Sweden's Klarna surpasses $1 billion in fourth-quarter revenue as US growth speeds up

STOCKHOLM, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Swedish "buy now, pay later" services provider and online bank Klarna reported a 38% year-on-year jump in ‌fourth-quarter sales on Thursday, just beating expectations, as it added ‌more banking customers and grew in the United States.

Quarterly revenue at the fintech group, ​which went public in New York in September, crossed the billion-dollar mark for the first time, reaching $1.08 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG had on average forecast sales of $1.07 billion.

Klarna said users of its banking services ‌doubled to 15.8 million.

"It's ⁠showing that we can really do what we set out to do, which was (to) first create a global ⁠payments network, and then create a true banking relationship," CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Reuters.

Klarna has said early adoption of AI across operations has helped ​it shrink ​its workforce despite rapid expansion, ​and it has used part ‌of the savings to raise wages. Siemiatkowski said on Thursday the average employee compensation had risen 60% since 2022.

"More and more of the jobs at Klarna that will exist even in an AI-powered world will be about human relationships, whether it's a relationship with our merchants ‌or relationship with our consumers," Siemiatkowski ​said, adding that a growing share of ​Klarna's staff will be supporting ​customers.

Klarna's gross merchandise volume (GMV), a commonly used e-commerce ‌metric for measuring sales, rose 32% ​to $38.7 billion in ​the quarter. In the U.S., its largest market, GMV grew 43% while revenue rose 58%.

Klarna is due to publish its full ​fourth-quarter earnings report on ‌February 26. In the third quarter, it made a net ​loss of $95 million.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm; Editing ​by Anna Ringstrom and Joe Bavier)