SKN | Morgan Stanley Flags “Highly Attractive Entry Point” in Adyen After AI-Led Selloff

Keypoints

• Morgan Stanley views Adyen’s recent de-rating as overdone and driven by misplaced AI disruption fears.

• The bank argues Adyen is already deploying AI at scale, reinforcing its competitive moat rather than weakening it.

• Clearing near-term earnings expectations could reset sentiment and refocus investors on long-term payments growth.

Morgan Stanley has turned constructive on Adyen, telling clients that the recent selloff across global software and fintech equities has created what it calls “a highly attractive entry point” in the Dutch payments group. The bank argues that Adyen has been swept up in a broader AI-disruption narrative that does not meaningfully apply to its business model.

Adam Wood, Morgan Stanley’s analyst on the name, said Adyen has been “caught in the recent AI-disruption driven drawdown,” but stressed that the underlying investment case remains intact. In his view, the stock’s pullback reflects sector-level fear rather than company-specific deterioration.

Why Morgan Stanley Sees Mispricing

According to the note, concerns around AI displacing software platforms are “not very applicable” to Adyen. Morgan Stanley highlighted what it described as a three-pillar moat: a fully unified payments stack, global financial and regulatory infrastructure, and sophisticated dynamic identification tools. Rather than being threatened by AI, the bank argues Adyen is already embedding it directly into its payments offering, using it at scale to enhance authorization rates, fraud prevention, and routing decisions.

This, Morgan Stanley believes, is driving incremental differentiation at a time when investors are lumping together very different software and fintech models under a single disruption narrative.

Stablecoins and Competition: Less of a Threat Than Headlines Suggest

The bank also addressed two popular concerns weighing on sentiment: stablecoins and intensifying competition. On stablecoins, Morgan Stanley pushed back on the idea that they pose a near-term risk, citing behavioural and regulatory frictions and their still negligible share of global digital payments. Over time, the analyst suggested stablecoins could simply become another payment method to orchestrate, which would add complexity and ultimately reinforce the value of globally scalable platforms like Adyen.

On competition, Morgan Stanley acknowledged Stripe’s strong visibility in 2025 but noted that Adyen continues to keep pace, including acting as a key payments partner for OpenAI’s ACP initiative. With both firms addressing an estimated €26 trillion global payments market in which Adyen has penetrated only around 5%, the bank sees substantial room for continued growth.

Market Setup Into Earnings

Morgan Stanley concluded that the stock’s recent de-rating “looks overdone.” In its view, meeting or modestly clearing expectations at the upcoming results could be enough to stabilise sentiment and allow investors to re-anchor on Adyen’s long-term growth and margin trajectory, rather than short-term thematic noise.

For a confidential discussion on how global payment infrastructure exposure, fintech valuation resets, and AI adoption narratives can be assessed within a high-conviction, globally diversified portfolio, contact our senior advisory team.