J.P. Morgan Payments is expanding its buy now, pay later (BNPL) offerings in partnership with Klarna.
The collaboration lets roughly 900,000 businesses offer Klarna’s installment payment options to customers, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Feb. 11). It also means that Klarna, preparing to go public in the U.S. this year, will be available through the biggest merchant acquirer in the world, processing $2 trillion in payments annually.
“We in the more recent years have become a third party network like Amex and PayPal,” Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Klarna’s CEO, told Bloomberg. “We are a bank, so this is the natural evolution. We are moving into a world with increased competitive pressure with retail banking services.”
Sweden-based Klarna has recently added Stripe, Adyen and Worldpay to its distribution roster, after selling its checkout business in 2023. The company has also been expanding in the U.S., where it is exploring a banking license.
This would allow Klarna to “control even more customer experience and provide a richer service,” Siemiatkowski said.
Bloomberg noted that for J.P. Morgan, the deal extends the banking giant’s BNPL business, this time via its payments unit.
The news comes days after Siemiatkowski said Klarna would “embrace” cryptocurrency, and asked advocates for the digital currency how to best do so.
Joking that his company was the “last FinTech in the world” to join the crypto race, the CEO added: “BTW all crypto fans. Tell me what we should do with it? “I have some ideas but keen to hear more,”
Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about Klarna’s planned initial public offering (IPO), which could come in April and value the company at as high as $15 billion. However, some factors won’t be determined until Klarna’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documentation comes through, that report added.
“Much remains to be seen when the SEC documentation comes through, including Klarna’s own current estimation of market size, potential and a more recent spate of financials,” that report said. “But then again, the stars are aligning for what might prove to be a timely listing, because some of the fundamentals clearly have momentum.”
A valuation of $15 billion, PYMNTS added, would mark an increase from the $14.6 billion valuation that had been seen as recently as the end of 2024, implied by Klarna’s most recent funding round, and head and shoulders above the $6.7 billion seen in 2022.
