Klarna, Europe’s most valuable fintech company, is laying the building blocks for operations in Ireland.
he Swedish company, recently valued at $45.6bn (€38bn), has begun hiring for a commercial team based in Dublin.
It provides buy-now-pay-later services, a form of credit for shopping in-store and online where shoppers can pay for a purchase in instalments.
It has 90 million users and is employed by retailers such as H&M and The North Face.
Klarna is in the early stages of preparing to launch services in Ireland, according to a person familiar with the plans. The company declined to comment.
The firm is assembling a Dublin-based commercial team that will be responsible for dealing with merchants that use Klarna’s services and it is hiring product managers to oversee the product. It is also recruiting for compliance-related roles.
Rival buy-now-pay-later company Humm already operates in the Irish market with several major retailers. Last week Klarna launched a shopping comparison site that it has made available in Ireland.
The company is fresh off raising $639m in a round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. This followed a $1bn round in March.
It is Europe’s most valuable privately held fintech company and is ranked second in the world after Stripe.
On announcing the latest funding, chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski said demand for buy-now-pay-later services has been driven by consumers seeking “more transparent and convenient alternatives” to pay.
Klarna is a fully regulated bank, registered in its native Sweden. Its annual report for 2020 showed that it is in the red, but that revenues for the year had surpassed $1bn for the first time.
The company is pushing deeper into the US market where it has secured partnerships with major retailers including Macy’s while it faces competition in the market from Affirm, led by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.