Swedish buy now, pay later platform Klarna is a major global fintech company. And there is a growing list of reasons why it wants to be seen as more than what it actually is. A buy now, pay later platform. More evidence of this shift came yesterday with the rollout of the open banking solution Klarna Kosma as a separate business unit within the company.

Kosma has had open banking capabilities for some time. But as a solution nested within the company, not as a stand-alone unit.

In fact, Klarna got into open banking back in 2014 when it acquired theGerman bank-to-bank payment service SOFORT. From there, its open banking capabilities became a resource for in-house services. And gradually it became a foundational solution to help other fintech companies roll out new products.

Rolling out an open banking platform may have just been a natural progression for Klarna. But it seems to come at a good time for a company known primarily as a BNPL player.

Klarna remains a privately held company. Yet it’s no secret that the company plans to go public at some point. And if you look at the company’s publicly traded peers, the picture is pretty ugly. Take Affirm. Please! The BNPL stock closed out the year 2021 at 100.56. Yesterday, it closed at 46.28.

By rolling out open banking as a product and more broadly by repositioning itself away from BNPL, perhaps Klarna hopes to rid itself of some of the current stench surrounding BNPL.

Open banking brings with it a new competitive set that includes companies like Plaid and TrueLayer. Visa almost acquired Plaid. Later on, it raised $425 million at a much higher valuation than Visa’s original offer.

So What Exactly Does Klarna Kosma Do?

Kosma (and other open banking APIs) essentially helps financial institutions, fintechs, and merchants establish the banking connections they need to launch fintech applications. And Kosmo has racked up 15,000 of these banking relationships, across 24 countries.

“With Kosma we are opening up the power of our proprietary Open Banking platform and technology to banks, merchants, and fintechs who share our dream of a world where consumers own their data and banks compete for customers by delivering value, not by locking in data,” says Klarna CTO Yaron Shaer.

Klarna shared a few examples of companies that already use Kosmo to build fintech solutions.

One such company is Amsterdam-based FINOM, which offers an all-in-one financial services platform for small businesses. FINOM  integrates with Klarna to create digital invoices, which include a ‘Pay Now’ button. This allows the payment directly from the invoice. And this of course helps FINOM’s small business clients collect their money faster.

So we don’t want to overstate the pivot we see in the Kosmo announcement. Klarna is still a BNPL company. And it shows no signs of getting out of that space, which remains popular despite mounting criticism that it is not the beacon of financial responsibility that it presents itself as.

But it strikes us that Klarna wants to distance itself from the field. And this requires being known as more than a BNPL company. Kind of in the same way that Radiohead wants to be known as more than the band that made “Creep.” And by creating this distance, Klarna hopes perhaps that it will avoid Affirm’s fate.