Klarna: Getting More Ambitious（节选）
Klarna：雄心愈壮（节选）
A payments unicorn seeks to become a dray-horse bank
独角兽支付公司欲成传统零售银行
There is a through-the-looking-glass quality to the blue-lit tunnel that leads into the headquarters of Klarna, a Swedish online-payments firm. And there is something back-to-front about the company itself. It is a startup firm that grew up in Europe, and is now seeking to expand into America – the reverse of the usual pattern. Unlike most tech unicorns galloping to expand their market share, it already makes a profit. Even more strikingly, it plans to move from an area of financial ferment – mobile payments – into the sterile old business of retail banking. Investors are giddy about its plans, however unusual: a funding round last year valued the firm, whose name is Swedish for “getting clearer”, at $2.25 billion, up by almost a billion on the year before.
Klarna’s business “is quite basic”, says Sebastian Siemiatkowski, its founder and boss. Some 65,000 online merchants have so far hired it to run their checkouts. Its main appeal, for both retailers and their customers, is the simplicity of its system. Shoppers do not have to dole out credit-card details or remember a new password. Instead, they can simply give an e-mail and a delivery address, and leave the payment to be sorted out later. (Klarna pays the retailer in the meantime, and bears the risk that shoppers will not stump up in the end – something few other payment firms do.) Customers who have previously used one Klarna-run checkout are recognised when they visit another, further reducing the need to fill out online forms. All this hugely increases the “conversion” rate – the proportion of customers who actually make a purchase after putting an item into their online “basket”.
Like many fintech firms, Klarna believes that its algorithms do a better job of identifying creditworthy customers than the arthritic systems used by conventional financial firms. It relies on the e-mail and delivery addresses supplied, as well as the size and type of purchase, the device used, time of day and other variables. This not only allows it to bear the risk that customers fail to pay when Klarna bills them, but also to offer them extended payment plans, for a fee. These loans have higher margins than the cut-throat online-payment business – although the giants of the industry, such as PayPal, are experimenting with similar offerings.
Klarna handled sales of roughly $10 billion in 2014 (compared with PayPal’s $235 billion), generating $300m in revenue, all in Europe. (It has not yet made public figures for last year.) It handles 40% of online payments in Sweden. In 2014 it bought a German firm, Sofort, expanding its presence there. It thinks it can continue to grow in Europe, but its main focus now is America, where it launched in September.
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