Nordic challenger bank Lunar announced a $47 million (€40 million) Series C funding round today, bringing its total raised to $122 million. The funds come from investment firm Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker and individual investors Klaus Oestergaard and Alan Howard.
Lunar plans to use the new funds to enter the buy now, pay later (BNPL) space. “It’s the most profitable banking landscape in the world, but also the most defensive, with least competition from the outside,” Founder and CEO Ken Villum Klausen told TechCrunch. “This means that the traditional banking customer is buying all their financial products from their bank.”
The decision to launch a BNPL tool comes after the company’s many successful launches, including paid subscriptions, consumer loans, and business bank accounts. The bank currently counts 5,000 business users and 200,000 retail banking users across the Nordic region.
Unlike established players in the BNPL market, Lunar’s BNPL tool will not rely on merchant partnerships. Instead, the bank will ask users after they make a purchase if they want to split the payment amount into installments. This model will work with both brick-and-mortar retail as well as ecommerce purchases.
Villum Klausen founded Lunar in 2015. The company’s 180 employees work in the company’s offices across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
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