Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Co-Founder & CEO, Klarna & Tim Bradshaw, Digitial Media Correspondent, Financial Times
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Klarna is a payment system, that focuses on the merchants, to create frictionless services. Some is about paying on delivery. They create a buying experience, that is like a Like button. 30% of online sales in Sweden is this.
The problem has been the same…it has never been solved. Everytime you checkout it is hideous. Too many password, data etc. How can it be simple, like clicking a button, without setting up accounts etc
Last year it was about $2billion, it is in 6 countries. They are looking at UK. Ask the merchants about dropout process, there is something broken, so potential to fix problems. The payment space is swamped with companies. You have customers with cards, you have a Wallet, you have Visa, you have fraud preventions etc…so if Visa produces something like verify be visa, it can kill it. Klarna owns the whole stack; you get the goods and then you pay for it. It is similar to credit card – you pay later. You only need to use name and address. We have ways of identifying risk, with your online behaviour when checking out. Eg if you buy 3am, it says something about whether you will pay etc. We collect lots of data, we know what you buy, when etc. Gives us millions of data points, It tells us about behaviour
Klarna is already partly a bank, they have a licence, they allow deposits etc. Building the structure allows us to create something unique. To create something great you need more than the payment infrastructure as well. The hard thing is to innovate, a new thing. Look at a bank, they could do it, but their compliance department says no, they get something that is not user friendly. Legal need to facilitate things happening, get something that works In EU, we can passport the banking licence throughout, so could open in any new country
