https://archive.md/20250522090137/https://www.ft.com/content/6c4bf393-c80b-42b7-993a-35270143f688
It seems that Klarna are losing more money than usual due to customers losing money.
In Sweden, Klarna makes more money when a customer loses money. Let's recall this quote by Niklas Adalberth, Klarna founder, at an investment conference in 2014:
'The best customer is the one that doesn't pay at once, but gets a reminder and then a debt collection claim.'
Now, Klarna lose money because of their customers not being able to pay their debt. This is as things should be. Klarna should not be able, to paraphrase John Lydon, to holiday in someone else's misery.
A few months back, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the CEO of Klarna, said they'd fire loads of people and replace them with AI. This backfired in horrible ways; Klarna were forced to realise they'd tried to replace humans with a probability machine that's trained using stolen materials; that didn't work out well. So now, in the latest big Klarna meeting, the CEO turned up...as an AI avatar. This says a lot about Klarna.
#klarna #BNPL #capitalism #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #stupidity #cynicism #grift