Klarna dropped its open banking brand after less than 18 months

Buy now, pay later giant Klarna has killed off its open banking brand Klarna Kosma a little over a year after launch, although the business will continue to operate as before.

The Swedish BNPL has axed the Klarna Kosma brand but says there are no job cuts and its open banking platform is performing well, according to tech.eu.

The Swedish BNPL giant launched Klarna Kosma as a brand and business unit in April last year, saying it represented a “major strategic move”. Klarna Kosma houses Klarna’s open banking platform and was launched amid heightened interest in open banking.

The core piece of Klarna Kosma is account aggregation, meaning that Klarna clients can plug into Klarna’s API and access account statements and garner other banking information and data from 15,000 banks around the world. Klarna Kosma also has other elements such as account-to-account payments.

By launching Klarna Kosma, Klarna, which has more than 150m customers, was publicly taking on the likes of Visa-owned TInk and Plaid and TrueLayer, in a highly competitive space.

Klarna says the decision to scrap Klarna Kosma – which is thought to have happened last month- is a marketing move and the constituent parts of the business will remain.

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Klarna Kosma is a sub-brand and business unit of Klarna to harness the rapid growth of its world-leading Open Banking 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.  In March 2023, Kosma said that processes close to a billion information requests to bank accounts each year.