Klarna signs Apple Premium Partner iSTYLE for instalments in four CEE markets

Klarna agreed a partnership with iSTYLE, an Apple Premium Partner retailer, to offer its payment methods across iSTYLE's stores in Hungary, Romania, Czechia and Slovakia. Shoppers buying an iPhone, Mac, iPad or Apple Watch can pay in full at checkout or spread the cost over instalments rather than paying the whole amount up front.

The deal extends Klarna's acceptance footprint in Central and Eastern Europe, where the method's merchant base is thinner than in its Nordic and German core.

Consumer electronics is the vertical that pulls BNPL into a new market first, because the basket is large enough that the instalment option changes the conversion rather than decorating the checkout. Klarna adding a specialist Apple reseller across four CEE markets at once is a straightforward acceptance expansion into a region where the local competition is bank-issued instalment programmes rather than other BNPL providers, and where the method's presence has so far been mostly cross-border.

Whether Klarna follows the electronics beachhead with general retail merchants in the same four markets, and whether local banks respond by repricing their own instalment offers at electronics chains.

• thepaypers.com