Klarna Integrates Google’s UCP to Enable Agentic Commerce | News

Klarna, the Swedish digital bank and flexible payments provider, announced on February 2, 2026 that it is joining Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a newly introduced open standard aimed at enabling artificial intelligence agents to interact with commerce platforms across the entire shopping journey, from product discovery through purchase and post-purchase support.

Klarna’s participation in UCP reflects an expansion of its longstanding relationship with Google, which includes integrations with Google Pay, Google Cloud and other Google services, and follows the company’s earlier support for Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). By aligning with UCP, Klarna seeks to help establish interoperable frameworks that allow AI agents, merchants and payment providers to operate on a common technical foundation, facilitating smoother AI-driven commerce experiences.

In a press release disseminated through Business Wire and cited by multiple news outlets, Klarna framed its support for UCP within the broader context of an industry as a shift toward autonomous, AI-assisted commerce. UCP is described as an open standard that provides a shared set of rules and technical interfaces enabling artificial intelligence agents to engage with merchant systems and payment networks without requiring bespoke integrations for each environment. The standard is intended to support commerce processes including discovery, pricing, ordering, checkout and post-transaction interactions across diverse platforms.

Klarna’s Chief Commercial Officer, David Sykes, was quoted emphasizing the importance of building a commerce infrastructure grounded in openness, trust and transparency as AI-driven shopping evolves, and he characterized UCP support as part of Klarna’s work with Google on interoperable standards for the evolving digital commerce landscape. The press release also included remarks from Google’s Ashish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Merchant Shopping, who described open standards such as UCP as essential for practical, scalable AI-powered commerce interactions.

The announcement positions UCP alongside earlier technical frameworks such as Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, launched in late 2025, which focuses specifically on secure execution of agent-led payment processes. Klarna had previously announced support for AP2 as part of its efforts to integrate AI agents into both payment and commerce workflows, building on its existing Google partnerships spanning Google Pay, Google Store and Google Cloud infrastructure.

Industry sources describe UCP as a response to broader movements within the technology and retail sectors to develop shared technical standards for agentic commerce, a term used by some firms to describe AI systems that can autonomously conduct shopping tasks on behalf of users.

Since its unveiling, the protocol has attracted backing from major retailers and payment networks, including firms such as Shopify, Target, Walmart, Visa and Mastercard, according to reporting on Google’s UCP launch. These participants aim to ensure that AI agents can perform commerce operations, ranging from catalog browsing and comparison to transactional settlement, in a way that is consistent across platforms and compliant with evolving technical and security expectations.

Klarna itself operates a global payments and commerce network used by millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of merchants. Its technology supports flexible payment options, real-time risk decisioning and integrations with digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, making it a significant participant in efforts to integrate traditional payments infrastructure with new agentic commerce standards.

The company’s engagement with UCP occurs against the backdrop of its recent introduction of its own Agentic Product Protocol, an open specification designed to make merchant product data accessible to AI agents in standardized formats that facilitate discovery and comparison across markets.

That initiative, unveiled in late 2025, offers structured feeds containing tens of millions of products and price points, and is intended to reduce technical barriers for merchants and AI developers seeking to participate in agentic commerce ecosystems.

Klarna’s endorsement of shared agentic standards highlights a widening industry focus on enabling AI systems to interact with commerce and payments infrastructure in ways that are predictable, secure and interoperable. As protocols such as UCP gain adoption, firms involved in electronic commerce and digital payments are exploring how these standardized frameworks may reshape the technical underpinnings of online shopping environments where AI plays a central operational role.