What changes when payments stop being a line item you manage and start being data you can actually use? Why can so many retailers see their online customers perfectly and the person standing in their store barely at all? And how do you choose a technology partner for a version of checkout that hasn't been invented yet?
To find the answers, it helps to speak to someone who has seen payments from both sides of the table.
Brady Hampton is an Enterprise Account Executive at Adyen, coming up on four years with the company. Before that, he spent six years at HSBC, sitting firmly on the legacy side of banking and payments, with a couple of years at a hyper-growth startup in between.
That's roughly a decade in payments - enough, by his own reckoning, to put him in the nerd category.
Adyen is a financial technology platform rather than a payment service provider, and Brady is quick to point out that the distinction matters. The business covers in-store, online, in-app, subscription and billing, and handles processing, risk management and acquiring. Banking licences in the UK, Europe and the US allow it to go further still, into capital, business accounts and card issuing.
But the more interesting shift isn't in the product list. It's in what payments are for.
Because for a long time, payments were the plumbing. The bit nobody thought about until it broke on a Saturday afternoon. What Brady describes is an industry pulling that infrastructure into the centre of the business - into loyalty, into marketing, into how a retailer recognises a customer at all.
We talked to Brady about legacy payment stacks, unified commerce, what agentic commerce actually means for retailers, and the three things he'd get right first.
Brady, let's start with you. How did you end up in payments?
I'm coming up to four years at Adyen now. I work primarily with enterprise retailers on our direct payment solution - effectively helping them simplify their payment infrastructure. But the conversation almost always comes round to global scale, and how they move into this market, that market, and so on.
Before Adyen I had six years at HSBC, so I got to sit on the legacy side of banking and payments. That's been really useful coming to this side of the table, where we're often leading with innovation and what's new in the space. Previously it was very much a cost centre.
And between HSBC and Adyen I had two years at a hyper-growth startup, which was great for seeing how a business actually gets built -the go-to-market side of things, launching fast.
So despite considering myself a bit of a spring chicken, that's about ten years in payments. I'd probably fall under the nerd category at this point.
You used the word legacy almost immediately. What does legacy actually look like in payments?
Historically, payments companies have been seen as just payments companies. You're a payment service provider, you look after the gateway or the acquiring, and there's a long, complex flow behind it that retailers don't really see.
We're trying to change that narrative -positioning ourselves not as Adyen the payment service provider, but Adyen the financial technology platform.
But bringing it back to the retailer, the real question is how you get them to switch. That's the million-dollar question, and it's usually about speaking to the right person.
What we always lead with is this: yes, there's a cost element to payments. But the businesses doing things really well, particularly in retail, know their customers no matter how they interact with them. Online, in store, through the app. They have complete unified data across every sales channel.
With a legacy setup, you simply don't have that. If you're using one online provider, one in-app provider and a separate POS provider, you can't retain what we call payment tokenisation across those channels. So you can't recognise that the person in your store this morning is the same person who browsed your site last night.
That's what unified commerce actually means. And it's what turns payments away from being purely a cost exercise into something strategic for your commercial and marketing teams - for loyalty, for brand.
What should retailers be looking for in a technology partner?
Everyone says seamless integration, and it's a buzzword, but it is fundamental - because of how quickly things change.
Think about the Apple Store, probably fifteen years ago now. There wasn't a countertop experience. People were walking around collecting payments on these new devices, and at the time that was genuinely strange.
Now look at Tap to Pay, where a phone becomes a payment terminal. That's getting big. And the number of times we speak to retailers who want to go down that route and can't, because their existing ePOS provider hasn't built the integration to enable it - it's a lot.
So it matters across the whole stack. Are we with providers who are going to keep us up with the times?
Uniqlo is the one that always comes to mind for me. You can pay via a staff member walking the floor, you can use self-checkout, and online they know you're visiting and they know you're in their app. I was in there recently with a basket of about a hundred pounds and a discount appeared because they'd recognised me.
Obviously it's not universal. Some retailers genuinely want the countertop experience, the tradition of being served at a counter, and that's a valid choice. But the demand is growing and it keeps changing.
So what do they need in a technology partner? The ability to cater for changes we can't see yet. There's Amazon Go, where you collect your items and walk out. It's about being with partners who'll make the next progression available to you as soon as it exists.
And there are retailers who were household names ten years ago, and then somebody new came onto the scene and took their customers purely on experience. That's the thing to always be aware of. If you're not acting on it while everyone else is, it's very easy to fall behind.
So what's next for payments?
Point of sale and e-commerce are very different, so let me split them.
On point of sale, it's store mobility and contextual shopping. We're moving away from the version where you go in, pick your items in ten minutes, then get stuck in a queue for thirty on a busy Saturday. People do walk out over that -too many lines, too overwhelming.
So more and more you're seeing payment via a shop assistant on the floor, or a kiosk, or self-checkout. I think most retailers go that way over the next two to three years.
The one that intertwines with it is no-interaction checkout -the Amazon Go model. The technology is there. The adoption isn't, yet. It naturally raises the question of whether it's safe, whether you can let people walk out with higher-value goods and trust that the technology has picked it up. But stores are doing it, and I'd be amazed if in five years a large percentage of the market isn't operating that model. There's real cost saving in it. It's about trusting the technology and accepting that it's been around long enough.
The next area is loyalty and recognition - and bespoke recognition specifically.
You may have seen that Adyen is acquiring Talon.One, which is a big signal of how we see payments sitting within retail. At the moment, even the more forward-thinking companies work off payment tokenisation, then rely on a loyalty provider to produce a report, then share that with the marketing team. Embedding it changes that. You know which loyalty tier a customer falls into, what bespoke packages suit them, whether they're more likely to buy something discounted or not. It's more data on customers and more buying signals.
And on the e-commerce side, the term of the moment is agentic commerce. We've announced work with the major LLM providers, and we have live merchants using it in the US -Europe is behind, largely because of the compliance and restriction picture here. But that's a space retailers need to be ready for. A new wave of customers who are effectively chatbots.
There's been a lot of noise in that space. How much of it is real?
Look at OpenAI's pivot from the start of the year. It was very much "let's do checkout," and then they realised how hard checkout is to do properly.
A lot of payments companies launched very early without an actual working product. We could all build a demo. We could all show you what it looks like.
But we're focused on not claiming we have a solution until we can show you five, six, seven merchants already doing it. And that was in the US - the UK landscape is very different right now.
Which links back to the tech partner question. You want partners who are going to be ready to consolidate and absorb all of this new data into their solution.
What are the three things retailers absolutely have to get right?
The first goes back to that word from the start. Consolidate your payment stack into a single provider so you get a unified commerce view. You immediately gain more data than any other setup gives you -you can see whether a customer shopped in store, in the app, or online.
And from that you can do genuinely useful things, like offering local payment methods. You might have a customer based in Singapore shopping with a UK retailer. Showing them Visa and Mastercard isn't going to work very well. Offering them something like GrabPay, which is their preferred method at home, is highly valuable. But you can only make that choice if you have the unified setup underneath.
Second, be ready for agentic commerce. Have tech partners in play who are forward-thinking in their own areas and who'll make the integration possible when it's available.
It's a bit like when the internet started - nobody's going to use that. When people started getting mobile phones -nobody's going to need that. And we've all seen how fast AI has been adopted in day-to-day life. It's the quickest adoption of any technology I can think of. So agentic commerce is going to be a high-value topic for retailers over the next year or two.
And third - the one that gets left out - reliability and stability.
Your payments shouldn't give you downtime. You're trading on Black Friday, online and in store. The number of times we speak to merchants who've come to us because their payment terminals stopped working, or their online system went down on Black Friday, is still very common. In this day and age, it shouldn't be. You're losing customers and you're losing revenue.
And finally - what makes the partnership with Sitoo work?
It's a natural match, because we share exactly the same philosophy: eliminating complexity so retailers can scale, and scale globally into new regions.
A good example in the UK is the work we've done together with TFG. You combine Sitoo's high-speed POS with the ability to innovate and adapt to new payment requirements quickly - which is precisely what we were talking about earlier. If you're not partnered with a POS provider who can accept Tap to Pay and be ready for whatever point of sale looks like next, you're going to struggle.
The other piece is servicing global customers. We speak to so many enterprises using different technology partners in different regions. Consolidating point of sale into Sitoo and payments into Adyen means one POS contract and one payments contract across every region. For the businesses we work with, that's the biggest saving grace.
Then there's Sitoo Payments, which is the exciting part of the offering. Some merchants are better suited to a direct relationship, and for others, starting with Sitoo taking on point of sale and embedding payments is fantastic. One contract, one partner. And over time there's capital, card issuing and the rest of it, which only gives retailers more of a leg up.
The compliance side never gets talked about either. It's the more boring topic, but when a retailer says they want to grow into Europe or the US, being able to say you can just do it with Adyen and Sitoo genuinely simplifies things. Compared to the alternative -and we still hear this a lot -of eight POS partners and five payment relationships across the globe.
Combining that into two providers that are stable and forward-thinking is invaluable.
