Powering global scale with a single unified platform.
Adyen is a global financial technology company built to remove friction from the global economy, giving businesses everywhere a single platform for payments, data, and financial services. It's a mission that shapes how the company treats speed, simplicity, and trust as design principles, not just values on a wall.
Those same principles run through Adyen's own operations. Workday is the system Adyen's HR team relies on to support employees globally, and the platform its finance team uses to close the books, manage spend, and report on the business. “Workday is our flagship ERP in finance,” says Ali Zaidi, team lead, finance systems. “Whenever we're looking to solve a new problem, we always look to Workday first.”
“Workday is the backbone of how my team supports our people around the world,” says Darina Todorova, global lead, people technology.
That dual footprint—HR and finance, running on one platform, inside a company operating under a banking license across dozens of countries—puts Workday at the center of how Adyen scales.
It's also the foundation Adyen is now building on as it brings agentic AI into its everyday operations, guided by one shared principle: know exactly what problem you're solving before you reach for AI. “We don't start with the question of where we can add AI,” says Darina. “We start with the problem we're solving, and how AI can bring additional value.”
Automation where it matters most, except the human part.
For Darina's team, that means being deliberate about where technology belongs and where people do. “We build for scale, we design for self-service, and we automate anything that isn't uniquely suited to a human touch,” she says.
Internally, her team has a name for this: Top of License. “That's everything that needs real judgment, the thinking and the decisions,” Darina says. “Then there's the rest, the admin and repetitive work, and that's where we want AI to strip things away so people can focus on what actually adds value.”
Much of the groundwork runs through Workday Data Cloud (formerly Workday Prism Analytics) “Workday Data Cloud helps our managers make better, data-driven decisions, because we combine different data sources and digest the information for them,” she says. “It's easily accessible and centralized.” That single view supports what her team has built toward for years: an almost zero friction onboarding process, backed by heavy investment in automation and integrations. “Workday has been a key enabler for us in that journey,” Darina says.
Adyen has also adopted Workday Extend to shape that experience around the specific needs of a global financial technology company. “We developed custom apps using Workday Extend that have helped us simplify the experience for our employees and give them a better, more seamless experience,” Darina says. The payoff isn't just a smoother experience for new hires. It's more space for the HR team itself. “It creates a lot of space for our HR team to support people, build connections, and bring an even better employee experience,” she says.
Modern finance, governed at scale.
Ali's team brings the same discipline to finance. “Our goal is always to standardize as much as possible and build on top of the ecosystem we're already in,” he says. Using Workday Data Cloud and Workday Accounting Center, Adyen built data flows that automate journal bookings and month-end close, moving work that used to live in spreadsheets on employees' laptops directly into Workday, and straight into the company's books.
The change is easiest to see at the start of each close. “We've onboarded more than 10 use cases now in Workday Accounting Center,” Ali says. “All of it took hours before. Now it's done at the click of a button at the start of the close.” Instead of processing data by hand, people log in on day one and go straight to review. That same standardized foundation is what lets Adyen open new entities and enter new regions with consistent governance already built in.
Workday gave us the foundation to standardize finance first, and now AI can build on top of that with confidence.
Team Lead, Finance Systems
Bringing agentic AI into a system they already trust.
For both teams, agentic AI is a natural extension of a platform they already trust with their most sensitive data. “We're eager to adopt more of Workday's AI products,” Ali says. “We already trust the governance and security built into the platform, so we're ready to build on it.”
That trust is what makes Adyen eager to put AI to work on processes like collecting audit evidence and matching bank transactions to journal postings, and to go further still with Sana Agent Builder (formerly Flowise). “Every company has its own unique processes and needs," Ali says. "Sana Agent Builder will let us customize and build for the specific problems we're solving at Adyen.”
On the HR side, Darina sees the clearest opportunity in the everyday work that takes up her team's time. “What excites me most is what agents can do for the operational side of HR,” she says.
Both leaders are just as clear about where AI shouldn't go. Some things stay deliberately human—deep conversations, empathy, judgment calls—while others are automated with human oversight, and some are fully automated.
When it comes to AI, we don't want to do more with less. We want more time for the value only people can add. Workday has been a great enabler for that.
Global Lead, People Technology
Strengthening the foundation for what comes next.
Adyen's readiness for new technology didn't start with a mandate from the top. As a company built largely by engineers, informal experimentation with AI was already underway as early as 2022, well before it became a formal strategy, giving Adyen a head start once the time came to scale it responsibly, in an industry where responsible use isn't optional.
That head start shows up in how little the complexity shows on the surface. Adyen operates across global markets in a highly regulated environment and under a banking license—all of which adds real complexity behind the scenes. “Even though our processes are sophisticated, our employees don't feel that complexity,” Darina says. “Thanks to Workday and all our automations, we've managed to keep that hidden behind the scenes, with simplified, self-service, intuitive processes for our workforce.”
For Ali, the shift has been just as much cultural as technical. “Finance has historically relied heavily on Excel and doing things manually,” he says. “We've used technology like Workday to make our processes streamlined and intuitive enough that we've built real trust with the systems and the tooling. That mindset shift is our biggest achievement as a team.”
His advice to other companies just starting out: get the foundation right first. “Setting up a single source of truth, having data you can rely on, good documentation, that's context that becomes incredibly valuable once you bring in AI,” he says.
That is what Adyen and Workday are building together: a foundation strong enough that the complexity disappears behind the scenes, leaving more room for the people running the business, and for what comes next.