Klarna Closes Deal on PriceRunner Acquisition

Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later firm, has completed its purchase of PriceRunner, the comparison-shopping service in the Nordic region, the Stockholm-based company announced Monday (April 4).

The merger promises PriceRunner will bring new features to the Klarna app with product discovery, price comparisons and customer reviews to help shoppers save time and money while making more informed decisions.

Klarna, which boasts more than 400,000 global retail partners, coupled with PriceRunner’s retail cohorts will benefit from increased website traffic, Klarna said.

“The acquisition will serve to strengthen our consumer offering,” said David Fock, Klarna’s chief product officer, in a statement. “Klarna will not be a marketplace but a viable and competitive alternative for retail partners versus Amazon, Google and Facebook.”

Mikael Lindahl, CEO of PriceRunner, said his goal is to create the best shopping experience for consumers together with Klarna.

Last month, Klarna introduced Klarna Kosma, a business division geared toward open banking.

Read more: Klarna Unveils ‘Klarna Kosma’ Open Banking Unit

Kosma was developed to assist financial institutions, FinTechs and merchants build FinTech apps and services through access to 15,000 banks in 24 countries using a single application programming interface, or software that allows two applications to talk to each other.

Klarna has more than doubled the number of connected banks in its network in the past year, the company said. Kosma processes nearly 1 billion information requests to bank accounts each year.

Earlier this year, PriceRunner filed a suit against Google in Sweden’s patent and market court, seeking $2.4 billion in damages for violating antitrust laws by manipulating search results.

See also: PriceRunner Hauls Google to Swedish Court Seeking $2.4B in Damages

PriceRunner alleges that the company lost profits due to the Alphabet subsidiary’s anti-competitive behavior in the U.K. since 2008 in Sweden and 2013 in Denmark.

The complaint follows a ruling by the European General Court that concluded Google violated antitrust laws by manipulating search results in favor of its own comparison-shopping services.