Arnout Schuijff was born in Amsterdam and studied computer science, developing an extraordinary intuition for distributed transactional systems. In the late 1990s, Schuijff was the systems architect behind Bibit Global Payment Services, an early European e-commerce payment gateway acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in 2004.
Frustrated by the patchwork of aging mainframes and regional acquirers that slowed down global commerce, Schuijff and Pieter van der Does reunited in 2006 to build 'Adyen' (meaning 'Start Over Again' in Sranan Tongo). Schuijff built Adyen's entire codebase from a clean sheet of paper, unifying payment gateway, risk management, and local acquiring onto one single end-to-end platform.
Schuijff served as Adyen's Chief Technology Officer until 2021, overseeing its flawless technical scaling into a $45+ billion Euronext powerhouse. Today, Schuijff focuses on philanthropic tech initiatives and angel investments across the Dutch ecosystem.