Latest news with #Strazza
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Adyen opts for build over buy
This story was originally published on Payments Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Payments Dive newsletter. Dutch payments processor Adyen plans to keep fueling expansion, including in the U.S., by building its own software and systems over buying up other businesses, Adyen's president for North America, Davi Strazza, said in an interview this week. The provider of payments processing, point-of-sale hardware and software services for merchants, including retailers such as Crate & Barrel and Dick's Sporting Goods, prizes its unique ties to clients and sourcing proprietary data from those relationships, he explained. Specifically, the company can track customer data across store and e-commerce environments, Strazza said. He contends Adyen's authorization rates are better with its custom approach. 'When we talk about optimization, we can go deeper than any other company can, because we have those direct connections,' Strazza said in the Monday interview. 'We have unfiltered, unrestricted access to the data in the ecosystem.' That's true when there are trouble spots with services too. 'We can go to customers and say 'Hey, if you have a challenge, you're going to talk to Adyen, period,' he explained. 'It's not going to be like a hot potato problem where there's pointing fingers. No, it's us.' Sharpening its edge in the market is key because Adyen operates in a highly competitive arena, against processing behemoths Fiserv, with its Clover point-of-sale services, and Worldpay, now a unit of Global Payments. Then there are digital rivals PayPal Holdings and Stripe also battling for merchants' payments volume. Some of those competitors have taken a very different approach to expansion, opting for acquisitions. For instance, Fiserv has been on a growth tear in recent years buying up other smaller businesses to bolster its overall enterprise. It absorbed Clover as part of its 2019 mega-deal to buy First Data, which had purchased Clover in 2012. It also bought Finxact, The LR2 Group, restaurant reservation management company Nextable, ISO Merchant One, BentoBox, NetPay, Integrity Payments, Pineapple Payments, and Ondot in recent years. Adyen processed $1.4 trillion in payments volume last year, catering to U.S. clients that also included Cinemark Holdings, Patagonia, Etsy and EBay, Strazza said. The North America operation that Strazza oversees is the company's second-highest revenue-generating region, with the market contributing about a quarter of the top line. Europe, the Middle East and Africa collectively accounted for 57% of Adyen's revenue last year, the most of any region, followed by North America with 27%, Asia-Pacific with 10%, and Latin America yielding 5% of the company's revenue last year, according to its 2024 annual report. The EMEA region was the company's fastest-growing area, with net revenue jumping 26% to $1.15 billion Euro (about $1.19 billion as of the end of last year) over 2023. For North America, revenue rose at a slightly slower pace, rising 25% to $536 million Euro (about $557.4 million). As of last year, Adyen had about 4,345 employees globally, the annual report said. Nearly a fifth of its workers, 800 employees, are in North America. That's after about a 20% expansion of headcount last year, and the expectation is that the region will have similar growth in its workforce this year, Strazza said. About 300 of its U.S. workers are in San Francisco, where Strazza is based, and about 250 are in each of Chicago and New York, with just 30 in Canada. The company is still investing in its product set, but has a complete offering now in the North America region, including buy now, pay later, pay-by-bank, cards, digital wallets and financial services, Strazza noted. He argues that Adyen's 'differentiator is the depth of the services.' 'We continue to invest a lot in the U.S. as a business – the bulk of our large customers are based here, and so that excites us a lot,' Strazza said.
USA Today
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Fina Strazza went from 'Fear Street' to 'John Proctor.' Will she conquer the Tonys next?
Fina Strazza went from 'Fear Street' to 'John Proctor.' Will she conquer the Tonys next? Show Caption Hide Caption The 'Fear Street: Prom Queen' film left R.L. Stine asking one question Acclaimed author R.L. Stine chats with USA TODAY's Ralphie Aversa about the Netflix film adaptation of his book, "Fear Street: Prom Queen." Fans of Netflix's 'Fear Street' horror movies have good reason to tune into the Tony Awards on Sunday. Fina Strazza, who plays a villainous mean girl in the 1980s-set slasher film 'Fear Street: Prom Queen' (streaming now), snagged her first Tony nomination for actress in a featured role for 'John Proctor Is the Villain.' The Broadway show has seven nods going into the June 8 ceremony at Radio City Music Hall, including best play and lead actress for Sadie Sink. The 'Stranger Things' star also has ties to 'Fear Street' after appearing in two of the three movies in the 2021 film trilogy. Strazza, 19, is 'feeling good' but 'still in a little bit of a haze about the nominations,' she says over a recent video chat. 'Can't quite wrap my head around it still.' In the play, Strazza stars as Beth Powell, a devout, by-the-book overachiever at a rural Georgia high school circa 2018 in the wake of the #MeToo movement. She and her fellow students are studying 'The Crucible,' Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, and over the course of a narrative peppered with pop music references, the kids wrestle with the themes of the play, its connection to their own lives and how John Proctor probably wasn't the hero everyone thought he was. 'It's about these young teenage girls grappling with how to be young feminists in a community that they've never been taught how to be, and how to think critically and how to take up space when they've never really had that encouragement,' says Strazza, who had her Broadway breakthrough at 8 years old when she was the youngest actress to play the lead role in the musical 'Matilda.' For the past two years, 'there's not been a single day that I haven't thought about this play,' Strazza adds, and she sees firsthand how its story has affected young theatergoers. 'It's been really kind of heartbreaking but also empowering to see how relevant the story still is, even though it takes place seven years ago. We kind of all feel like we're still in the same place. And I feel that audiences have been leaving the theater every night with this kind of vigor and drive to keep up a fight in this world. It's been really meaningful to be a part of that.' Strazza's also enjoyed working with Sink, and those two go way back: Strazza starred with Sink's brother Mitchell in 'Matilda' and their families have been friends for years. 'I've always been very proud of her to see how much she's done,' Strazza says. 'I've been following in her footsteps a little bit with 'Fear Street' and now with this. I'm happy to be on this little path behind her. She's just the most grounded and sweetest person ever. I really enjoy being around her.'
