Biggest merchant acquirers in Europe 2016-2022, based on number of transactions

For several years in a row, Russia’s Sberbank increasingly solidified its position as Europe’s largest merchant acquirer – processing more payments than the likes of WorldPay or Adyen. This might be attributed to the large popularity of their own Sberbank Online in Russian e-commerce – this being a service Russia’s biggest bank offers to its clients on the country’s biggest online shopping platform OZON.ru and with which customers can select the card they wish to pay with. Coinciding with Sberbank Online, the Russian bank also saw a significant growth of its online banking user base – increasing by roughly 25 percent between 2020 and 2019 alone. This makes Sberbank – a bank that offers and processes its own payment method that is used rather often – different than, say, Adyen – a publicly listed company that offers companies many different payment processing solutions.

What are merchant acquirers?

Several things happen the moment a consumer digitally wants to buy something, which may sound complicated at first. Say somebody bought clothes online and paid for it with a Visa credit card. First, the transaction is handled by a payment processor or gateway – which authenticates the transfer and effectively sends a signal that money needs to change hands. The issuer – Visa, or the bank that issued the Visa card – receives that signal. Second, the issuer verifies the transaction and makes sure the customer has money to make the purchase. Thirdly, a signal is sent back from issuer to processor to either confirm or block the transfer. Note that until now no money moved yet – just data. Here, at last, is where the acquirer comes in. A merchant acquirer looks at this final piece of data and handles the actual money transfer, essentially “grabbing” the money from one place – Visa, in this example – to then place it somewhere else - the merchant’s bank account. To name an example of such an acquirer, Worldline handles nearly all payment transactions in Belgium. However, as it owns about 36 percent of equensWorldline – originally a payment processor – the lines between processing and acquiring blur as the need for digital payments increased worldwide.

Fintech entering the payments world: Adyen

A fintech unicorn from the Netherlands that specializes in payments processing and acquiring, Adyen’s revenue grew by almost 30 percent in 2020. The Amsterdam fintech Adyen aims itself at domestic, mid-market companies as well as global merchants like Spotify. The company then tries to connect these merchants with multiple payment methods from Visa to AliPay and currencies via a single system. The figures shown above estimate the Amsterdam fintech had slightly more than four billion purchase transactions in 2020 – a figure that was only slightly higher than the last figure Adyen communicated on how many transactions it had processed.