In a recent report, we analysed Adyen’s figures from its live Summer of Sports tracker, which contains rare insights into its cross-border volumes during the Olympic games. With the Paralympics in full swing, we took a closer look at how the world’s biggest sports event affected the Dutch player. 

In its Summer of Sports live tracker, Adyen drew data for France from its Unified Commerce segment, which spans both online and in-person payments, from 24 July 2024 until the first week of September. Looking specifically at data from 5-11 August (the last week of the Olympics), foreign shoppers accounted for 35% of Adyen’s authorised share volumes.

Shoppers from the US were the biggest contributors to foreign volumes, accounting for around 22% of all authorised sales volume of foreign spend over the period, with Germany in second with 8% and the UK in third with 6.5%. Where the company’s dynamic currency conversion feature was enabled, giving shoppers the option to pay in their home currency, Adyen reported that 46% of shoppers from the UK opted to pay in GBP, compared to 33% of Canadian shoppers in CAD and 25% of US shoppers in USD.

These figures don’t fully reflect Adyen’s wider cross-border volumes now (in 2014, the most recently available figure, the company reported cross-border accounted for 35% of all volumes, but at the time it largely catered to digital-only companies and had no point-of-sale presence). However, they highlight the impact of supporting a wide number of payment methods abroad during big sporting events.

The same is true for Visa, which was the exclusive payments partner for the Paris Olympic games and recently broke out consumer spending data for the event’s opening weekend. Visa shared that the largest share from overseas spending had come from US Visa cardholders (29%), while 78% of international purchases made in Paris were contactless – up 9% YoY. We’ll be tracking these companies to see if they share more transaction impacts from the world’s biggest sporting competition in their next earnings calls.

Read ‘How important is cross-border payments to Adyen?’

Joe Baker

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Joe is a Senior Copywriter at FXC Intelligence, writing and editing reports, news and analysis to support the company’s weekly content and client projects. Before joining FXC Intelligence, he worked as a B2B copywriter, journalist and editor covering a broad range of topics, including technology, transport, retail and the food and beverage industries. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Warwick.