Most consumers have never heard of Adyen. That's by design.

The Dutch fintech giant operates largely behind the scenes, powering payments for companies including Airbnb, Uber, Microsoft, Netflix and countless retailers around the world. In Canada, its customer roster includes Air Canada, Lululemon, Simons, Groupe Dynamite and Lightspeed.

But while the company may be invisible to most shoppers, its ambitions in Canada are becoming increasingly visible.

When Sander Meijers arrived in Toronto from Amsterdam in 2022 to lead Adyen's Canadian operations, the company had a local team of eight people. Today, that team has grown to 40 employees, with a dedicated office in Toronto's financial district and a small presence in Montreal.

For Meijers, who was in Vancouver recently to speak at Web Summit Vancouver's Fintech Summit, that growth reflects something larger than Adyen's own success.

He believes Canada is entering a new phase for payments and financial technology.

"Canadian market is ready for us," he said.

That may sound like a predictable statement from a country manager trying to grow a business. But throughout a conversation with Vancouver Tech Journal, Meijers made a broader argument: payments are evolving from back-office infrastructure into a strategic layer that shapes customer experiences, powers personalization, enables faster access to capital and increasingly relies on artificial intelligence.

In other words, payments are becoming a competitive advantage.

"People think payments are plumbing," said Meijers.

To explain why he disagrees, he points to a common retail frustration. A customer buys an item online, then tries to return it in-store, only to discover the retailer's systems don't talk to one another.

Adyen's platform aims to eliminate those disconnects. A retailer can recognize the original purchase regardless of channel and process a refund instantly to the same payment method.

For consumers, the experience feels seamless. For retailers, it requires sophisticated infrastructure operating behind the scenes.

"If you would consider us plumbing, plumbing doesn't do that," Meijers said.

That philosophy helps explain why Adyen has focused on enterprise customers rather than competing directly for small business merchants. While companies such as Stripe initially became known for helping startups quickly accept payments online, Adyen built its reputation solving complex global payment challenges for large organizations operating across multiple markets, currencies and payment methods.

Today, those worlds are increasingly converging.

At the same time, new technologies are reshaping what businesses expect from their payments providers. Artificial intelligence was a major topic at Web Summit Vancouver, and payments is no exception.

Fraud remains one of the industry's biggest challenges. But Meijers argues AI is allowing payment providers to move beyond simplistic rules-based systems toward richer behavioural analysis.

Instead of evaluating a transaction in isolation, platforms can examine broader patterns.

A Canadian cardholder purchasing three luxury watches in Paris might once have triggered an automatic fraud alert. But if the system can see that the same customer recently booked a flight, checked into a hotel and has been transacting normally throughout a trip, the purchase may actually make perfect sense.

The result is fewer false declines and better fraud protection.

"The fraudsters have the AI tools as well," Meijers acknowledged. "It's not going to get better before it's going to get worse."

AI is also accelerating another trend: personalization.

Consumers increasingly expect brands to recognize them across channels and devices. Meijers believes payments data can play an important role in creating those experiences, helping merchants understand preferences and reduce friction during checkout.

Yet while technology is advancing rapidly, he argues Canada's underlying payments infrastructure still has room to improve.

In particular, he points to the absence of widely available real-time payment rails—systems that allow money to move instantly between accounts.

Canada's card networks work well, he says, but the country's banking infrastructure has lagged behind jurisdictions such as Europe, where real-time account-to-account transfers have become commonplace.

For fintech companies, faster payment infrastructure could unlock new products and services. For businesses, it could mean quicker access to cash and reduced reliance on traditional banking processes.

"We're going to need real-time rails for that," Meijers said.

The discussion comes as Canada's payments market faces growing competition.

New payment methods, digital wallets and buy-now-pay-later services are challenging longstanding industry norms. At the same time, global fintech firms are expanding their presence in Canada, attracted by both the market opportunity and the country's talent base.

Meijers believes that talent advantage is often overlooked.

Asked whether hiring remains a challenge, he offered a surprisingly optimistic view.

"There's a lot of good talent," he said. "To be honest, it's cheaper and often better than in the U.S. as well."

That combination of talent, growing fintech adoption and increasing demand for modern payment experiences helps explain why Adyen continues to invest in Canada.

For consumers, many of those changes may remain invisible. Most people won't know who processed a transaction, enabled a refund or approved a payment.

But that's exactly the point.

The most successful payments companies, Meijers argues, aren't the ones customers notice. They're the ones quietly making commerce feel effortless.