First time I tried Klarna, their 'payment' workflow was actually a 'grant full access to all bank accounts' workflow in disguise. I was thinking this amount of misleading must be illegal. Further interactions with them always felt sleazy.
Maybe they know the regulators will dismantle the company in the near future and are optimizing for extracting the maximum before their implosion?
Almost like PSD2's open banking part was a huge mistake. I love how my banks, payment providers and random financial apps can now ask for unscoped access, without any way to figure out what I have authorized in the past, what's still pulling my data and how I can revoke any of it.
Most OAuth providers have better transparency and control.
Problem is that the expiration and "reauth" is handled by the third-party provider (there's no longer an actual cryptographic reauth step), and it's not like anyone is auditing this or is even incentivized to. It's pure security theater.
FWIW, after I gave Klarna a sneak peek into my banking account several years ago, I did a GDPR/DSGVO information request a few days later, and according to that, they did not store the transactions they had access to.
Not sure if the information was truthful, of course.
Nobody is auditing nor policing those GDPR SAR responses, so there's little reason to be truthful. The most likely explanation is, short of actual malfeasance, that the ticket of "include transaction data or data derived from it into GDPR data exports" is rotting in the Jira backlog to this day.
Yeah, I don't see why anyone with a bit of technical knowledge would use that over PayPal. I mean I'm all for destroying those evil ultra capitalist US corps but unfortunately our European counterparts are just complete rubbish more often than not.
If you don't offer wire transfer or PayPal, you lost me as a customer.
Ehm, Paypal isn't exactly better than Klarna though. I have had only problems with both but Paypal beats Klarna in money saved for me as customer. Last time I used it I got the money back and the business got reported as a scammer (not by me, their algorithm). The business would have sent the goods already if it wasn't a bank holiday so I nearly got the whole order for free, around 1800 euro.
Only use case for me with Klarna is getting them give me invoice I pay with SEPA-transfer. 30 days after shipping. Actually a good system for me.
Recently bought something and then found it cheaper, negotiated the seller to match price and now the invoice I got got the cheaper price. And I just now had payment go out.
Maybe they know the regulators will dismantle the company in the near future and are optimizing for extracting the maximum before their implosion?