Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. There was plenty going on as usual — with fintech investors sounding off, payments companies seeing big stock moves and much more.
One other note, you can find Mary Ann on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, which she co-hosts every Friday with Alex Wilhelm, including this episode that came out Friday.
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two global payments companies release earnings with wildly different results. Uruguayan fintech company dLocal saw its stock surge by over 30% on Wednesday alone on the news that the payments outfit had tapped former Mercado Libre CFO Pedro Arnt as its new co-CEO. Shares closed that day up nearly 32% at $20.45, after climbing as high as $24.22 earlier in the day, giving the company a $6 billion valuation.
That surge was on top of an August 15 spike after the company beat earnings estimates in releasing its second-quarter financials. Impressively, dLocal reported revenue of $161 million, up 59% year-over-year and 17% quarter-over-quarter. The company also saw a large jump in profits, reporting gross profit of $70.8 million in the second quarter of 2023, up 43% year-over-year compared to $49.6 million in the second quarter of 2022 and up 14% compared to $61.8 million in the first quarter of 2023.
Earlier this summer, I caught up with dLocal co-founder Sergio Fogel, who rejoined the company in June as co-president and chief strategy officer, per a Bloomberg report, “as part of a push to help regain investor confidence and stabilize the company’s stock after it tumbled following a probe in Argentina and a short seller attack.” You can read the details of that interview here.
By Friday afternoon, shares were trading at just under $20 and the company’s market cap hovered at $5.8 billion.
Meanwhile, shares of Dutch payments processor Adyen sank “to their lowest level in more than three years” on Friday, as reported by Reuters and others. Shares were trading at $872 as of Friday afternoon, down significantly from a 52-week high of $1,763.80. That was after a 39% drop on Thursday, according to CNBC, after the company “reported worse-than-expected sales and a profit drop in the first half of the year.”
Specifically, Adyen notched revenue of $804.3 million in the first half of 2023, up 21% from a year ago but below analyst estimates. According to CNBC, “Adyen attributed the tepid print to increased hiring, firmer wages and to a shift in its North American customers’ business prioritization from growth to cost savings in the first half of the year.” Revenue growth is slowing. In the first half of 2022, revenues climbed by 37% year-over-year. Despite the not-so-great news, Adyen remains one of Europe’s highly valued fintechs, with a market cap of $27.22 billion euros.
