Demand for banking talent is high as Klarna looks for CFO

• Key insights: Klarna's stock plunged after it lowered its full-year outlook and said Chief Financial Officer Niclas Neglén and Chief Marketing Officer David Sandström will depart the aspiring neobank in early 2027. 
• What's at stake: The U.S. is Klarna's largest market by revenue and an important pillar of its growth strategy as it looks to offer more banking services to its customers.  
• Forward look: Klarna plans to search for a U.S.-based CFO amid elevated demand for banking talent. 

Klarna is looking for a new U.S.-based finance chief at a time when demand for banking talent is at a premium. 

The Swedish lender's long-time Chief Financial Officer Niclas Neglén will depart the company in 2027 after a six-year tenure that included Klarna's initial public offering. Chief Marketing Officer David Sandström will also depart the company at the beginning of next year after nine years. Klarna will begin the search for a U.S.-based CFO.

Neglén's departure opens a top vacancy at a fast-growing fintech that has set its sights on the U.S. market and is challenging the traditional retail banking model. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has said that he wants to evolve the company beyond its buy now/pay later roots to a full-fledged neobank with a suite of banking services, including card payments, lending and rewards. Fintechs have also been nabbing up bank talent as they look to secure banking charters of their own. But pressures on Klarna's stock as a result of lowered guidance and changes to its accounting methodology for certain loans reflect the difficulty that fintechs can face when they try to expand their product offering to wider banking services and reaffirms fintechs' demand for executives with banking experience.

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The U.S. market, in addition to being Klarna's largest by revenue, is also one of its fastest growing. "Having a stronger presence in [the U.S.] is important to us," Siemiatkowski said. "It's also helpful to be close to the investor relations community and the stock market." 

The C-suite departures came as Klarna reported its second quarter earnings, which beat analysts estimates. Revenue hit $1.04 billion in the second quarter, a 27% year-over-year increase and ahead of expected $988 million. Gross merchandise value jumped 18% to $36.6 billion and transaction margin dollars — which Klarna now says will be its north-star KPI instead of GMV — rose 42% to $446 million. Active customers notched up 8% to 120 million and active merchants increased 54% to 1.2 million. 

But Klarna's earnings beat was overshadowed by the management churn and a pullback in forward-looking guidance. Klarna now expects gross merchandise volume to $149 billion to $151 billion, down from more than $155 billion, largely due to currency conversions and a softening in Germany, its largest market by volume. 

Revenue is now expected to hit $4.08 billion to $4.16 billion, driven by its volume adjustments and changes to the way it accounts for revenue from originations of its long-term lending product, Fair Financing, in the U.S. and Germany. Klarna will now measure those originations at fair value, meaning that income will be booked as an upfront gain rather than over the life of the loan. 

Transaction margin outlook was raised to $1.62 billion to $1.65 billion, or 1.09% of GMV, an increase from 1.04% that Klarna guided in May. 

Shares of Klarna tumbled down 22.3%, or $4.36, to $15.17 as of 2:45 p.m. in New York today, a sign of investor rebuke, according to Zack Investment Research stock strategist Jeremy Mullin. Klarna's stock value tumbled nearly 30% in February after investors balked at up-front loan loss provision expenses that were tied to the expansion of its Fair Financing loan portfolio. 

"Klarna is telling the market it would rather be smaller and more profitable than chase GMV, and the guide reiterates that idea," Mullin told American Banker in an email. "But pairing that pivot with a CFO news isn't sitting well. The sell-off signals that traders won't be taking the margin story on faith, especially with U.S. transaction margin still far behind mature markets." 

The shift to fair value accounting mid-year is also likely to raise some questions, according to KBW analyst Sanjay Sakhrani. 

Klarna's Neglén said the company is shifting to fair financing accounting as it looks to sell more of its loans on the secondary market and limit the number of loans it keeps on its balance sheet. 

"We are very focused particularly on the fair financing forward flows," Neglén said. We've ramped them up to a certain level now, [and] we've come to the point where substantially all of our loans will be eligible to be sold in the second half of this year, and that's where we're making that fair value change."