Klarna Cashed In on ‘Buy Now, Pay Later.’ Now It Wants to Be a Bank
As the payments giant prepares an IPO, it’s trying to persuade millions of consumers to use its debit cards.
Illustration: Nick Little for Bloomberg Businessweek
This was supposed to be the summer Sebastian Siemiatkowski hit the jackpot. The founder of Klarna Group Plc, a 20-year-old financial-technology company from Sweden, had planned an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in the spring. Seeking to raise at least $1 billion, the listing would have cemented Siemiatkowski’s status as a billionaire, at least on paper. But as the clock ticked down to the debut, President Donald Trump announced his plans for stiff tariffs, sending global markets into a tailspin. Two days later, Siemiatkowski put his plans on hold. “The IPO is obviously an important event for our shareholders,” he says. “But to me it’s just one milestone.”
So instead of taking victory laps and plotting what to do with his riches, Siemiatkowski, 43, has spent the summer on conference stages, podcasts and TV news shows skirting the IPO question. But now he’s back, planning to complete the listing as soon as September, and he’s got a new pitch: building a global digital bank. Over the past two decades, Klarna has evolved from a European clone of PayPal Holdings Inc. to the biggest provider of short-term “buy now, pay later” consumer loans. It has more than 100 million active customers, mostly in the US and Europe, who use it to search for products, track deliveries, manage purchases and, in some places, maintain savings accounts.