Exclusive: Adyen targets fragmented payments with Intelligent Money Movement

Adyen is moving to consolidate payments, payouts, and liquidity management into a single infrastructure, targeting one of the most persistent inefficiencies in enterprise finance: fragmented money movement.

The company's Intelligent Money Movement (IMM) platform, released earlier this month, reflects a fintech sector in which providers are extending beyond payment acceptance to full-stack financial orchestration.

Large enterprises, particularly those operating marketplaces or global platforms, typically rely on multiple systems to manage incoming payments, hold funds and distribute payouts. That structure creates operational complexity but also reflects deliberate choices regarding risk, compliance, and banking relationships.

"There's a lot of existing payment systems, treasury systems, payout systems and liquidity systems out there. The problem that Intelligent Money Movement solves is the fragmentation of those systems," said Sander Meijers, the Country Manager for Canada at Adyen.

Adyen argues that fragmentation is inefficient. But for many firms, the separation between acquiring, banking and payouts is not accidental - it provides redundancy, regulatory flexibility and control over counterparties.

IMM's core proposition is to collapse these layers into a single technical stack. Rather than integrating multiple providers, companies process incoming payments, hold funds and execute payouts within the same system.

That architectural decision has downstream implications. Because transactions are handled within a single environment, the system inherently links incoming payments to outgoing disbursements, eliminating the need for reconciliation between separate ledgers or banking relationships.

The consolidation also changes how finance teams interact with cash flow. By controlling the full transaction lifecycle, IMM enables near real-time visibility into funds as they enter the system, rather than relying on delayed settlement across intermediaries. This allows finance teams to trigger payouts directly against incoming transactions without moving funds between accounts.

A report by Adyen and BCG, which surveyed 300 CFOs, corporate treasurers, and finance and payments managers, found that while 23 per cent of their time is spent managing pay-ins and payouts, 10 per cent is spent managing partners and bank relationships, and 17 per cent is devoted to liquidity management.

"So 23 per cent of their time, they're really trying to figure out how to connect those two sides of the business, pay in, pay out, and then at the same time, how to manage my liquidity in between," said Meijers.

The common thread across these sectors is the need to manage both sides of the transaction (collection and disbursement) in a tightly coordinated way. The report added that the average enterprise treasury function deals with five to six banks, 40 bank accounts and 12 pay-in and payout providers.

Because IMM is built on the same infrastructure as its payments platform, companies already using Adyen can extend into payouts without building separate integrations.

The model points to a broader shift in financial infrastructure, in which the distinction between payments, banking, and treasury functions becomes increasingly blurred, particularly for global digital platforms managing high-velocity transaction flows.

Marketplaces, online travel agencies, and platform-based businesses (in which funds are collected from customers and distributed to third-party providers) are the primary adopters.

"Retail marketplaces with a global presence is where we see a lot of traction," said Meijers. "It could be a driver, it could be a delivery person, it could be a a small shop ... So anytime, when you see money coming in from all across the world with different currencies and different payments, and somebody needs to pay out for that service, that's where we see a lot of traction."