Dive Brief:

• Buy now, pay later company Klarna is cutting about 500 jobs across 10 markets and outsourcing the jobs to two partners, a company spokesperson said Thursday.
• “In September, we transitioned some of our teams from Klarna to one of our partners, Foundever,” the spokesperson for the Stockholm-based firm said in an email. “We’re now planning to extend that partnership and also establish a new agreement with professional services provider Accenture.” 
• Affected employees “will continue their existing roles, with the same salaries, and their current team structure will remain unchanged,” the spokesperson said in an email. Foundever is a Miami-based company that provides outsourced customer service and technical support.

Dive Insight:

The spokesperson said that no parts of the Klarna business are being sold. The outsourcing affects employees “primarily with roles in teams involved in volume and errands-driven operations, such as customer service and case handling,” the spokesperson said Thursday.

The move impacts Klarna employees in Australia, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S., the spokesperson said. The cuts result in a global Klarna employee headcount of about 5,000, the spokesperson said.

Klarna filed a notice Oct. 23 with the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services, notifying the state it’s cutting 102 jobs due to outsourcing of functions. Those include customer service, partner operations and product, user account and fraud prevention, and anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing functions, according to the notice.

The Ohio job cuts are expected to occur on Dec. 23 or in the two weeks following that date, the notice said.

Klarna “anticipates that impacted employees will be offered employment at the vendor to which the Functions are being outsourced,” the company said in the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice. 

The BNPL provider will keep the Columbus office space because employees outside of the specified functions will continue working at that location, the company said in the WARN notice. The spokesperson said the company also has U.S. offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Portland and Las Vegas.

Klarna cut about 10% of its workforce, or 700 employees, in May 2022 when it revamped operations. More cuts followed in September of last year, when the company offered fewer than 100 employees buyouts. Klarna was able to shrink its first-half loss this year after last year’s cost-cutting effort. 

The Swedish company isn’t the only BNPL provider that’s had to make cuts amid a heightened focus on profitability and more challenging macroeconomic conditions. San Francisco-based Affirm cut about 500 workers in February, Afterpay-owned Block said last month it shed about 1% of its workforce and Sydney-based Zip restructured its operations, ending fiscal 2023 with a 31% lower headcount than the previous year-end.