Ethical Stewardship in the Global Payment Ecosystem: A Case Study of Adyen

This paper examines the ethical dilemma of algorithmic bias in the risk management frameworks of Adyen N.V., a single-platform global payment infrastructure provider. As payment organizations shift from technical optimization to automated decision-making, AI-driven risk engines such as Adyen's RevenueProtect maximize authorization rates and minimize chargebacks — but the continuous refinement of an "ideal merchant" profile systematically marginalizes legitimate yet unconventional market actors, particularly cross-border merchants in emerging markets. Because these decisions occur inside a black box, affected merchants face rolling reserves and frozen settlements without verifiable grounds, producing liquidity crises and a legitimacy deficit for the platform. The paper analyzes the financial, accounting, management, and marketing impacts of this bias, reviews the limitations of current remedies — human-in-the-loop review and explainable AI — and proposes a research agenda: integrating immutable, IoT-verified fulfillment data and decentralized tokenization into AI risk models, anchoring probabilistic prediction in physical verification to reduce unjustified fund retention without sacrificing settlement velocity.