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Buy now, pay later lenders Klarna AB and Affirm Inc. are separately partnering with Google Inc. to enhance their technology stacks.
Klarna announced early Thursday it is partnering with Google Cloud to fast-track development of consumer-centric products and marketing campaigns within the Klarna app. Google Cloud is the commercial arm of Google that sells computing, data storage, machine learning, and networking services to businesses and organizations.
Klarna will use Google Cloud’s generative media models, including Veo 2 and Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, to create so-called “dynamic digital lookbooks” for shoppers. Digital lookbooks are a collection of photographs that showcase a brand’s products, often in a lifestyle or aspirational context, to create an emotional connection with the consumer. Digital lookbooks can include product links and videos and are typically shared through a brand’s Web site, social media, or through email marketing campaigns.
In addition, Klarna will rely on Google Cloud’s technology to enhance its library of more than 200 million images by using artificial intelligence-based models to regenerate and refine visuals.
“Partnering with Google Cloud allows us to combine Klarna’s deep consumer insights with Google Cloud’s world-class AI infrastructure and models,” says a Klarna spokesperson by email. “Their unified tech stack from cloud to generative AI gives us speed, scale, and reliability to build more personalized and creative experiences. It lets us move faster, experiment safely, and bring innovation to millions of Klarna customers.” Klarna through the collaboration will be able to produce high-quality visual content tailored to consumer preferences, according to the two companies.
Pilots have shown that the use of AI to create lookbooks and marketing campaigns can drive 50% growth in orders and increase the time a consumer spends on an app by 15%, Google says.
Klarna’s partnership with Google will also extend to security. The BNPL lender will use Google Cloud’s AI hardware to train and deploy neural networks to detect and prevent fraud and money laundering on its platform. Google’s fraud-detection models analyze complex relationships and connections between separate entities, such as users, transactions, and devices, to detect anomalies and suspicious patterns of activity.
Affirm is supporting Google’s agent-payments protocol, an open protocol to authenticate consumers who are initiating a payment using an AI agent when shopping online. Google unveiled its protocol last month.
Supporting Google’s agentic-commerce protocol will help embed BNPL directly into “the architecture of agentic commerce”, the BNPL provider says.
“Generative AI is rapidly changing the ways we acquire information, shopping information included,” Max Levchin, Affirm chief executive, wrote in a recent shareholder letter. “AI agents aptly pull together pricing and availability information, combine insights from reviews, comparison shop, and deal-hunt. In-chat and fully agentic shopping are imminent.”
Affirm says it believes that the changes agentic commerce can bring to e-commerce represent an entirely new set of opportunities for merchants and itself. “Generative AI is unbundling, or, more precisely, decomposing traditional e-commerce, and is offering entirely new ways of recomposing it,” Levchin noted.
In addition to supporting Google’s agentic-commerce protocol, Affirm is launching its 0% Days promotion. The 0% Days promotion will run Oct. 22-24 and offer consumers 0% BNPL financing for up to 24 months. As always, Affirm does not charge late or hidden fees.
