Independent. Direct. Security First

Learn why Adyen cherishes its in-house strategy as Alexander shares how Adyen’s extreme technical independence (no third-party vendors) enables efficiency in everything from libraries to security.

(00:00) Introduction to the Alphalist Podcast

(00:44) Meet Alexander Matthey, CTO of Adyen

(01:34) Adyen's Founding and Growth

(02:47) Alex's Nerd Journey

(05:42) Transition from Coding to Leadership

(07:28) How GenAI is changing coding

(10:52) Life in the FinTech space

(15:04) How Adyen's Long-Term Vision Drives Innovation

(18:12) End-to-End Independence. No third-party vendors.

(20:39) Product Discovery - Start with Customer

(22:49) How industry has changed

(23:43) Adyen Tech Strategy: Have set languages/tools etc.

(27:24) Adyen Tech Stack

(27:50) Adyen's Organisational Structure & Conway's Law

(28:28) -Biggest Concentration on Payments

(29:35) -Teams powering Financial Services

(30:39) -Data and Platform Engineering

(31:48) Transitioning to Smaller Teams

(33:06) Starting from Scratch: Building a Payment System not in 100% private cloud

(35:33) The Adyen Formula: Direct Communication via Phone

(42:13) Security First: Internal Responsibility

(46:16) Tools and Monitoring for Security

(49:57) Security if start from scratch

(54:07) Advice to My Younger Self