Klarna - The Not Gonna Be a Super App Company

Whenever I see the term "super app" used in North America, it's almost always "look out below" because grift and hallucinations follow.

First, the term is meaningless at this point. You want a real super app? It's ChatGPT. The last person to announce they were building a super-app? Elon Musk's X. Hold my beer, I'm still waiting on a reason to give a social media network my bank account details.

There you go. In a recent PYMNTS article, the Klarna CEO announced the following:

* We are going to become yet another financial services company with a phone plan.

* We're trying to be a super app.

* We want to be a financial advisor in your pocket.

* Klarna is going to be adding stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Is this what defines a super app? Wouldn't that make Cash App already a super app? Only 57 million users. I mean, noteworthy, but not transformational.

So what is really going on here?

Ultimately I think they are trying to get the attention of Paypal. Essentially, there is a battle brewing where Paypal is possibly not able to modernize quickly enough to take on the threats of newer financial services upstarts.

It's entirely possible that the whole t is a ploy to get acquired by Paypal, which has historically been an acquisitive company and has a much higher overall valuation.

If this is Klarna's ploy, it still has not only brand work to do, it also has significant revenue diversification problem. When they company filed its F-1, it revealed BNPL is 80% of its revenue, and that number is accelerating y/y, not shrinking.

Which means the company seems to be increasingly grasping at straws to get off its single BNPL horse.