Klarna Building Parallel Payments Network
Klarna at $2.26B/yr
This is Klarna’s path out of being just a lender and into becoming payments infrastructure with its own data advantage. Card networks mainly see dollars, merchant IDs, and payment credentials, but Klarna increasingly sits earlier and deeper in the shopping flow, inside its app, checkout integrations, rewards, and direct bank linked payments. That gives it item level purchase data, which is the raw material for better merchant targeting, stronger rewards, and eventually cheaper routing outside the Visa and Mastercard rails.
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Klarna’s merchant app strategy matters because merchants already use it as a conversion tool, and retailers can measure performance down to basket or even item level. That makes Klarna more like a commerce and demand partner than a generic lender, and creates a natural reason for merchants to share richer purchase data.
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Visa and Mastercard make money by operating the network between issuing banks, merchants, and acquirers, taking fees while merchants absorb the cost. Klarna’s open banking and debit push targets that toll layer directly, because if payment starts from a bank account inside Klarna’s own flow, Klarna can keep more of the economics and control more of the user experience.
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The closed loop is already becoming visible in the numbers. Klarna reached $105B in GMV and $180M of advertising revenue in 2024, and reported that merchant and app based shopping are driving more than 60% of transactions in the 12 months ended June 30, 2025. That mix shift means the app is becoming a shopping surface, not just a financing button.
The next step is turning payment intent and item level shopping data into a merchant network that can fund rewards, sell ads, route more volume over debit and pay by bank, and make Klarna the system merchants use to win demand as well as close checkout. If that play keeps working, Klarna starts to look less like BNPL and more like a commerce network sitting beside the card rails.