw in Q3 for Q4 and maybe throughout the next year.

[Ethan Tandowsky, executive]

Yes. So first on take rate. I think if we would exclude a large customer, what we see is very much a trend in line with the building blocks that we laid out, right? So there is, of course, a tiered pricing impact because we're growing our business with our existing customers. That means that over time, they're getting to higher tiers with lower prices per transaction. And we've quantified that to be an expectation of low single digits to mid-single digits. That's the trend that we see. We don't see changes in the structural prices either that we offer to our existing customers or that we offer to our new business as they come on. The pricing is mostly down to size of that merchant more than any other factor. So I would say that it's been pretty consistent in terms of pricing over the last year.

Then in terms of hiring. So we are ramping up hiring a bit. We should expect a higher number in Q4 than we've seen in the earlier quarters. But I think getting to the couple of hundred is still probably unlikely. It was never a go by itself to get to that couple of hundred. Those are the areas we identified as really important investment areas for us. They're still the areas that we identify as really important investment areas for us. And our hiring process isn't constrained by the annual calendar period that we typically report on, right? So we'll make sure that we continue to hire those people, make sure we get quality people in. And if that rolls a bit over into the next year, that's probably likely.

[Josh Masser, executive]

So that concludes our business update call. So thank you very much, everyone, for joining today. We appreciate you taking the time. And of course, the IR team is available for any further questions. Have a great day. Thanks.