Flexible Finance Available to Stripe AI Agents with Klarna

The rise of agentic commerce – where autonomous AI assistants find, negotiate and purchase goods on behalf of humans – is transforming the retail landscape. However, until recently, these digital agents have largely been restricted to traditional card-on-file transactions. This technical bottleneck has threatened to sideline alternative payment methods, such as Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), just as they reach peak popularity.

To bridge this gap, global digital bank Klarna has announced that its flexible payment options will soon be supported within AI agent-driven shopping experiences. This is made possible through Stripe’s Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs), a tool designed specifically to facilitate secure, automated transactions. The move ensures that US merchants already using Klarna via Stripe can offer these options to AI agents without needing any additional integration.

Solving the agentic commerce gap

Standard AI shopping agents have historically defaulted to card payments by design. This effectively freezes out providers like Klarna from automated flows, stripping consumers of their preferred payment choices. Stripe’s SPTs solve this by allowing an agent to initiate a purchase using a customer’s specific payment method without the agent ever seeing the actual payment details.

By participating in this ecosystem, Klarna ensures that its interest-free credit options can pass through the same permissioned layer as traditional debit or credit cards. 

Kevin Miller, Head of Payments at Stripe comments: “Our Shared Payment Tokens will soon support Klarna, enabling AI agents to offer buy now, pay later payment options to buyers at checkout. By bringing Klarna to agentic transactions, we are helping businesses lift conversion while giving buyers more flexibility and control in how they pay.”

Building the next decade of checkout

The collaboration focuses on future-proofing the checkout experience. By embedding BNPL into the infrastructure of agentic commerce now, the companies are setting the standard for how automated systems will handle credit and consumer debt.

Klarna views this as a necessary evolution to ensure their services remain ubiquitous. If AI agents cannot access flexible credit, the consumer loses the financial agility they have come to expect from modern e-commerce.

“The infrastructure being built for agentic commerce will define online checkout for the next decade,” says David Sykes, Chief Commercial Officer at Klarna.

“As AI agents begin purchasing on consumers’ behalf, it’s critical that flexible payment options remain available. By supporting Stripe’s Shared Payment Tokens, we’re ensuring Klarna is embedded in this next generation of checkout experiences from day one.”

For merchants, the integration is designed to be frictionless. As long as the AI shopping agent allows for flexible payments at checkout, the merchant can capture the sale using Klarna’s existing infrastructure on Stripe. 

This is expected to help businesses maintain high conversion rates even as shoppers delegate their buying decisions to software.

As these agents become more sophisticated, Klarna intends to continue expanding its reach with further integrations to ensure interest-free payments are available for everything, everywhere.