Swedish retail payments company Klarna has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider. It is leveraging AWS’s scalability and security, as well as its portfolio of cloud services, so it can innovate at a faster pace while maintaining regulatory compliance and protecting customer data.

Klarna is leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure to increase redundancy and fault tolerance as it continues to scale its business, growing from a start-up into a global company that supports 60 million customers across 170,000 merchants, in 17 countries.

Leveraging AWS, Klarna has been able to innovate more quickly. For example, the company recently launched a direct-to-consumer platform that lets consumers purchase items from any merchant and pay later in four equal instalments with zero interest and fees.

As a fully licensed bank, Klarna works closely with AWS’s compliance and security assurance teams to help it maintain the necessary trusted infrastructure to high security standards and has built its core banking platform on AWS from the ground up. To complement this, Klarna has developed a microservices architecture on AWS that will optimise costs by using the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Klarna plans to follow up the launches of its cloud-based open banking platform and customer authentication platform with additional on-demand products using AWS.

Open banking provides online merchants and ecommerce providers with the ability to leverage Klarna’s secure and compliant banking infrastructure to develop their own payment facilities. It also opens up the ability for these online providers to connect with Klarna’s network of over 4300 financial institutions around the world to serve their customers.

The customer authentication platform allows multinational businesses to provide a simple, secure and personalised customer authentication experience in any market through a one-time integration. Klarna is also planning to use AWS’s machine-learning (ML) services, such as Amazon SageMaker, to help merchants train and build ML models to identify and manage risk, predicting credit scores in real time, forecasting long-term economic trends, and helping end users manage payments and other transactions.

“Together with AWS we share a relentless focus on providing choices to consumers, so they no longer have to settle for the status quo,” said Koen Koppen, CTO of Klarna. “Our collaboration with AWS has helped us to rapidly innovate and create new services and applications that customers want, in a secure and seamless way. We look forward to continuing to leverage AWS’s deep portfolio of cloud services to develop new, flexible payment services that will help consumers maintain full control of their finances and help merchants create frictionless payments.”

Founded in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2005, Klarna gives consumers the option to pay now, pay later or over time, offering a frictionless and smooth checkout experience. Klarna now works with 170,000 merchants, including Adidas, Sephora, Asos, Nike, Sonos, Ikea, H&M and JD Sports, to offer payment systems to users across Europe and North America. It has 2500 employees and is active in 17 countries.

“It’s exciting to see our customers using cloud technology to change the world, and this is exactly what Klarna is doing,” said Andy Isherwood, managing director of AWS in Emea. “We have worked with Klarna for over a decade and it has been inspiring to see them grow from a Swedish start-up to a global financial services powerhouse, using the secure, proven infrastructure of AWS. We look forward to continuing to work alongside them as they leverage the breadth and depth of AWS services to develop technologies never before seen in the financial services space and as they delight customers around the world.”

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