Klarna, the highest-valued private fintech in Europe, is on a mission to make shopping simple, safe and smooth, for both consumers and retailers, through its suite of payment products and services. From its inception in 2005, Klarna has not compromised on providing a seamless consumer experience — even when it comes to consumers in collection.
With a high standard for customer experience and in an effort to integrate collections seamlessly with their product, Klarna initially opted to keep collections in-house. For five years the company had great results with in-house collections, but as Klarna expanded to new markets and added new products, scaling in-house collections while maintaining a best-in-class customer experience strained the company’s resources and became less feasible.
This led Klarna to begin considering a third-party collection partner. By this time, the collections industry had evolved. New players like TrueAccord were building digital-first collection solutions that vastly improved the customer experience via personalized outreach, flexible payment plans, and a self-optimizing, machine learning-driven performance engine.
It’s easy to underestimate the expertise involved in building an effective, compliant digital debt collection engine, and partnering with the right collection solutions provider would free up valuable internal resources. Klarna’s priority was to focus on their core business and engage an expert partner who would be able to build a world-class collection operation for them — one that would only enhance their consumer experience while not sacrificing brand image.
“We look at collections partners the same way we look at hiring team members: we only want to work with the absolute best. We wanted to partner with a company that truly takes care of consumers,” said Jan Hansson, VP Debt Collection, Klarna.
Other key considerations to moving away from in-house collection included, data science expertise, engineering talent, compliance resourcing and industry knowledge. After doing their due diligence, Klarna decided to partner with TrueAccord as a collection solution provider. TrueAccord stood out from competitors in two important ways: customer centricity and digital and multichannel capabilities.
By partnering with TrueAccord, Klarna was able to increase liquidation rates and achieve better holistic results, with retention rate a key indicator. Moving to a partnership with TrueAccord from in-house collection also allowed Klarna to free up valuable internal resources and refocus on their key business functions. Klarna is now expanding their engagement with TrueAccord to include more accounts and looks forward to growing the partnership even more in the future.
“We are so proud to work with TrueAccord,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO, Klarna. “Putting technology to use for the people instead of against the people is the next generation of tech.
To learn more about TrueAccord’s work with Klarna, read the full case study or check out our recent webinar, “Digital Debt Collections 101 with Klarna”.