Rounding out its clutch of the top credit companies in the world, Klarna, Europe’s largest online buy now, pay later service provider, has added American Express as a partner.
Inking the deal with AmEx completes the set of credit companies that are working with the service. The Stockholm-based company had already signed up Visa and MasterCard as partners.
Its move to bring AmEx into the fold comes as Klarna begins the long march to gain market share in the U.S. Last month the company inked a deal with Overstock, which marks its first agreement with a North American e-commerce site.
Klarna’s push to simplify buying on websites, and especially in the mobile shopping experience, increases conversion rates for retailers by orders of magnitude, the company claims.
A single click-to-buy button means that transactions can happen without a shopper needing to enter any credit card information at the point of sale. Klarna handles the transaction and then gives users an option to either pay later (through its service) or use any existing credit card.
For companies like American Express, the partnership with Klarna increases visibility in Northern European countries that don’t typically use credit cards for purchases. Europeans use credit cards for about 41 percent of their non-cash transactions, whereas in the U.S. that number is around 65 percent, according to data from CapGemini.
“The main benefit to us is that we get access to the U.S. market through Amex,” says a spokesman for Klarna.