A Swedish fintech best known for 'buy now, pay later'. Klarna Group is incorporated in England and Wales with a registered office in London, and its UK arm is authorised by the FCA.
Klarna is a Swedish fintech company and digital bank best known for "buy now, pay later". Fintech means financial services built on technology. At the online checkout you can choose to pay immediately, pay later or split a purchase into instalments. Klarna also offers cards, banking and savings in some countries and sells shopping and advertising tools to retailers. As of 2026 it reported more than 119 million active consumers and more than one million merchants worldwide (Wikipedia).
The company was founded in Stockholm in 2005 by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson, who came up with the idea while connected to the Stockholm School of Economics. It was first called Kreditor, with the aim of making online payments safer and simpler, and took the name Klarna in 2009. Its bank is headquartered in Stockholm, but the parent company, Klarna Group plc, is incorporated in England and Wales with a registered office in London, and its UK arm, Klarna Financial Services UK Limited, is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority for e-money and consumer credit. Klarna bought Close Brothers Retail Finance in the UK in 2018 and launched a UK physical card in January 2022. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025.
We did not find a formal company mission statement, though a Built In page says Klarna's goal is to make paying "as simple, safe and above all, smoooth as possible" (a Klarna spelling of smooth). That is the company's own wording.
Klarna's products include Pay Now, Pay Later, instalment financing for bigger purchases, cards and savings, plus checkout technology and shopping and advertising services for merchants. Payment partners named by Wikipedia include Stripe and Nexi, with Marqeta supporting the US card and OpenAI powering an AI customer service assistant in 2024. A 2021 announcement said Klarna UK had over 14 million consumers and over 13,000 retailers, with a Manchester hub linked to retail clients such as Beauty Bay, Foot Asylum and Boohoo Group.
In the UK, a 2021 WeWork announcement placed the new London headquarters in Aviation House, Holborn, and an expanded Manchester office at Old Granada Studios; it reported over 200 UK staff and a hybrid policy with two agreed office days a week. A current Built In page lists the London office at 125 Kingsway, WC2B, and says Klarna has about 5,000 employees in total. Alex Marsh, Head of Klarna UK, said the investment would make Klarna "an increasingly important part of the UK economy" (2021). London listings have included marketing, merchant operations and communications roles, and engineering uses languages such as Java, Python and SQL. We did not find a published UK graduate or internship scheme, though Klarna has run graduate programmes in Stockholm, so check its careers page for UK openings.
Website: www.klarna.com
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