Sweden-based Klarna has announced that its flexible payment options, including BNPL, will be made available in AI agent-driven shopping experiences through Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs).
The integration will initially apply to US merchants already live with Klarna through Stripe, provided that the AI shopping agents in use allow flexible payment options to be offered at checkout.
The announcement addresses a structural limitation in agentic commerce, namely, AI shopping agents have typically defaulted to card-on-file payments, effectively excluding alternative payment methods such as BNPL from automated checkout flows and reducing consumer choice at the point of purchase.
How Shared Payment Tokens work
Stripe's SPTs are a payment mechanism designed specifically for agentic commerce, enabling AI agents to initiate purchases using a customer's preferred payment method without accessing the customer's underlying payment details. Klarna's participation in the SPT framework means BNPL options will be able to pass through the same permissioned layer. For merchants already offering Klarna through Stripe, no additional integration is required to support the new capability.
David Sykes, Chief Commercial Officer at Klarna, said the infrastructure being built for agentic commerce will define online checkout for the coming decade, and that supporting Stripe's SPTs ensures Klarna is embedded in the next generation of checkout experiences from the outset, so that flexible payment options remain available as AI agents increasingly act on consumers' behalf.
Adding to this, Kevin Miller, Head of Payments at Stripe, stated that bringing Klarna to agentic transactions is intended to help businesses improve conversion while giving buyers more flexibility and control in how they pay.
Broader context
The integration sits within a wider industry shift towards agentic commerce, in which AI systems initiate and complete purchases on behalf of users. As this model develops, the design of payment infrastructure becomes a determining factor in which payment methods remain accessible to consumers. The Klarna and Stripe collaboration represents one of the first public examples of a BNPL provider securing a position within an agentic checkout framework, with the companies indicating that further integrations are planned.
