Accepting Klarna Pay Now, formerly SOFORT

SOFORT has been consolidated into Klarna Payments and is no longer available as a separate payment method with its own integration. Klarna acquired the business in 2014 and has since folded the instant bank transfer product into its own checkout, where the equivalent option is presented as Klarna Pay Now. Merchants who still surface a SOFORT button or logo are pointing customers at something that no longer stands on its own.

Consolidation

What happened to SOFORT

Klarna withdrew SOFORT as a standalone product and merged it into Klarna Payments. Published cutover dates vary between providers, because each PSP retired its own SOFORT integration on its own schedule, so the precise date that applied to you depends on who processed your transactions rather than on a single scheme-wide switch-off. What is consistent across providers is the direction: the standalone SOFORT system and API are gone, and the pay-by-bank flow now sits inside Klarna.

What replaced SOFORT: Klarna Pay Now

Klarna Pay Now is the direct equivalent, an instant bank transfer authorised inside the customer’s own online banking environment with real-time confirmation to the merchant. Commercially it is not a like-for-like swap. SOFORT was a single method with a single price. Klarna Payments is a suite, and enabling it usually means enabling more than the pay-by-bank option. That is worth being deliberate about, because buy now pay later and instant bank transfer carry very different costs and very different risk profiles.

Cleanup

What to do if SOFORT is still in your checkout

Remove the logo and the method from your payment selector, your payment method pages, your order templates and your help content. Then look at what took its place. If SOFORT was quietly replaced by the full Klarna suite during a provider migration, you may now be paying buy now pay later economics on transactions that used to be a cheap bank transfer. That substitution is common, it happens without a conversation, and it shows up as a rising blended rate rather than as a new line on the statement.

Coverage

Which payment provider supports pay by bank for merchants in Germany and Austria?

Computop, Unzer and Global Payments all document a Klarna route, and every PSP serving these markets offers a pay-by-bank option of some kind, whether through Klarna, through an open banking provider or, increasingly, through Wero, which went live for retail payments in Germany at the end of 2025. Support is not the differentiator. What separates them is the price per transaction, whether it is blended or passed through, and whether the flow you are sold as a bank transfer is actually priced as one.

The wider pattern: pay by bank in Europe is being rebuilt

SOFORT is one of several bank transfer schemes to disappear or change hands in a short period. giropay was switched off entirely on 31 December 2024, Payconiq has been folded into the Bancontact and Wero structure, and iDEAL is being absorbed into Wero with the migration set to complete by 31 December 2027. Each of these arrives with its own contract paperwork and its own opportunity for a provider to reprice quietly.

Bundling

What a suite costs when only one method in it was chosen

SOFORT was one method at one price. Klarna Payments is a suite, and the migration usually switched on more than the pay-by-bank option. From that moment the mix inside your Klarna volume moves on its own, and nobody decided that it should.

Follow it through, with illustrative rates rather than benchmarks. Take 4 million euros of DACH revenue with 12 per cent formerly on SOFORT, so 480,000 euros. If half of that now settles on the credit products inside the suite rather than on pay by bank, it moves from an illustrative 0.9 per cent bank transfer rate to an illustrative 3.0 per cent buy now pay later rate. On 240,000 euros that is 5,040 euros a year, arriving through an integration change rather than through a negotiation. Use your own rates; the mechanism is the point rather than the numbers.

The answer is a price per method rather than per suite. Ask for the rate of each Klarna method separately, pay by bank apart from the credit products, and for the split of your Klarna volume across them over the last twelve months. If your contract carries one blended line for the whole suite, that is the line to open, because what sits behind it keeps moving.

Reviewing what replaced SOFORT in your contract

What you pay for the method that took SOFORT’s place is set in your PSP contract, not by any scheme. If the substitution happened during a migration and was never explicitly priced, that is worth isolating. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.

Relevant markets: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland