Following a formidable start for its “buy now, pay later” service in the United States, Klarna intends to roll out in Australia and other markets next year. The Swedish FinTech firm is also bolstering an important tech hub in Berlin as it debuts new products for merchants as well as users and grows its coverage per CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Reuters reported.
Klarna puts up payment for products on behalf of a shopper and provides a range of choices to settle the balance during the time frame of a few weeks. The course has been popular with millennials who have a preference for debit cards over credit cards. And Siemiatkowski said, according to the outlet, “We are winning a new merchant every eight minutes.”
The FinTech says that, in the United States, the company is bringing users onto its shopping app at an annual rate of 6 million. Siemiatkowski said, according to reports, “We are on a very exciting journey from a Scandinavian payment provider to a global shopping ecosystem.” The company also wants its app to have more personalized options with the inclusion of delivery tracking, a financial overview for its users and price-drop notifications.
The firm has a total of 2,500 staff in its employ around the globe and is putting 500 of them under the roof of a tech hub in Berlin that will come to fruition in the New Year to be geared toward engineering, commercial, and product growth. When asked about the evolution of his company beyond its checkout product, the CEO talked about the other initiatives the company has in store in a recent interview.
“For consumers, when they shop online today, they have so many friction points. One of them might be the ability to get free credit without all the fees and things that people associate with credit cards,” said Siemiatkowski. “But there’s also other things like, where’s my package? When will it arrive? How do I do returns? Where are the best offers? Where are the best discounts?”