Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski: fintech innovator gunning for the banks

Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s Klarna app allows customers to buy now, pay later, without racking up interest charges. He’s excited about the future. Regulators are nervous.

Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski
(Image credit: © Klarna)

“The credit-card model is simply unsustainable for consumers,” Klarna’s billionaire founder, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, told investors last month. They clearly agree, says Bloomberg. In a recent funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, the wildly popular “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) app was valued at $46.5bn. One backer, Chrysalis Investments, reckons the fast-expanding Swedish company, which first saw the light of day in 2005, could be worth $125bn in 18 months – more than Europe’s second-largest bank, HSBC.

Modelled on Sweden

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.