With BNPL mainstream, Klarna shifts its focus to better economics
- Flexible payments have become table stakes at checkout. For BNPL providers, the next challenge is finding growth beyond the product itself.
- Klarna's latest moves suggest the company wants to give customers a reason to return even when they aren't making a purchase.
Some fintechs face a nice-to-have problem where acquiring the next customer is no longer the hardest challenge. Instead, the bigger challenge is keeping customers engaged and finding new ways to monetize those relationships.
Klarna is among them. In quick succession, the Swedish fintech applied for a U.S. bank charter, expanded into everyday mobility payments, embedded financial wellness tools into its app, and secured a landmark antitrust victory through its Swedish subsidiary, PriceRunner.
After spending the better part of a decade building one of the world’s largest BNPL businesses, Klarna is now focused on improving the economics of every existing customer relationship. Its strategy is to lower funding costs, increase engagement between purchases, and create new ways to monetize the millions of consumers already in its network.
BNPL built Klarna’s scale – now the company is focused on maximizing the value of that scale.
BNPL is now table stakes. That changes the growth equation and brings the focus to customer relationships.
Flexible payments are increasingly an expected part of the checkout experience rather than a point of differentiation. Recent research found that 43% of consumers abandon a purchase when BNPL isn’t available, while 42% switch to a lower-cost alternative. BNPL still influences conversion, but the competitive edge is increasingly shifting toward how seamlessly financing fits into the broader shopping journey and what happens after the purchase is complete.
For companies built on BNPL, that creates a new challenge. Once the product becomes commonplace, growth has to come from somewhere else.
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