Security

Everything about paying with direct banking is designed with your safety in mind. Using your own secure online banking means there is no need to share any personal information or card details with the merchant. The entry of your online bank details occurs entirely in the secure Klarna payment form, where the merchant has no access. There is no need for Klarna to store these details and they are never visible to the merchant or any other third party, including Klarna employees. This highest level of security is acknowledged by the TÜV “Approved Data Protection” seal and TÜV Saarland “Approved Payment System“ certificate.

The assertion of a breach of the general terms & conditions (prohibition of disclosure of PIN and TAN to third parties) is not correct. The German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) made its position clear in February 2011. It deemed general terms & conditions of German banks, or their interpretation, which prohibits the use of payments with direct banking to violate cartel law and called upon the banks to enable non-discriminatory access for online payment systems that are independent of banks, such as Pay now (known at the time as Sofort Überweisung). The banks have agreed not to claim publicly that users of payment methods such as Pay now were in breach of the banks' general terms & conditions.

“Phishing” are attempts by third parties to gain and misappropriate sensitive personal information (e.g. account number, PIN, TAN, credit card number) from recipients of e.g. “phishing emails”. These emails are imitations of those from trustworthy sources and, via a link contained in the email, seek to lead the recipient to a fraudulent website. At such a website (which in turn is also an imitation of the website of a trustworthy company), the victim is asked to provide personal information. With the help of the following characteristics, you can check the authenticity of Pay now: 1) The Internet address (URL) must begin with https://www.sofort.com/ (this means you are using the secure payment form. This URL contains "sofort" as this was the original name of the payment method.) 2) By clicking on the security certificate – in green, at the beginning of the URL – you can see that Sofort GmbH (Sofort GmbH is a Klarna Group Company) is the owner of the certificate. The lock symbol confirms that the connection is secure. Data transfers are carried out via secured SSL connections.

In order to carry out the transaction, Sofort GmbH necessarily requires one-time access to your account. In this respect, Sofort GmbH functions as a technical service provider that transmits to your bank the information you put into the secure payment form via an encrypted connection. The Pay now system is a multi-banking software tool, used to operate your online banking.

Certainly not! At no time does the merchant have access to your sensitive online banking details (such as PIN and TAN), which you enter into the encrypted payment form. Under no circumstances does the merchant have access to your account.

No! PIN and TAN are not stored and are never visible to third parties, including Klarna and employees of Sofort GmbH. This is no false promise, because Sofort GmbH places its our own compliance with data privacy regulations under close scrutiny. The TÜV Saarland regularly evaluates and certifies the procedures of Sofort GmbH according to the guidelines of federal German data-protection law.