Roelant Prins on payments evolution
From Current changes in payments with Roelant Prins | Couchonomics with Arjun · · CouchonomicswithArjun
“The change in payments is fast but at the same time it's very slow — there’s a lot of innovation coming through phones and wallets, yet legacy infrastructure and culture mean adoption across countries like Japan or Germany can still look like 20 years ago.”
On , Roelant Prins, Chief Commercial Officer & Member of Management Board at Adyen, spoke about payments evolution during Current changes in payments with Roelant Prins | Couchonomics with Arjun on CouchonomicswithArjun.
About Roelant Prins
Roelant Prins, Chief Commercial Officer and member of the Management Board at Adyen, appeared on the podcast "Couchonomics with Arjun" in October 2024 to discuss the evolving payments landscape. Prins described the pace of change in payments as "fast but at the same time very slow," noting that while innovation is occurring through phones and wallets, legacy infrastructure and cultural factors mean adoption in some countries remains limited. He discussed Adyen's development of intelligent payment routing to optimize success rates and lower costs, and commented on Apple's tap-to-pay technology, stating that turning phones into payment terminals offers merchants flexibility. Prins also said that public domestic infrastructures like UPI and Pix have not destroyed innovation but have created an underpinning layer for further development. He identified wholesale cross-border payments as an area that remains "massively inefficient, expensive and slow." In a 2018 keynote at Money 2020 Asia, Prins announced the launch of Adyen's point-of-sale (POS) solution in Singapore. He discussed retail trends, citing research with Forrester that found an investment payback time for moving from legacy payment setups to a unified solution could be as short as six months, with a 106% return on investment over three years through higher revenues and lower costs. Prins outlined three key factors for retailers to survive and thrive: making consumers fall in love with the brand, making the experience convenient, and keeping costs low with a lean infrastructure. He also highlighted Adyen's support for Alipay and UnionPay on POS terminals to serve Chinese shoppers, and described the "endless aisle" concept, where a web-based terminal in store allows customers to purchase out-of-stock products for next-day delivery.