Klarna, the Swedish payments and buy-now-pay-later company listed in New York as KLAR, announced on 6 July 2026 that it has submitted applications to the Utah Department of Financial Institutions and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to establish Klarna Bank USA, a proposed Utah-chartered industrial bank that would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Klarna Inc. The company disclosed the move in a statement and a Form 6-K filed with the SEC.

The important qualifier comes first: this is an application, not an approval. Industrial bank charters go through a review that can run well over a year and can be denied or granted with conditions. Until any charter is granted, Klarna continues to serve US customers as it does now — through partner banks.

What Klarna is actually trying to change

Klarna already operates as a licensed bank in Europe, where it has held a banking licence since 2017. In the United States, it has served customers since 2019 without a charter of its own, relying on partner banks to provide the regulated banking functions behind its products. A US charter would change that structural dependence. It would let Klarna hold customer deposits directly, fund its own lending from those deposits rather than from wholesale funding, run more of the payments and account infrastructure itself, and potentially lower the funding costs associated with relying on sponsor-bank arrangements and wholesale financing.

That is the distinction worth drawing out. Today Klarna operates alongside banks; if the charter is granted, it would own and operate one through a regulated subsidiary, while Klarna's parent company itself would remain a commercial entity outside bank-holding-company supervision — which is the entire point of the structure. An independent analyst, Ben Danner of Javelin Strategy & Research, framed the shift as significant precisely because a directly held deposit base is stickier than an occasional BNPL relationship — building deposit customers turns Klarna from a company that behaves like a bank into a direct competitor to the banks it currently partners with.

By its own account, Klarna has extended more than $91.3 billion in credit to US consumers since 2019 and says it has saved them over $5.1 billion in interest compared with revolving credit-card debt, with around 30 million Americans using it each year. Those are Klarna's figures, offered in support of the application, and should be read as the company's framing rather than independently audited totals.

Why the Utah industrial bank route — and why it is contested

The specific vehicle matters. An industrial loan company, or industrial bank, is a state-chartered, FDIC-insured depository that can take insured deposits and make loans, but whose commercial parent is exempt from the Bank Holding Company Act and therefore from Federal Reserve holding-company supervision. Utah is the primary home for these charters. The structure has long appealed to specialty-finance firms and fintechs because it allows a company to fund lending with insured deposits while keeping a commercial parent outside the full bank-holding-company regime. At the bank level, the entity would still be subject to capital, consumer-protection and anti-money-laundering requirements alongside the other obligations attached to FDIC-insured institutions.

It is also the route that Block, formerly Square, and Nelnet used to secure Utah charters in 2020, and Klarna now joins a broader group of firms — including fintechs such as Affirm and PayPal, and, more recently, automakers and other commercial groups — that have concluded owning the bank is worth the added supervision. But the model is politically contested, and that is the part most likely to shape the outcome. In January 2026, Senators John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, and Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced a bill to close what they called the shadow banking loophole, arguing the ILC charter lets a commercial parent gain a bank's privileges while bypassing Federal Reserve holding-company oversight; the bill sits with the Senate Banking Committee. The Independent Community Bankers of America said in May that cutting the Fed out of ILC supervision leaves a gap in safety-and-soundness oversight. Pulling the other way, Trump-appointed regulators have signalled greater openness: the FDIC's leadership has publicly presented the ILC charter as one route to encourage new bank formation, and the agency has approved industrial banks for several automakers and for the investment firm Edward Jones in recent months. That combination — active opposition in Congress, a more receptive FDIC — is why the review is adversarial and its outcome genuinely uncertain.

Key Takeaways

  • Klarna filed on 6 July 2026 for a Utah-chartered industrial bank, Klarna Bank USA, submitting applications to the Utah DFI and the FDIC.

  • It is an application, not an approval; industrial-bank reviews can take well over a year and may be denied or conditioned. Klarna keeps using partner banks meanwhile.

  • A charter would let Klarna hold deposits, fund its own loans, and reduce its reliance on sponsor banks and potentially its funding costs.

  • The industrial-bank route keeps Klarna's commercial parent outside Federal Reserve holding-company supervision — the same route Block and Nelnet used in 2020.

  • The ILC model is contested: community-bank groups and some lawmakers oppose commerce-linked firms owning deposit-takers, which makes the review adversarial.