Klarna · Banking
The story of designing Klarna's consumer banking sign-up — from first prototype to a launched flow that made young Europeans excited to bank with Klarna.
The story of designing Klarna's consumer banking sign-up — from first prototype to a launched flow that made young Europeans excited to bank with Klarna.
By 2020, Klarna was the world's largest fintech most people had never used to actually bank — over 90 million consumers, more than 250,000 merchants, and around two million transactions on an average day, served from 17 core markets across three continents. The company had brand permission, a direct relationship with shoppers, and an obvious next move: turn checkout users into banking customers.
Create an excellent first impression for Klarna's Consumer Banking products and offer a sign-up experience that makes young Europeans excited about banking with Klarna.
Week one looked like this. Before opening Figma we mapped the territory on a whiteboard: the two sign-up flavours we'd ship (dedicated sign-up + dynamic sign-up), the parallel tracks of generative research, benchmarking, and concept exploration, the product principles we'd hold the team to — fast & simple, less paperwork, explain extra data requested, good KYC/SCA — and the three-step backbone of any account opening: Basic info → Verification → Activation.
The Klarna Banking customer journey runs from first touch through explore, getting familiar, decide, commit, and finally use. Onboarding and activation span the back half of that journey — and within onboarding, sign-up is the surface where intent becomes a real bank account. That's the problem I owned end-to-end.
A digital nomad with simple banking needs, but curious about the features and apps that empower her financial life. Cupi was the lens for every decision: she'd give us her time and trust, but only if we earned both step by step.
Before designing, we ran usability testing on a competitor sign-up — N26 — to anchor the team in what good felt like. Three takeaways carried into our work:
Opening a bank account requires a lot of regulated information by law. Early prototypes felt long and complicated, and confidence dropped at the exact step where users had been asked to invest the most.
Horizontal progress bar — could reuse Klarna's existing component, but it couldn't carry detail about what was coming next, made the flow feel even longer, and was harder to navigate. Rejected.
Vertical progress bar — every step visible, easier to navigate forward and backward, scalable as the flow grew. Required building a new component, but the trade-off was clearly worth it.
We hadn't planned for users to pick a card design during sign-up — the physical cards looked the same across our banking and credit products. But once we tested, it was clear card selection had to live inside the flow, not after it. Tucking the choice in mid-journey gave users an early visual win without disrupting the form rhythm.
Users invest real time and emotional effort in opening a bank account. The moment they finish, they're scanning for something to do.
Sign-up is mostly text — labels, microcopy, disclaimers, success states. I worked closely with brand and product-marketing teams so the sign-up's voice matched the marketing pages users arrived from, and so regulated copy didn't feel like a hand-off to a different product.
We watched both signal types in parallel.
What got shipped, end-to-end: a Banking. But Smoooth. entry point that doubled as the marketing surface, a verification flow that showed every step of KYC at a glance with edit affordances on each block, and an account-created moment that confirmed the card was on its way alongside the next likely step. Three screens, one continuous voice from marketing to onboarding to success.
0 → 1 launch of Klarna's consumer banking sign-up across Europe.
Klarna card users converted 4.5× better through sign-up than non-card users.
Post-launch survey: new users described the flow as simple · fast · intuitive.
Card-selection mid-flow became a durable activation pattern reused across products.
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