Adyen said September 22 it has nominated Niclas Neglen, currently chief financial officer at Klarna, as its next CFO and a member of its statutory management board, effective February 1, 2027 and subject to regulatory and shareholder approval. Before Klarna, Neglen was CFO and chief operating officer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at HSBC Private Bank, and he spent 13 years in senior finance roles at General Electric. Hwa Tsao will serve as interim CFO until the handover, then return to his prior role as senior vice president of group finance, according to Adyen’s announcement.
“His experience lines up exactly with where Adyen is in its growth journey and what we were looking for in our next CFO,” said Pieter van der Does, Adyen’s co-founder and co-chief executive. Neglen called the move an opportunity, saying “Adyen has built an exceptional business, and I believe there is tremendous opportunity still ahead.”
The hire matters beyond the individual move. Adyen is pulling its next finance chief from a company whose own challenge this year has been proving it can grow profitably, not just report a profit, a skill set that maps closely onto Adyen’s own stage as a mature public payments processor still expected to post the growth rates of a younger company. It also continues a pattern of finance leadership moving between the platforms competing for the same enterprise payments customers, alongside strategic repositioning elsewhere in the sector, such as PayPal’s own turnaround under new leadership. Adyen investors will be watching whether Neglen’s HSBC and GE background, built around large, complex balance sheets, translates into capital discipline that a platform business, rather than a bank, actually needs.
Source: Adyen
