Klarna Shifts From BNPL to Lead Generator

The key strategic shift is that Klarna stops being paid only for financing a checkout and starts being paid for sending shoppers to the merchant in the first place. A plain BNPL button is easy for merchants to swap out once PayPal, Affirm, or Afterpay offer similar installment terms. A shopping app that helps a retailer target users, run rewards, and lift conversion is much harder to commoditize, because Klarna is then selling traffic and measurable sales, not just credit.

• Klarna already showed the early shape of this model in 2020, when its app was sending about 700K daily leads to U.S. merchants. That means merchants could treat Klarna less like a payment method and more like a customer acquisition channel.
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• The merchant value also changes at the workflow level. Instead of only measuring whether installment payments raise checkout conversion, retailers can use Klarna data to see repeat purchase behavior, full price sell through, and which cohorts respond to rewards or promotions.
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• This is also where Klarna separates from Affirm. Affirm has leaned into higher ticket lending through partners like Shopify and Adyen, while Klarna has built a lower AOV shopping app with cash back and merchant ads. In 2024, ads were about $180M, or 6% of revenue, up 15x since 2020.
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Going forward, the winners in BNPL are likely to look less like lenders and more like shopping networks. Klarna is already moving that way, with merchant fees falling to 57% of revenue by 2024 as ads, cards, subscriptions, and other lines grow. The more shopping intent and transaction data it captures, the more defensible that lead generation role becomes.