Raphael Stevens

Adyen has acquired a banking license in the U.K., which enables its merchants to offer cash advances to small and medium-sized enterprises in the country.
Adyen already has a banking license in the Netherlands, which lets it process merchant payments nearly instantly.
It comes as Revolut, one of the U.K.’s biggest fintech firms, has been struggling to obtain a license from the Bank of England.

The Adyen logo displayed on a smartphone.
Rafael Henrique | SOPA Images | LightRocket via Getty Images

Dutch payments giant Adyen on Thursday said it won approval for a banking license in the U.K., marking a deeper push from the company into the banking sector.
The company said its new license would allow its merchants to offer cash advances to small and medium-sized enterprises in the U.K.

Crucially, Adyen said the license would enable it to continue operating under the U.K.’s Temporary Permissions Regime — under which it can provide services in line with its EU business — after Brexit.
Adyen already has a license in the Netherlands as an acquiring bank. In this capacity, the company can process merchant payments nearly instantly, rather than relying on banking partners to handle settlements, which can often take several days.
Adyen’s U.K. merchants can already offer customers bank accounts, virtual or physical cards, and cash flow and expense management.
“The U.K. is a key market for Adyen and we’re excited to cement our position here with this banking authorisation,” said Mariëtte Swart, Adyen’s chief legal and compliance officer.
“It will strengthen our ability to help domestic and international businesses achieve their ambitions faster. It’s another stride towards Adyen becoming a full spectrum global financial technology platform.”

A competitor to U.S. payments giant Stripe, Adyen is one of Europe’s largest technology firms, with a market capitalization of 23.4 billion euros ($25 billion). The company has been recovering after its first-half earnings numbers showed the slowest revenue growth on record.
The company’s shares fell as much as 39% on Aug. 17, wiping 18 billion euros from Adyen’s market value. Shares of Adyen closed down more than 2% on Thursday in Amsterdam.
Adyen’s permit approval comes as one of the U.K.’s own biggest fintech firms, Revolut, has been struggling to obtain a license from the Bank of England. Revolut applied for a license two years ago, but has faced delays. Regulators have had numerous concerns to consider, including the company’s late filing of accounts and internal problems with corporate culture.
Revolut says it has worked to improve its corporate culture internally. The company also saw its chief financial officer, who was at the helm at the time of its delayed accounts, leave earlier this year.
Correction: Adyen’s shares fell as much as 39% on Aug. 17. An earlier version misstated the date. More

Apple phones on display in an Apple store in Miami, Florida, May 4, 2023.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Check out the companies making headlines in premarket trading Thursday.
Apple — Apple shares fell more than 2.6% after Bloomberg News reported China is planning to extend a ban on iPhone use to state-owned corporations. A day earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that China was moving to prohibit iPhone usage and other foreign-branded devices in government agencies.

Dutch Bros — The drive-through coffee chain dropped about 6% in premarket trading after it announced a public offering of $300 million in shares of its Class A common stock after market close Wednesday.
Dave & Buster’s — Shares of the entertainment and dining company fell more than 3% after it reported weaker-than-expected second-quarter earnings. The company generated 60 cents per share profit on $542 million of revenue. Analysts surveyed by LSEG were expecting 93 cents per share on $559 million of revenue. Comparable sales declined year over year on a pro forma basis.
McDonald’s — The fast-food chain gained nearly 1% premarket after Wells Fargo upgraded the stock to overweight from equal weight, saying the company “is firing on all cylinders” when it comes to innovation and that it could see upside in the second half of this year.
ChargePoint Holdings — Shares of the electric vehicle charging infrastructure company tumbled 11.6% after ChargePoint missed estimates for the fiscal second quarter. ChargePoint noted $150 million in revenue while analysts polled by LSEG forecast $153 million. The company also said it would cut its global workforce by about 10%.
WestRock — Shares added 6.7% after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company is nearing a merger with Europe’s Smurfit Kappa in a deal that could create a global paper and packaging giant worth around $20 billion.

C3.ai — The artificial intelligence software company plunged 9.2% in after C3.ai forecast a larger-than-expected operating loss for the fiscal second quarter. The company called for an operating loss of $27 million to $40 million, while analysts polled by StreetAccount anticipated a loss of $20.5 million. For the latest quarter, C3.ai reported a loss of 9 cents per share, excluding items, on revenue of $72.4 million, while analysts surveyed by LSEG called for a loss of 17 cents per share on revenue of $71.6 million.
Roku — The streaming stock was lower by 1% in early morning trading after Loop Capital downgraded the company to hold from buy. The move comes after Roku jumped more than 12% on Wednesday after announcing plans to lay off 10% of its staff, as well as consolidate office space and review its content slate to trim expenses. Roku had also lifted its third-quarter revenue guidance, saying it now expects revenue to range between $835 million and $875 million, versus prior guidance of $815 million. 
Verint Systems — The analytics company lost 16.2% in premarket trading after Verint’s second-quarter earnings and revenue fell short of expectations. Verint posted adjusted earnings of 48 cents per share, while analysts polled by FactSet forecast 57 cents per share. Revenue came in at $210.2 million, falling short of the estimated $57.4 million.
— CNBC’s Tanaya Macheel and Jesse Pound contributed reporting. More

Milton friedman looms large in the personal and political life of Argentina’s probable next president. Javier Milei’s ideas, which carried him to an unexpected victory in the country’s primaries in August, take cues from the 20th century’s most prominent free-market economist. Friedman influenced both Mr Milei’s opinions on the ideal size of the state (tiny) and its role in the economy (non-existent). So deep is Mr Milei’s admiration that he has christened one of his four pet mastiffs in Friedman’s honour. The former economics lecturer told The Economist in a recent interview that Milton and his other dogs, all of which are named for economists, make “the best strategic committee in the world”.The most far-reaching of Mr Milei’s Friedman-influenced proposals is to dollarise the economy. This would involve replacing the peso with the greenback, and mean getting rid of Argentina’s central bank, which Mr Milei calls “the worst thing in the universe”. He exaggerates, but only a little. Argentina’s economy is in tatters. Annual inflation is at 113%. The central bank has exhausted its dollars. The peso’s value against the American currency has halved since the beginning of the year. In short, the time for radical thinking has arrived. Unfortunately, dollarisation is more likely to be a curse than a solution to Argentina’s problems.When a country hitches its economy to another’s currency, it gives up on making its own monetary policy. Interest rates would be determined by the Federal Reserve, making them more predictable and just about impossible to fiddle. For a country with a record as chequered as Argentina’s, this would relieve a number of headaches. Most Argentines use dollars anyway. Making this state of affairs official would allow the public to avoid the hassle of converting back and forth from the American currency to pesos. Exchange rates for dollars, the world’s most heavily traded currency, would be unmoved by anything happening in Argentina, a fairly small economy, meaning currency values would no longer seesaw. It is a formula that, for a while at least, kept things relatively stable in Ecuador after it dollarised in 2000.The main draw, however, is that Argentina would be blocked from printing cash. Friedman was critical of central banks, convinced that most are too weak to keep inflation in hand, since doing so means standing firm against pressure from politicians to make it easier to pay bills or to let the economy run hot at election time. As Mr Milei is quick to point out, Argentina’s central bank has been one of the most irresponsible. Dollarisation would put the printing presses firmly out of reach. This means, proponents argue, that it would be only a matter of time before the state downsizes and the long battle with inflation comes to an end.Yet this argument has a problem: it takes an unrealistically rose-tinted view of governments. It assumes that politicians—aware that they are no longer able to call on the central bank in a crisis—will automatically reduce their borrowing to a safe level. This would be true if the only reason governments were borrowing too much was because they knew that the central bank would bail them out. In reality, most governments borrow because there is enormous pressure to do so. Lenders need repaying. Bureaucracies must be restructured. Opposition parties push incumbents to spend. And, most pressing of all, voters come to expect certain services from the state. The absence of printing presses is not sufficient to outweigh these concerns.When a disaster strikes, things get scary in a dollarised economy. There is no central bank to act as lender of last resort to either the government or the banking system. Defaults thus become much more likely. Banks that could have been saved with emergency liquidity fail, and the government lacks the dollars to cover deposits, leaving millions out of pocket. Moreover, most borrowing could by then be under American law, putting the government on the back foot in any restructuring negotiations.Indeed, Ecuador is currently experiencing many of the downsides of dollarisation. When the policy was introduced, it stabilised prices straight away. But it also failed to stem the government’s fiscal deficits. Policymakers have since resorted to increasingly creative ways to finance the bill, pushing the country into a deal with imf in 2019.Milei, rockedA future in which Argentina falls into disaster is more easily foreseeable than one in which policymakers see through the tough decisions required to make a success of dollarisation. Fiscal excess has been a problem for the better part of a century. The country has had 22 imf bail-outs over the past 65 years, leaving the fund so exhausted that it has given up demanding the country break even. A string of left-wing governments have built a sprawling welfare state and vast bureaucracy. Mr Milei promises cuts worth 15% of gdp, to a public sector that accounts for 38% of gdp, but struggles to outline where they will come from.There are plenty of other problems. A significant one is how Mr Milei’s government would find the $40bn his team thinks is necessary to make the switch to dollars. Currently Argentina cannot even repay the imf, to which it owes $44bn. Having run out of American currency, the central bank is instead burning through yuan borrowed from China. Mr Milei has suggested selling state-owned firms and government debt in an offshore fund to raise the necessary capital. It is hard to imagine there will be many buyers.Whoever takes power in December will be starting from a terrible position. Forget about finding the money to enable dollarisation. Growing numbers of economists reckon that the country is once again insolvent, meaning that it will be almost impossible for it to pay back its existing debts. The country’s bond prices reflect the fact that financial markets are pricing in another debt restructuring. In order to make a fresh start, Argentina may need to default, not dollarise. ■Read more from Free exchange, our column on economics:How will politicians escape enormous public debts? (Aug 31st)Which animals should a modern-day Noah put in his ark? (Aug 24th)Democracy and the price of a vote (Aug 17th) More

Few assets are as political as housing, and therefore few markets depend as much on national borders as those for mortgages. Governments can twiddle endless dials to control what goes on, concerning everything from how much you can borrow and who can lend, to what they can do if you stiff them. For today’s borrowers, though, one dial feels most urgent: how long is your fix?If you are American or Danish, the answer may well be that you have a fixed interest rate for the duration of your mortgage. As a result, you may pay as little attention as you wish to hawkish central bankers and climbing bond yields. In many other countries—including Britain, Canada and much of southern Europe—mortgage rates tend to be fixed for a few years at most, or not at all. If you fall into this group, you may recently have devoted rather more thought to monetary policy than you would like, since (congratulations!) you are one of its transmission channels. Faced with imminently rising payments, you might be looking enviously at those who need never worry about them.Things are not as great as they first appear for this group, however. America’s frozen housing market, with homeowners unwilling to sell and lose the low rates they locked in during the cheap-money years, should alert policymakers to the dangers of long-term fixes. For mortgage-payers, there is a more straightforward reason to be wary of such lending. A lifetime rate might offer psychological safety. But it is safety you must pay through the nose to achieve.To see why, start with how fixed rates are set. Whoever is lending to you—bank, building society or bond investor—is either borrowing the money themselves (from depositors, say) or forgoing lending it to someone else (such as by buying government bonds). In both cases they are giving up interest payments elsewhere. Your mortgage rate needs to compensate for this if they are to lend at all. One compensation method is a rate that floats on market conditions, always matching the interest payments the lender is losing elsewhere. The other is a rate that is fixed for a set number of years, at the average funding cost the lender expects over the course of the period.The catch is that you might want to repay your mortgage early—to move house, for instance. On a floating rate, the lender is unlikely to mind. After all, they are able to take your repayment and lend it to someone else for the same income. But on a fixed rate, they may mind considerably. Suppose you originally agreed to pay 5% interest for 30 years, then want to pay it back at a time when the equivalent market rate has fallen to 3%. In such a scenario, your lender will no longer be able to lend out your repayment for anything like the same income. Again, they will want compensation: the two-percentage-point difference, multiplied by the however-many years left on the mortgage, multiplied by your average remaining balance. A lot, in other words.Hence the unpopularity of 30-year fixed rates in much of the world. Few borrowers want to risk huge prepayment costs if their circumstances change and markets have moved in the wrong direction. One solution is for regulators to cap costs, but this just discourages lending on long-term fixes in the first place.Next to this, the alternative solution adopted by America and Denmark seems almost like alchemy. In both countries, mortgages can be fixed for 30 years and are prepayable at face value at the borrower’s demand. Americans experience no profit or loss regardless of how rates have moved. Danish borrowers similarly pay no penalty if rates have fallen (making their fixed rate expensive by comparison) but can realise a profit if rates have risen. This means that, unlike Americans, Danes need not worry about surrendering a cheaper-than-market rate to move, and can do so more freely.Yet there is a price for everything, and in this case the price is eye-wateringly high borrowing costs. The average rate on a new, 30-year American mortgage stands at 7.2%, whereas the 30-year Treasury rate is just 4.4%. In Denmark the equivalent rates are 5.3% and 2.9%. In Britain, meanwhile, borrowing costs for mortgage-holders and the government are broadly similar. Put differently, both long-term fixes add more than a third to each of the 360 monthly mortgage repayments in question. Those who had the enviable foresight to secure rock-bottom rates a couple of years ago may not mind much. Everyone else, no matter how envious, should remember that safety doesn’t come cheap.■Read more from Buttonwood, our columnist on financial markets:High bond yields imperil America’s financial stability (Aug 29th)Why investors are gambling on placid stockmarkets (Aug 17th)In defence of credit-rating agencies (Aug 10th)Also: How the Buttonwood column got its name More