Investors in Klarna have been told to indicate their interest in selling their shares by early next month, in a further indication that the buy now pay later (BNPL) giant is about to kickstart a US listing valuing it at about $20bn.
Sky News has learnt that shareholders in one of Europe’s biggest fintechs have been handed a February 5 deadline to register to sell down their stock as part of its looming initial public offering (IPO).
Banking sources also said on Wednesday evening that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two of the lead banks on the IPO, would publish equity research in the coming days – another sign that a listing is imminent.
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Klarna, which is based in Sweden but now has 85 million customers globally, announced in November that it had filed paperwork with US regulators for a public listing of its shares.
Its valuation is expected to fall within a range of $15bn-$20bn, although a number of the company’s existing shareholders believe it could be priced substantially higher than that.
Klarna has established a UK-registered holding company as part of the journey towards a public listing, with more than a dozen banks now hired to work on it.
Last week, Klarna announced an expanded partnership with Stripe, the payments group, to offer its products to a larger population of consumers.
Klarna, which employs about 5,000 people, was founded by chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who last year also set up a new holding company in Britain.
Nevertheless, its listing in the US delivered a fresh disappointment to the London Stock Exchange, which had been pushing for it to float in the UK.
Klarna has recovered from a torrid period in which it was forced to slash its valuation to $6.7bn (£5.3bn) in a funding round in 2022.
It had once been valued at $46bn (£36.6bn) and drawn backing from investors such as SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.
Klarna declined to comment.
