Klarna opens up Open Banking “autopilot” to accelerate Open Banking innovation

Stockholm, 17th November, 2022 - Klarna Kosma, Klarna's financial technology platform for banks, fintechs and innovative retailers, today announced a new initiative to help startups develop Proofs of Concepts (POC) in the eCommerce, data analytics and fintech space. Klarna will enable a select number of start-ups and established companies to access all the products on its world-leading open banking platform and access 15,000 banks for three months, free of charge.

The initiative aims to accelerate innovation in the development of open banking use cases by providing innovators with a zero-cost product development ‘sandbox’ built on the world’s largest bank aggregation platform. Launched in April 2022, Klarna Kosma provides financial institutions, fintechs and merchants with the essential connectivity to build the next generation of fintech apps and services by providing simple and secure access to 15,000 banks in 27 countries around the world through a single API. The platform has more than doubled the number of connected banks, and trebled the transactions processed on the platform in the past year alone.     

“Open banking was introduced to wrest control of consumer data away from the big banks and make it securely available to drive innovation” says Wilko Klaassen, VP Open banking at Klarna, “With that data accessible through simple APIs, with consumers’ permissions, a whole new vista of potential use cases has opened up. The initiative we are launching today aims to add rocket fuel to the innovation process.”

About Klarna Kosma: 
Klarna Kosma is a sub-brand and business unit of Klarna to harness the rapid growth of its world-leading Open Banking platform. By providing simple access to more banks than any other Open Banking provider, Kosma rapidly reduces the time for new fintech services to reach global scale and provides the essential building blocks for innovation in financial services. Kosma provides financial institutions, fintechs and merchants with the essential connectivity to build the next generation of fintech apps and services by providing simple and secure access to 15,000 banks in 27 countries around the world through a single API. The new business unit will harness the massive growth Klarna has seen in this area, having more than doubled the number of connected banks in the past year. Today, Kosma processes close to a billion information requests to bank accounts each year.