The CEO of fintech Klarna said the rise of agentic shopping won’t destroy brand loyalty, an outcome feared by e-commerce players who worry that it will be harder to woo bots than the humans whose errands they are running.
“If you have preference, it doesn’t matter that much how many buttons are in the checkout or what happens in the world with new things, because you have that brand affinity,” Sebastian Siemiatkowski said on the latest episode of Semafor’s Compound Interest show.
“When Klarna is side by side with some of the other buy-now-pay-later providers… we win on preference,” he said.
Klarna, founded in Sweden in 2005, became a household name in the US during the pandemic, when BNPL gained favor among Americans stuck at home, and now has 29 million users in the country. It went public last year in New York.
Swarms of bots fill shopping lists in internet backrooms, armed with some instructions from consumers, pose a challenge to e-commerce companies. Agents are harder to advertise to or reward with better perks or service. They put an abstracting step between end customers and what they choose to buy — and how they choose to pay for it, bringing the “top of wallet” fight waged for decades by credit-card companies in a physical world, then in an online checkout world, into the AI world.
“We’re the largest [buy-now-pay-later] network in number of users and geographical span, and we cover the broadest set of payment methods — everyday spend, mid-sized ticket spend, and big ticket spend,” Siemiatkowski said. “That, we believe, puts us very well equipped for the future, whatever the future is gonna bring.”
When asked about whether Klarna plans to follow the path of other fintechs like PayPal, Revolut, Sofi, and Chime — which all launched as proudly anti-bank and one by one acquired bank charters — Siemiatkowski said: “Directionally speaking, it would make sense for us to do so over time in the US.”
We also talked about Klarna’s future beyond BNPL and what people got wrong about Klarna’s own embrace of AI as a cost saver. And burrito bonds.