Klarna Working to Make it Easier for Merchants to Accept Bitcoin

August 10, 2015 By: Asif Imtiaz

Klarna’s CEO of North American operations, Brian Billingsley, recently expressed his company’s intention to make it easier for smaller online merchants to compete in the global marketplace by using Bitcoin.

According to Billingsley, Klarna is looking into the developments in the spread of crypto-currencies and closely working with Swedish financial regulators in order to find a way to allow its army of merchants to start “using” Bitcoin to receive payments from their respective customers. However, he went out of his way to confirm that Klarna is not considering adding Bitcoin as a payment method yet.

“We’ve done internal pilots with Bitcoin. We love the concept of a consumer paying with Bitcoin, [however] we haven’t seen a consumer experience to date that really makes it super frictionless,” he mentioned in a recent Interview with CoinDesk.

Based in Sweden, Klarna offers payment services to online storefronts in a way that customers can purchase products with top-of-mind information including email, zip code and billing address. Returning customers can even enjoy their online shopping experience with a single tap, if they are using a touch screen!

Klarna employs around 1,200 employees in 18 geographic markets around the world and have around 50,000 partner merchants who use its services to accept online payments.

The problem with adding Bitcoin to Klarna’s payment options would be that non-tech savvy consumers usually do not want to go into the hassle of opening a Bitcoin account then using it. Instead, when they see alternative options like credit cards, they tend to opt for payment with cards. “Unless there’s a very specific merchant that only accepts Bitcoin, there isn’t that [any] reason for the average consumer to set up and buy Bitcoin,” Billingsley added.

Although it is not clear how Klarna would utilize Bitcoins to make it easier for merchants to reach global market, Billingsley gave few clues about how his company is looking to tackle the problem. Billingsley sounded enthusiastic when he said that “the cross-border payments companies should be trying to figure out how to use blockchain technology.”