Klarna Kosma offers free three-month open banking fintech ‘sandbox’

Buy now, pay later giant Klarna is opening up its open banking technology (Klarna Kosma) for select fintech startups and larger companies to use free of charge for three months.

The offer requires companies to apply and detail their use case along with expected users, it also comes with a limit of 300 transactions or active users per month.

Klarna says it is specifically targeting fintech, eCommerce and data analytics firms, and hopes the free offering will help accelerate the development of open banking use cases.

“The initiative we are launching today aims to add rocket fuel to the innovation process,” said Wilko Klaassen, VP of open banking at Klarna.

“Open Banking was introduced to wrest control of consumer data away from the big banks and make it securely available to drive innovation. With that data accessible through simple APIs, with consumers’ permissions, a whole new vista of potential use cases has opened up.”

While Klarna Kosma has been growing, winning new customers like Krea and Airbank, its parent company has suffered a challenging 2022.

It continued to report growing losses while the firm’s valuation has dropped 85 per cent to $6.7bn from its 2021 peak of $45.6bn, amid a wider drop in valuations in the fintech space.

The fintech was also forced to lay off 10 per cent of its workforce earlier this year.