Shares of the Dutch payment-processing firm Adyen jumped nearly 90% in their first day of trading Wednesday, in what was one of Europe’s largest technology initial public offerings.
The fintech firm, a rival of PayPal, priced its shares at $281.6 (240 euros) which was at the higher end of its range. Rather than issuing new shares, Adyen’s existing shareholders are selling stock amounting to 13.4% of outstanding shares.
The initial share price gave the company a market capitalization of $8.3 billion, but after finishing the day up 90%, the company had a valuation of $15.8 billion.
“I’m very proud to be building this company with such a great team. This listing will only help us to continue to do what we are doing now: helping our merchants grow and reshaping the payments industry,” Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does said in a statement.
The company works with customers including Netflix, Facebook, and Spotify. It also sells point-of-sales systems for brick-and-mortar retail stores.
Jan Hammer, a partner at Index Ventures, Adyen’s biggest shareholder, said in a blog post the IPO was “a big day for the company, and for fintech startups reinventing the centuries-old financial services industry.”
Adyen processed payment volumes of $127 billion in 2017, up 63% from the year before. It had net income of $82.8 million in 2017. Adyen earns revenue primarily through charging its merchants fees on a per-transaction basis, according to its IPO prospectus.
The success of the offering may prompt more fintech companies to test the public markets.
“Having a successful company like Adyen go public gives a pat on the back to other fundamentally disruptive companies that are redoing the financial services infrastructure that’s existed for decades,” said Rohit Kulkarni, the head of research at SharesPost. Kulkarni said fintech has the second-largest number of unicorns globally.
Adyen was founded in 2006.
Image: Alper Çuğun, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0