Klarna’s CEO embraces AI and the ‘Toyota Way’
Good morning.
Growing up in Sweden as the son of Polish immigrants who struggled to find work, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski had a fraught relationship with money. “That was always the topic at hand,” he says. “We don’t have money for this, and we don’t have money for that.”
That helped inspire him to cofound a ‘buy now, pay later’ fintech company in Stockholm in 2005. It’s now a global payments network and shopping assistant that reaches more than 550,000 merchants and 150 million consumers. Klarna has also been an early mover in using AI to trim everything from staff numbers to marketing costs.
In this week’s episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, Michal Lev-Ram and I spoke with Siemiatkowski about his evolving business model, leadership philosophy, and close relationship with Sam Altman and others at ChatGPT parent OpenAI.
What I found especially interesting was how he’s brought the lean manufacturing techniques of the “Toyota Way” to the world of fintech. That includes creating autonomous teams that are encouraged to “participate in the development improvement process on a daily basis.” He sees a lot of similarities with automakers when it comes to dealing with concerns around security and quality.
Now, he dreams of helping create a world of real-time personalized financial services. “You wake up in the morning and your digital financial system says, ‘Hey, I’ve analyzed your mortgage and I realize you’re overpaying by ten bucks a month. I can make the switch on your behalf. The only thing you need to do in order to get a better mortgage rate is say yes.’”
It's the kind of seamless experience that’s made his BNPL payments model so beguiling, too. But one benefit of friction is that it can force a person to pause before making impulsive financial decisions, big or small.
He aspires to make the company a payment network, just like Visa, MasterCard, and Amex. “We see a huge opportunity to create a better experience.” Listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to find out how.
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Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com