Adyen Uses Tropic to Negotiate Software with Confidence

Adyen is a global payments technology company powering transactions for some of the world's leading brands. Sam Kaserer is Adyen's software category manager, responsible for managing the company's entire software spend.

Better data, better deals: Backing every negotiation with real intelligence

"How do we know we're getting a good deal?" That was the question Adyen's CFO asked Sam – and he wanted a more satisfying answer. The company was finishing up a major renewal where they didn’t have reliable benchmarking to know what “good” actually looked like. "That deal, and the questions it led us to ask ourselves, is part of the reason we signed up with Tropic," Sam shared.

From past experience, getting reliable data from traditional large consulting firms would be slow and costly. On the other side of the spectrum, using free AI tools would pull from outdated information or SKUs that no longer existed. “Tropic acts as a greatfilter and uses more reliable data. It's certainly more reliable than these publicly available tools,” he said.

Using Tropic gives Sam the ability to get the best deal for Adyen. “And it's not just about money,” he noted. “It's about value, innovation and these elements that weren't considered in some of these old school models.” 

“With Tropic, you're even more influential or you can get even better deals for your company. If you have that ability, why would you not do that?”

How Adyen uses Tropic

• Proposal price benchmarking: They upload a vendor proposal directly into Tropic and get benchmark pricing broken out by SKU and company size. Before the conversation starts, they know whether they’re being quoted a fair price and terms, or have opportunities to negotiate.
• Expert human guidance: When the data needs context, Tropic's in-house negotiation experts step in with specific, actionable guidance based on years of supplier-specific deal experience. The turnaround is often quick so it fits into your negotiation timeline rather than slowing it down.
• Competitive supplier intelligence: Tropic surfaces competing tools so you can validate whether the product you're evaluating is truly the best fit and  exactly what leverage you have. Either way, you're in a stronger position.

After submitting a proposal, Adyen can get “higher confidence third-party data” quickly, often within one day. “The cycle time of increasing the confidence level of a deal was much faster with Tropic than I've experienced before with other benchmarking tools,” he added.

Adyen also chose Tropic because the people mattered as much as the platform. In a market full of vendors, that cultural alignment mattered. “We want to partner with companies that are also innovating, want to build and change things, integrate, and really communicate,” Sam said.

His CFO now requests Tropic benchmark charts in their internal monthly deal review. The question that started it all finally has an answer.