Klarna folded its 18-month-old open banking brand Kosma back under the main brand

Klarna is a Swedish buy-now-pay-later and payments company with more than 150 million customers.

Klarna launched Klarna Kosma as a brand and business unit in April 2022, calling it a 'major strategic move' amid heightened interest in open banking, publicly taking on Visa-owned Tink, Plaid and TrueLayer.

The unit's core was account aggregation — clients plugging into Klarna's API for account statements and data from 15,000 banks — plus account-to-account payments. 2022 brought Klarna significant job cuts and an 85% valuation cut to $6.7bn; by May 2023 it had halved Q1 losses to $120M and said it was on track for monthly profitability in the second half of the year.

In July 2023, less than 18 months in, Klarna scrapped the Kosma brand. The company framed it as a marketing decision driven by growth: no job cuts, VP Wilko Klassen still leading, the unit folding under the Klarna corporate brand, with Kosma remaining the product brand for the API business.

The separate brand existed to give open banking its own identity in a crowded field; folding it back concedes that Klarna's name carried more weight with clients than Kosma's.

Klarna insists the business itself is performing and no jobs were cut — this is an unwind of branding, not of the underlying open banking bet.

The brand lasted exactly as long as the expansion era: born in April 2022's open-banking boom, retired within a year of the valuation reset that ended standalone brand-building.

A 'major strategic move' can be undone quietly as a 'marketing move'. A separate B2B brand buys focus but costs the parent's pull — fold it back once the brand adds overhead instead of trust.

As of 2023-07-31 the open banking platform operates inside Klarna's corporate brand, led by VP Wilko Klassen, with 'Klarna Kosma' retained as the product brand for the API business. Klarna says there were no job cuts and points to 'impressive growth' since April 2022; company-wide, Q1 losses had halved to $120M and monthly profitability was targeted for H2 2023.