Klarna Takes on Apple, Google With New Solution
Klarna‘s latest AI-driven service streamlines online purchases and disrupts the global verification industry with a solution that offers consumers control over their data while providing personalized shopping experiences.
“Sign in with Klarna” is designed to give consumers a smoother shopping experience. “The service saves time for consumers by fast-tracking the online purchase process and, if they consent to sharing their data, unlocks personalized offers from merchants,” the company said.
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Klarna said the service is now available in 23 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, among others.
The rollout follows successful testing in Sweden with the restaurant app Maitres and marketplace Tradera. Klarna said after just a few months, “the service has become the second most popular login method on Tradera, with 20 percent of the total social logins demonstrating its usability and ease.”
Stefan Öberg, chief executive officer at Tradera, said the marketplace immediately gets a complete profile “with just a couple of clicks from the consumer, whereas similar services from Apple, Facebook and Google create a profile that the customer needs to complete since it lacks information such as address and phone number.”
Öberg said most Swedes already use Klarna, “and the new login service thus significantly simplifies registration for the majority of our customers.”
The launch of “Sign in with Klarna” is a direct challenge to dominant U.S. tech giants, Klarna said, adding that Apple and Google’s elimination of third-party cookies “has made it harder for payment services to automatically fill in customer details to speed the online checkout.”
Klarna said the new solution “solves this for both consumers and merchants and presents a challenge to tech giants Apple, Facebook, and Google in the global verification industry — which is expected to almost double in size from $10.16 billion today to $18.12 billion by 2027.”
Raji Behal, head of Western and Southern Europe at Klarna, said with the new login solution, “we add another dimension to improving the customer journey for consumers and our offering towards merchants.”
“We give consumers control over their own data, making it easy for them to choose what to share with stores for a more personalized shopping experience,” Behal said. “The product has enormous growth potential, and we believe that it will become as familiar a feature in global online retail as our payment solutions in the near future.”
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