UK borrowing costs fall as PM backs chancellor
Will Walker Arnott, head of private clients at the bank Charles Stanley, told the Today programme it seemed like a "rare example of financial markets actually enhancing the career prospects of a politician"."I think the markets are concerned that if the chancellor goes then any fiscal discipline would follow her out the door and that would mean bigger deficits."Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens' College, Cambridge, and chief economic adviser at Allianz, warned that markets were likely to remain on edge."The minute you put a risk premium in the marketplace, it's very hard to take out," he told the Today programme."I suspect that we will see some moderation, but we will not go back to where we were 24 hours ago."
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Finextra
an hour ago
- Finextra
Deep Dive: Stripe vs. Adyen – Comparing Product Stacks and Pricing: By Sam Boboev
Two fintech heavyweights are vying for dominance in global payments: Stripe and Adyen. Both power a substantial share of online commerce, yet they've taken different paths to the top. Stripe, the Silicon Valley darling, built its name with developers and startups; Adyen, the Dutch powerhouse, quietly became the backbone for many large global retailers. Product managers and fintech founders on both sides of the Atlantic (especially in the US and EU) often face a strategic choice between these platforms. This deep dive examines how Stripe and Adyen stack up – from their product offerings to pricing models – and why it matters. Spoiler: Both companies have overlapping product categories (payments, fraud prevention, in-person solutions, and more), but their strengths and weaknesses can make each a better fit for different customer profiles. Let's dig in. The Payments Giants at a Glance It helps to frame the comparison with scale and performance. In 2024, Stripe processed about $1.4 trillion in total payment volume (TPV), growing 38% year-over-year, while Adyen was close behind with €1.29 trillion (+33% YoY). These figures underscore that both companies handle enormous transaction flows (roughly on par with ~1–1.5% of global GDP each). Adyen has long been profitable – it sustained an impressive ~50% EBITDA margin in 2024 – whereas Stripe historically reinvested for growth but finally achieved full-year profitability in 2024. In other words, Adyen is the rare fintech operating at bank-like profit levels, while Stripe proved its business model can scale financially. Both are now plowing resources into R&D and expansion, setting the stage for an intense rivalry. Stripe launched in 2010, targeting developers and small online businesses with easy-to-use APIs. Its strategy was bottom-up: win the hearts of startups and SMBs, then gradually move upmarket. Adyen, founded in 2006, took almost the opposite approach – a top-down focus on large enterprises and global retailers. Adyen built a single unified platform for 'unified commerce' (online, in-app, and in-store payments all in one), directly connecting to card networks and local payment methods. This made Adyen the go-to for many big multichannel merchants (think Uber, Spotify, Microsoft, McDonald's, H&M and the like), while Stripe became synonymous with the startup economy and SaaS world. Today, however, their offerings overlap significantly. Stripe now serves 50% of the Fortune 100 companies in some capacity, and Adyen is expanding its reach to mid-sized clients and platforms. Both are truly global – Stripe is used in 195+ countries with support for 135+ currencies, and Adyen similarly supports transactions worldwide (150+ currencies and dozens of local methods). A quick external perspective sums it up well: 'Adyen is better for midsize or large companies with multiple sales channels, whereas Stripe is good for small, online businesses.' In practice, Stripe's flat-rate pricing and plug-and-play simplicity make it popular among SMBs and tech startups. Adyen's custom approach and interchange-plus pricing appeal to high-volume, omnichannel businesses that can integrate a more complex solution. But these lines are blurring. Stripe has been aggressively courting larger enterprises (even Amazon inked a deal in 2023 to have Stripe process a significant portion of its payments across the US, Europe, and Canada). Meanwhile, Adyen is indirectly serving many SMBs via platform partnerships (for example, when Etsy or eBay use Adyen as their payments engine, thousands of small sellers are on Adyen's rails). The competitive arena is set: both companies offer a broad payments platform, but how do their product stacks and pricing compare in detail? Core Payments Infrastructure At their heart, both Stripe and Adyen are payments processors – they enable businesses to accept a wide range of payment methods and get paid online (and offline). Let's compare their core payments capabilities: Stripe and Adyen each support an extensive array of payment methods: global credit/debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc.), digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.), bank transfers, and region-specific options (from **SEPA Direct Debit in Europe to ACH in the US, Alipay and WeChat Pay in Asia, Klarna/Affirm for BNPL, and many more). Stripe advertises access to 100+ payment methods out-of-the-box with a single integration. Adyen similarly prides itself on being a one-stop solution to 'offer your customers all their preferred payment methods with a single integration'. For example, a merchant using either platform can easily offer local favorites like iDEAL in the Netherlands or Boleto in Brazil alongside global cards. One difference is how these methods are integrated. Adyen built direct connections to many local payment schemes and card networks through its own licenses. This 'single platform' approach can improve authorization rates and reduce hops in the transaction process. Indeed, Adyen highlights its direct acquiring connections to Visa/Mastercard and even domestic networks, claiming it can optimize approval rates via intelligent routing (their RevenueAccelerate tools). Stripe, on the other hand, initially partnered with banks for acquiring in various regions, but over time it also obtained regulatory licenses and built out global infrastructure (Stripe has regulatory licenses in multiple jurisdictions and data centers worldwide, ensuring transactions are processed locally where possible for speed and better success rates). Both companies now can offer very high uptime (Stripe boasts 99.999% historical uptime, and Adyen is known for reliability as well) and the ability to settle funds in a currency of the merchant's choosing. Adyen explicitly lets merchants 'choose when and in which currency' to receive payouts, a flexibility important for international businesses. Stripe is almost universally lauded for its developer-friendly APIs and documentation. It provides client libraries in every popular programming language and famously simple code snippets. For a small business or product team, Stripe's developer tools can shorten integration time dramatically. (As an example, Stripe's drop-in checkout or pre-built UI components – Stripe Elements and Checkout – let you start accepting cards with minimal coding.) Adyen's platform is also robust, but the common refrain is that Adyen is not as 'plug-and-play' for small merchants. Adyen often requires a bit more initial setup and understanding of payment flows. That said, Adyen offers comprehensive APIs and SDKs too, along with client-side components (its Drop-in UI and Components for web/mobile) to handle payment method selection and encryption. The gap in ease has narrowed over time, but Stripe's polish in developer experience and documentation remains a strong differentiator. For a startup with a lean engineering team, Stripe's 'it just works' approach can be very attractive – everything from the initial integration to handling webhooks for events is well-supported. Adyen tends to shine for merchants that need fine-grained control and are willing to invest in a more bespoke integration. Transaction Performance: Both Stripe and Adyen invest heavily in optimizing payment success rates. Adyen's advantage of direct network connections means it can sometimes get slightly better authorization rates, especially in regions where local processing matters (for instance, processing European cards with a European acquiring license to avoid cross-border inefficiencies). Stripe has countered by developing its own smart routing and 'adaptive acceptance' algorithms, and by working with card issuers. Stripe even formed an Enhanced Issuer Network program to share data with card issuers, reportedly reducing fraud and boosting authorizations by 1–2% on eligible volume. In practice, both processors are top-tier in transaction quality; large merchants often run A/B tests between providers and find both Stripe and Adyen to be high performers, with differences depending on specific geographies or banks. It's not unusual for an enterprise to use multiple PSPs in active-active mode and route traffic between Stripe, Adyen, and others to optimize costs and uptime. Both companies understand this and continually roll out improvements (for example, Stripe has machine learning to retry failed payments at optimal times and auto-update saved card details, while Adyen recently introduced an AI-powered tool called Adyen Uplift to improve payment conversion by an average 6%). On core payment processing capabilities, both Stripe and Adyen offer a full-spectrum, global solution. Stripe wins praise for ease and developer tooling; Adyen wins praise for technical robustness and global unified infrastructure. For most standard online payments use cases (accepting card payments on a website or app), either will get the job done with high standards. The differences emerge more clearly when we expand into other aspects: in-person payments, platform payments, and value-added services. Source: Stripe vs. Adyen 2024 performance and strategy highlights NerdWallet on ideal customer profiles for Adyen vs Stripe Stripe Newsroom: Amazon expanding use of Stripe (enterprise win) Stripe Enterprise documentation (custom pricing options) Adyen official pricing page (interchange++ transparency) Codelevate 2025 PSP comparison (product features & pricing details) Fintech Wrap Up deep dive (TPV and product developments in 2024) Adyen website ('One platform' omnichannel messaging) Codelevate on strengths/drawbacks of each platform FXCintel analysis on Adyen's 2023 results (North America focus) Disclaimer: Fintech Wrap Up aggregates publicly available information for informational purposes only. Portions of the content may be reproduced verbatim from the original source, and full credit is provided with a "Source: [Name]" attribution. All copyrights and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners. Fintech Wrap Up does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the aggregated content; these are the responsibility of the original source providers. Links to the original sources may not always be included. For questions or concerns, please contact us at
Times
3 hours ago
- Times
Public sector reform may be the only route left for Labour
It is more than a quarter of a century since Tony Blair complained about the 'scars on my back' from two years of trying to reform the public sector. As the Cabinet Office supremo, Pat McFadden, noted in a speech on the same subject in December, Blockbuster Video and Toys R Us were still in operation at the time of Blair's comments, while Airbnb, WhatsApp and Spotify had yet to be born. Twenty-six years later, creative destruction has reshaped the private sector, in some ways unrecognisably, but the same old arguments swirl about modernising government. The case for public sector reform has become more urgent after the reversals of the past few weeks. A partial U-turn on cuts to winter fuel payments, at a cost of almost £1.3 billion, turned out to be a mere appetiser for a near-total capitulation on attempts to cut welfare by nearly £5 billion. Those surrenders, plus a possible downgrade of the independent fiscal watchdog's productivity forecasts and other revisions, could blow a £30 billion hole in the public finances. After £40 billion of tax rises in October's budget — which put the UK on course for a record postwar haul of 37.7 per cent of GDP — the drums are beating to the rhythm of more taxes this autumn. Breaking a manifesto promise not to increase the burden on 'working people' could cost the chancellor her job. Cranking up taxes even further on businesses — which have swallowed £25 billion of extra national insurance contributions — and on capital gains, carried interest and inheritances would place another drag on already sluggish growth. Labour may have been handed an ugly fiscal picture by the Conservatives last year, but it is getting worse. Much valid criticism has been made of Rachel Reeves, Sir Keir Starmer and senior colleagues for their failure to persuade a recalcitrant parliamentary party of the need for realism in spending cuts. Although the winter fuel business was handled badly politically, reducing payments was right in principle, and £5 billion should have been just the start in controlling a benefits bill that is predicted to swell to £378 billion by 2030. The simple fact is that Labour is showing itself incapable of getting the nation's costs down, and higher taxes would stifle the economy. Sharpening public sector productivity is the only plausible third way. Three articles we carry today offer a way forward. Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, argues that the present model of 43 county-based forces has not been fit for purpose 'for at least two decades' and should be replaced by 12 to 15 regional forces. He says this would reduce back-office duplication and allow the enlarged groups to make better use of technology. Rowley also makes the point that creaking social services are frequently forcing police officers to take on the role of social workers, especially in cases of children missing from local authority care. Penny Dash, the new chairwoman of NHS England, says the health service's dysfunctional bureaucracy makes her 'just want to cry'. There are examples of brand-new scanners lying idle, unused buildings on the NHS estate, operating theatre times routinely slipping and appointment letters being sent out to patients after they were due to be seen. Dash wants to open up data on NHS performance, including on individual doctors and teams, saying the institution should go 'really big on transparency'. Today we also report on the scandal of HS2, a rail project that could end up costing more than £100 billion despite suffering repeated delays. We reveal how contracts were struck with the private sector, on behalf of the taxpayer, that contained no element of risk. This meant that there was no incentive for many of the contractors to operate efficiently, as they were safe in the knowledge that if the costs over-ran, the taxpayer would pick up the tab. The new boss of HS2 has pledged to renegotiate the contracts. His approach should be replicated across Whitehall. In truth Labour has so far taken the easy options for improving public sector performance, awarding workers above-inflation pay rises and increasing capital budgets. Sensible cabinet ministers now accept in private that those pay deals should never have been struck without some kind of union commitment to workplace reform. The next steps will now be harder, involving confronting vested interests, including Starmer's own backbenchers. Blair, with his record landslide in 1997, was prepared to sustain scars in pursuit of reform — and even he made limited progress. The big question is whether Starmer and his team are up for and up to the challenge.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
JEFF PRESTRIDGE: This is why savers should be very, very angry at Reeves' mad, bad plan to slash the annual cash Isa allowance
In nine days, and after months of speculation, we should finally find out the damage that the Government wants to inflict on our tax-friendly Isas. I warn you, it isn't going to be pleasant. For those who prefer cash to shares, prudence to risk taking, Labour is going to leg you over something rotten. Prepare to be angry. Very angry.
