"Take customer service...We have reduced the number of human agents by 70% this year as a consequence of being able to use AI. That is a huge reason for the profit increase."
@KlarnaOfficial CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski tells Julia Chatterley how his company has leveraged AI.
Questions asked in this interview
4
1:36Because there is a lot of bemoaning that you are this European giant, why couldn't Europe have kept you there and see you list there rather than coming to the United States?
4:49What are you seeing and how are you managing it and how are you ensuring that profits are up 93% year-over-year in the first half of this year versus last year?
6:40How much of the driver, the growth drivers, is down to that?
US markets closing higher to finish out the week. The major averages all, as you can see there, in the green. The Dow led the way up more than 400 points, we're talking around 1%. Wall Street shows little sign of slowing down as a strong year already draws to a close. It's no wonder European firms like fintech giant Klarna may want to go public here in the United States. They're known for buy now, pay later technology and recently filed the paperwork to go public. Klarna could be valued in the tens of billions of dollars. The company hopes the IPO is part of a big 2025. It will integrate with Google Pay next year after striking a similar deal with Apple Pay. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is with us now. Sebastian, always a pleasure to talk to you and it's an incredibly exciting time. You've told me for years really that this was the plan, that you were focusing on profitability and you were also focusing on at some point going public. There's a lot of fintechs out there saying they're going to watch you and see how it goes. Explain why now, for micro reasons but also macro of course.
No, it's great to see you again, Julie. I think that, as we have been saying to you, it was clear for us that the future of retail banking and fintech speaks global and we needed to be a global company, meaning success in the US. We are now majority revenue US, over 30 million consumers in the US, but we also need to be profitable in the US. And as we now have achieved those targets, you know, we feel that the time is ready. Plus, you know, we've been private for 20 years, a lot of private investors, employees that hold stocks, so it feels like a natural next step.
Is that why? Because such a significant proportion of your business, as you're saying, and the growth of it is in the United States now, that you chose to list in the US? Because there is a lot of bemoaning that you are this European giant, why couldn't Europe have kept you there and see you list there rather than coming to the United States? There is some disappointment, let's be honest.
Yeah, I think there is. And I hope, you know, when Spotify listed in the US, they hung out the Swiss flag instead of the Swedish flag, so I hope they do better this time around. But with that said, I think it's been, you know, as we did this evaluation, it became clear to us that obviously, in addition to the fact that we are mostly an American business by revenue nowadays, it's also that there is a bigger understanding for growth companies like ours among the investor collective in the US. And we think that will benefit the company. We also think it can help our continuous marketing and awareness in the US. So, you know, there are obviously additional reasons like that.
Yeah, I was going through some of our old interviews and I remember you saying to me back in 2022 that Apple Pay potentially offering a buy now, pay later option was a testament to the power of the tool that you were already providing for consumers, but also of course it was competition at that point. And now you're on Apple Pay here and of course in the UK as well, and you're going to hit Google Pay a little bit this year and a lot next year. It sort of takes you from a tool to being mainstream payments, which I know you were already doing, but I think the symbolism is huge.
And the business. Yeah, I am happy you say that. I would tend to agree and I think it speaks to the kind of shift in strategy we decided to do a few years ago where we decided we want to be a network similar to Visa and Mastercard. And that means we need to go from hundreds of thousands of merchants to millions. And the way we can do that is with fantastic partners like Apple, Google, Adyen, and Worldpay, and all the other Stripe and other big announcements like that we've had that help us distribute our payments to consumers and merchants globally. So very, very happy about this new... and it's kind of a shift to a business to not work only directly with merchants but through these partners.
Yeah, I mean you have a banking license too in the EU, so you are challenging the traditional banks. You've got Klarna Card, Klarna Balance, Klarna Cashback I know as well. You mentioned the number of users, I think it's 85 million now isn't it, actively worldwide. How big can that get? What's the ambition?
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Siemiatkowski, S. (2024, November 26). Klarna CEO on How His Company Has Leveraged AI [Interview transcript]. Quest Means Business. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/793671/
MLA
Sebastian Siemiatkowski. "Klarna CEO on How His Company Has Leveraged AI." Quest Means Business, 26 Nov. 2024. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/793671/.
BibTeX
@misc{siemiatkowski2024_793671,
author = {Sebastian Siemiatkowski},
title = {Klarna CEO on How His Company Has Leveraged AI},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Quest Means Business. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2024},
month = {nov},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/793671/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
