After a recent data breach, Swedish fintech Klarna is under investigation by Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority, the government agency responsible for financial regulation. The investigation, announced Monday, involves a May 27 breach in which customers of the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) company — the highest-valued private fintech in Europe — were able to access the accounts of other Klarna users.
“The bug led to random user data being exposed to the wrong user when accessing our user interfaces,” founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in a written statement. He blamed human error for the data breach, “not an external breach of our systems,” and pointed to the data leaked as being “non-sensitive.” Klarna did not respond to a request for comment.

Klarna is also the subject of a previous investigation that was initiated in March to determine if the BNPL fintech has adequate functions and processes in place to identify data privacy and security risks, a spokesperson for the Financial Supervisory Authority told Bank Automation News. “That investigation was initiated as a part of our risk-based supervision approach, where we have decided to investigate how a number of banks, of which Klarna is one, handle the growing risk and concerns of information and cyberattacks,” they noted.
The two separate investigations into Klarna will be rolled into one, since the government agency is looking into similar issues and functions at the fintech. “It is too early to speculate what the outcome will be, but as with all banks, we have a wide range of possible actions to take, all from dismissing the case if we find that the breaches are minor to issuing fines and sanctions if the breaches are found to be serious,” the spokesperson said.
Klarna announced June 10 a new equity funding round of $639 million, giving the company a post-money valuation of $45.6 billion and making it the highest-valued private fintech in Europe. The round was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 with additional participation from existing investors Adit Ventures, Honeycomb Asset Management and WestCap Group.





