Klarna Leads BNPL GMV Race
Klarna at $2.8B revenue
Klarna’s lead shows that BNPL scale comes less from having the biggest wallet or merchant base, and more from being the checkout option shoppers actively look for. Klarna started earlier, got deeply embedded with fashion and ecommerce merchants, and used BNPL as a repeat shopping habit, not just a feature inside a broader payments app. That gave it $105B of 2024 GMV versus roughly $33B to $35B for PayPal Pay Later and Cash App Afterpay.
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Klarna built merchant relationships around conversion first. Retailers could see that offering four payments on a $280 to $380 basket lifted checkout completion, especially in apparel and seasonal spending. Being the first BNPL button on sites like ASOS or H&M mattered because repeated exposure built shopper trust and repeat use.
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PayPal and Block had bigger distribution, but BNPL sat inside broader ecosystems. PayPal had 434M active accounts in 2024, and Block was still reporting quarterly BNPL GMV of $6.98B in Q1 2024 and $7.75B in Q2 2024, which points to annualized volume well below Klarna. Scale alone did not create the same dedicated BNPL habit.
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Klarna’s advantage compounds because high BNPL volume feeds a closed loop. More shoppers attract more merchants, more merchants improve app selection, and more transactions give Klarna better purchase level data to sell ads, drive rewards, and push users from discovery to checkout. That is why BNPL GMV matters beyond lending revenue alone.
The next phase is a fight over who owns the shopping journey before payment happens. If Klarna keeps turning BNPL traffic into app engagement, merchant marketing, cards, and direct payments, its early lead in BNPL GMV becomes the base for a broader commerce network that is harder for wallet based rivals to catch.