What’s one surprising thing that business leaders and practitioners get wrong about revenue growth?

A lot of times, business leaders can focus too much on short term revenue gains at the expense of long term, sustainable growth. But what we've seen a lot is that this leads to customer churn, margin erosion, and operational inefficiencies.

When we think about what’s worked well for us at Klarna in terms of revenue growth, it's about prioritizing customer lifetime value over immediate gains. So instead of chasing short-term revenue spikes, we’re really investing in things like personalized engagement or frictionless user experiences, or other initiatives that really build loyalty.

What are some common misconceptions about payment costs?

Obviously this is a topic I spend a lot of time on! I think a major misconception is that payment costs are just fixed, rather than a strategic lever. So a lot of times business leaders are really only focusing on processing fees. They think the cheapest payment method is the best, but that doesn’t really make sense for anything in life, right? Lower fees don’t mean better performance. Often it can mean the opposite, and can result in lost sales, slow settlement, and a poor customer experience.

So what I try to do in my conversations is help businesses shift their mindset to be about optimizing revenue, and that it actually goes beyond payments. It's about getting that higher AOV, it’s about getting more purchase frequency, lower cart abandonment. A payment method can lead to higher net revenue even if it has a higher per transaction fee.

Where do you see the next major innovation in payments optimization?

At Klarna, we’re actively working to reduce friction and to improve security across all payment types. And we think that the next big innovations are going to involve extending the kinds of protections and optimizations available for card purchases to other payment methods. So for example, tokenization is going to play a key role in simplifying repeat transactions beyond just cards. We’re already seeing tokenization expanding to alternative payment methods: bank based payments, digital wallets, open banking.

And in terms of other innovations, things like crypto: they're going to need new authentication and security frameworks beyond just the 3DS that we've seen, or network token models. Because 3DS was designed for card rails, emerging digital payment methods will require a decentralization of authentication models that aligns with the real-time programmable nature of these assets. So there are a lot of changes to come.

How do you expect rapid improvements in AI to impact payment optimization?

This is our favorite topic at Klarna! AI-driven fraud detection is definitely going to transform authentication from a reactive, rule-based model to a real-time adaptive model. So rather than just relying solely on a rigid setup or authentication model like 3DS, AI is going to continuously analyze thousands, if not millions, of data points per transaction. So things like behavior patterns, device intelligence, past payment history to assess risk dynamically. This shift will mean fewer 3DS challenges, higher approval rates, lower fraud losses.

As AI continues to evolve, its impact on payments—and the world, really!—will extend beyond just risk mitigation to things like enhancing personalization, optimizing the transaction flow, even potentially creating new financial products or personalized products. So AI’s going to stop fraudsters, but ultimately be really good for customers as well.

What kind of new financial products might AI enable?

The opportunities are endless. And I would say AI is like the birth of the Internet, right? You can imagine a world where you can have a new mortgage plan in 30 seconds. That’s because machine learning models are enhancing underwriting at a phenomenal pace and enabling more precise credit risk assessments in real time. There's just so many things that could be possible that we don't even know what they are yet.

More insights from our Payments Unscripted series

For more insights from leaders at companies like Anthropic, Visa, and Mindbody, read our guide, Revenue growth reimagined: Practical lessons from 10 industry leaders.

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