Buy now, pay later company Klarna Group considers itself akin to American Express in the sense that both are card-issuing lifestyle brands focused on customers, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said last week.
Calling Amex “an interesting company,” Siemiatkowski drew multiple parallels at an investor event between Klarna and Amex’s efforts to grow against larger network rivals Visa and Mastercard in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Klarna co-founder referenced Amex nine times in his 51-minute chat with analyst Harshita Rawat May 28 at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference.
Siemiatkowski and Chief Financial Officer Niclas Neglén have presented at multiple investor conferences this year to explain the business and how accounting works within Klarna’s consumer lending. Klarna went public in September 2025 on the New York Stock Exchange, with its stock price declining about 60% since the IPO.
Whereas Amex has focused on travel and dining, Klarna is using fashion and beauty products to grow through merchants such as the department store Macy’s and LVMH-owned Sephora, a cosmetics retailer, Siemiatkowski said. The BNPL company announced its latest partnership in that space on Wednesday, with retailer Ulta Beauty.
Fashion and beauty purchase sizes are typically smaller, $100 to $200, but they occur more frequently, he said. “Once you’ve really nailed that (spending), you can then expand into the financing segment, the big-ticket spend, and you can also move into the everyday spend,” such as groceries, Siemiatkowski said.
Moreover, few consumers think of Amex as a bank, even though it’s the 10th largest in the U.S., because the company has focused its efforts on being a “a lifestyle brand, customer-service company with a card,” Siemiatkowski said. “Klarna, to some degree, has that similar aspect to it that we think about ourselves like that, we think about us as a customer service company.”
Klarna operates as a digital bank in Europe, holding deposits that fund its BNPL lending, and offers numerous financial services in the U.S. and U.K.
Also like Amex, London-based Klarna possesses a customer base that attracts marketers and provides “significant” revenue, Siemiatkowski said. “Our user base of 120 million is very relevant to our merchants, so they want to market into our user base, just like people would pay Amex to market to their user base,” he said.
The CEO also brushed off concerns over agentic commerce possibly rendering financial services brands less important as agents select and purchase for consumers.
“Is anyone worried about Amex and the implications on agents coming after them?” Siemiatkowski said. “No. Why? Because there’s preference. There is an audience that likes the product and uses it. And so, our ambition for the last 20 years is to build that preference with our user.”
In response to a question from Rawat, Siemiatkowski said that demographic differences between Klarna’s U.S. and European customers are minimal, and that many fintechs create products “used by tech bros.” Klarna began in 2005 in Sweden and was initially based in Stockholm, before the IPO.
“Klarna is not a tech-bro product,” he said, with the company skewing “more female than male” in its customer base. “And I’m really happy because in our relationship with our merchants, everyone knows who’s making the economical decisions nowadays, and it’s not the males anymore.”
