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.
Senior Product Designer · Sign-up lead
2020 – 2022
Mobile (iOS · Android) + Web
0 → 1 sign-up · Europe
Product, Engineering, Compliance, Brand, Research
Klarna at the time
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.
The Klarna surface area Banking was about to plug into.
The brief
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.
The brief — excited, not just signed up.
Where I focused
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.
Sign-up — the surface where intent becomes a real account.
Persona — Curious Cupi
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.
Principles
Take the user's existing relationship with Klarna into account — a returning Klarna customer should not be onboarded as if they were a stranger.
Make users excited — small moments of anticipation, especially around the card.
Hold the user's hand — give context, guidance, and a real sense of security at every step.
Can be completed without leaving the couch — fully digital, no paperwork, no in-person verification.
Metrics we tracked
Quantitative — total signed-up users and sign-up funnel conversion rate.
Qualitative — direct user feedback and customer-support logs.
Research — the N26 sign-up study
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:
Users are okay providing the basic personal information needed to open a bank account.
People start to get uncomfortable when they're asked for more personal information or documents without understanding why.
A great sign-up reads as fast, paperless, secure, online, free.
Market scan — every neobank sign-up we could get our hands on.
What N26 taught us before we drew a single Klarna screen.
Mapping the emotional curve across the sign-up.
Challenge 1 — A long form for serious data
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.
The first prototype — long, dense, easy to lose users in.
Sketching the whole sign-up before pixels.
Two navigation concepts, one pick
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.
Concept №1 — horizontal progress bar. 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.
Concept №2 — vertical progress bar. Shipped.
Three patterns that made it work
Progressive disclosure — split the full sign-up into named steps so each one feels small and rewarding to finish.
Investment loops — completing the first steps raises the probability of finishing the rest, because users protect what they've already invested.
Visual anchors — the progress line fills as users move, softly directing attention to the next step.
The sign-up home — three patterns working together.
The shipped sign-up, step by step.
Challenge 2 — Card selection mid-flow
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.
Card selection concept №1.
Concept №2 — card pick tucked between PIN and T&C. Shipped.
Challenge 3 — Energy after sign-up
Users invest real time and emotional effort in opening a bank account. The moment they finish, they're scanning for something to do.
A success screen that earns the moment
Peak-end rule and emotional connection — a card animation celebrates the moment, taking focus away from the work the form took.
Communicating status — the same animation tells the user the sign-up succeeded and the card is on its way, while surfacing the next possible steps.
The success screen — peak-end moment plus a clear next step.
User testing — what held up
No one had real issues completing onboarding.
Users expected to give information when opening a bank account.
Several screens — Tax info, Set PIN, Address, Additional info — needed extra disclaimers.
Users wanted more information up-front to decide to open the account in the first place.
What testing surfaced — and where to add disclaimers.
UX writing & product marketing
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.
Marketing card → onboarding — one continuous voice.
Monitoring after launch
We watched both signal types in parallel.
Quantitative — daily checks on the onboarding funnel, step-by-step conversion at every drop-off point.
Qualitative — a 68-participant survey asking "You start banking with Klarna. What do you most look forward to?". The word cloud came back with simple, fast, intuitive, einfach, schnell, übersichtlich, all-in-one, real-time overview.
New-user survey described the flow as simple · fast · intuitive.
Card selection mid-flow became a small but durable activation pattern.
Learnings
Identity check is the most critical step of the entire flow — design budget concentrates here.
Tailoring onboarding to a user's existing Klarna history is a real advantage, and we should keep using it.
Unifying onboarding across Klarna's financial products is a big deal — the journey is broader than any single product.
Looking back
I'd zoom out earlier — look at the entire Klarna service experience and understand the role banking plays in the wider Klarna offer before designing inside one product.
I'd align tighter with marketing so the messaging outside the product is in lock-step with what users see the moment they land in the flow.
