Yaron Shaer | CTO, Klarna | Top 30 EMEA CTOs 2026

Career History

Klarna is a global leader in payments software for e-commerce, offering customers a seamless checkout experience and its well-known “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) service. Once Europe’s most valuable private fintech, it reached a valuation of about $45bn in 2021. Shaer has been Chief Technology Officer since 2022, overseeing the company’s engineering strategy. He has driven Klarna’s expansion of its open-banking platform, Klarna Kosma, and is leading efforts to scale and improve the infrastructure needed for global product launches.

He joined Klarna in 2014 as Senior Engineering Manager, leading teams on the core system, Kred. Over the following years, he took on broader leadership positions, guiding the Platforms domain as it evolved into Servicing and later into DBS. In 2018, he was promoted to Vice President of Engineering, before stepping up as CTO four years later, alongside acting as competence owner for engineering.

Before Klarna, Shaer was Software Delivery Manager at Camelot Strategic Solutions and previously held software development leadership roles at Nokia. He holds a BSc in Software Engineering from Tel Aviv University, completed in 2002.

About Klarna

Founded in Stockholm in 2005, Klarna has grown into one of the world’s largest fintechs, serving over 119 million active users and processing more than 3.4 million transactions each day. Its checkout technology is embedded across thousands of e-commerce sites, and the company employs over 3,000 people in offices spanning Stockholm, London, New York, Berlin and beyond. Klarna provides a seamless payment system for online stores, handling card payments, direct bank transfers and its own financing options. It also offers a consumer app that lets users browse and buy from thousands of merchants, pay immediately or later, and manage their purchases in one place.

In September 2025, Klarna completed its US IPO, raising $1.37bn and listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The company has also been expanding beyond buy now, pay later into broader banking and everyday payments. Its debit-first Klarna Card has now reached five million active users across 16 countries, while Klarna has also introduced peer-to-peer payments across 13 European markets.