Klarna Becoming a Neobank

Klarna is trying to turn a checkout feature into a full consumer finance and payments relationship. BNPL by itself is getting easier for banks, wallets, and other checkout providers to copy, so Klarna is widening the business into debit, cards, savings, subscriptions, ads, and its shopping app. That gives it more ways to make money from the same user and more control over how a purchase starts, gets paid for, and gets repeated.

• The clearest sign of the shift is revenue mix. In 2024, core BNPL merchant fees were 57% of revenue, down from 75% in 2020, while interest bearing loans, late fees, ads, interchange, and Klarna Pro made up a much bigger share. That is what a move from single product lender to neobank looks like in practice.
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• The product is also moving from checkout button to daily money tool. Klarna launched open banking settlements in the UK so users can pay from bank accounts, and by early 2026 it reported 15.8 million banking consumers and 4.2 million active Klarna Card users. Those users are more valuable because they come back outside the original BNPL moment.
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• Affirm shows the other path. It stayed closer to high ticket lending and platform distribution, reaching $2.8B of revenue in 2024 with faster growth and large partners like Shopify, while Klarna leaned harder into a lower ARPU shopping app, merchant discovery, and bank like features. The split is lender first versus network and neobank first.
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The next phase is a fight over who owns the consumer before checkout, not just at checkout. If Klarna keeps growing cards, bank connected payments, and in app merchant demand, it can look less like a BNPL provider and more like a parallel retail banking and commerce network, competing for spending that would otherwise sit with cards, wallets, and big banks.