My Path in Payments: Rasmus Rolén on fintech innovation

Rasmus Rolén is CEO of Avarda, a payment solutions provider offering ecommerce retailers a white label checkout, buy now, pay later (BNPL), and value-added services to build customer loyalty through payments.

He is also Head of Corporate Development at TF Bank, the financial institution which owns Avarda. Describing this role, Rasmus says, “I’m also always scouting for businesses to purchase. And, likewise, I'm looking for parts of our business that we can divest or sell that aren't essential to our core DNA.” Towards the end of 2024, Rasmus and his team were excited to acquire Paynova, a BNPL and payments company, from Sileon.

It’s been a busy almost two years for the first-time CEO. Rasmus stepped into the role of CEO in 2023 during “a little bit of a rough ride in ecommerce” as the financial services industry faced ballooning inflation after the pandemic. During that time Rasmus, like other ecommerce leaders, had to focus on profitability rather than expansion. “We worked together as a team, and in the end we came out of it in better shape than before,” he reflects.

Rasmus is now strategizing on how to expand Avarda across Europe. The fintech currently offers BNPL in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Germany; Rasmus is looking to extend this to markets such as the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and others.

Career beginnings

With a knack for numbers, Rasmus decided early on he wanted to go into the world of finance.  “I've always been a person who has been ambitious and firm on what I want to achieve. I envisioned myself as a hotshot banker sitting in a nice office in London and New York, preferably in a pinstripe suit.” He wasted no time in chasing that dream, graduating with a Masters in Science and Business Administration, Finance from Lund University in Sweden.  

When others his age took a sabbatical year, Rasmus spent his summers pursuing internships in corporate banking. While he was still a university student, Rasmus was already clocking up long hours alongside banking analysts and business development experts at SEB and Citi. Unfortunately, the dream of the well-dressed money magnate was far less appealing in reality. “I didn't understand what value I was creating. In the end, I felt lost.”

He looked for a new way forward. “I had a good understanding of financials, and I knew I had the drive to succeed in whatever I took on.” He credits his early mentors for encouraging him to find his path.

“I've been fortunate enough to have good role models around me. My mother has been very successful in business. She came from Poland in 1969 and the only thing she had was this pure drive. I see that fire in her. I think some of that DNA seeped into me.”

With an open mind, Rasmus took inspiration from recruiters at his university campus and decided to give auditing a try. Impressively, Rasmus began as an Associate at EY immediately after graduating. “Probably the most important thing that I took away from that part of my career was work ethic. I understood what it meant to get stuff done on very, very tight deadlines because there wasn't really a choice.”

“The second thing I learned was how to structure work. I would rather see [working at EY] as a continuation of my education that set me up for success in all other roles I’ve taken on.”

Although he was grateful for the experience – remaining with the Big Four firm for three years – auditing wasn’t Rasmus’s ultimate passion, either. He needed a new idea, and didn’t have to look too far to find it. “Being from Stockholm, I’ve always had an eye out for the big pink Klarna – although at that time it was blue and not pink at all!” A friend urged him to apply, and he landed the role of Financial Analyst in 2016.

Starting at Klarna

“From my first day there, I felt this is the place where I would be able to thrive. Super results-oriented, a lot of autonomy, high pressure – Klarna shared a lot of the characteristics of consulting but with the plus side of having ownership of the results of the work you were doing.”  

Rasmus had found a place where he belonged: fintech was clearly his professional calling. “Payments is perfect for me,” he explains. “It’s this perfect intersection between the more traditional type of finance and tech entrepreneurship.

“If I would have gone into more traditional banking I would have ended up quite bored because I’m generally not motivated just by looking at risk-adjusted margins. I want to look at something that is more meaningful than that, which is where tech comes in.” And Klarna is where he found that meaning. Rasmus was motivated by the focus on consumer-facing product development, which brought opportunities for innovating on user experience as well as analysing data.

“I love data. It doesn’t matter if I’m a CEO or whatever, I would always call myself an analyst because I love looking at data, and I love drawing conclusions from data.”

When Rasmus joined Klarna in 2016, the payments technology firm had already achieved a $1bn valuation four years prior. Klarna had roughly a thousand employees, yet it still “felt like a startup environment, in a way,” according to Rasmus, who was energized by working closely with founders Sebastian Siemiatkowski and other management executives.

“It wasn’t about pedigree, which was what I really enjoyed about Klarna,” Rasmus recalls, noting the stark contrast with the elitist world of banking. “Some of the people I worked closest with had made a career coming from customer service. They’d never studied [at university], but they ended up with great careers at Klarna. They were doing the job well, and that was rewarded at Klarna. That really resonated with me.”

Leading in payments, adapting to changes

Finding himself surrounded by passionate peers, Rasmus quickly climbed the ranks. Less than two years after he began at Klarna, Rasmus established a team of strategic data analysts and built out a framework around risk management. He became Senior Manager, Consumer Credit Risk Lead by 2018, progressing to Head of Global Consumer Credit Risk in 2019. By 2020, he was named Analytics Director, Head of Finance and Analytics – just four years after joining as an analyst.

One thing Rasmus had to learn was the variation in payment systems in various countries. He had to figure out the challenge of scaling technology while adapting the local merchant and customer preferences.

“When you expand into new markets, it’s so simple to think about payments as that transfer process from one person to a company. But how it needs to be designed varies significantly. What works in Sweden does not necessarily work in Germany. What works in Germany does not necessarily translate to the US. That was a complexity that I didn’t realize before.”

Creative thinking is a must in payments innovation. And the ability to invent new products at pace holds part of the excitement for Rasmus. He reflects on how quickly the world of online payments has changed compared with in-store credit card payments. “With online payments, you have so much more flexibility than you would have with a credit card. You can essentially choose whichever terms you want. You can pay today, pay tomorrow, pay in three months, over twelve months, if you want. None of that is available in an in-store environment.”

Rasmus has noticed that new payment technologies can sometimes attract negative media coverage. “One of the most common misconceptions about BNPL is that the best customer is the one who doesn’t pay. But that is just simply not true. There’s so much evidence that proves the opposite: the best customers are the ones who pay on time and can handle the debt they’re taking on.”

He notes the responsibility that a BNPL company has in dealing with customers who are overextending themselves, and informing customers of their payment obligations. Rasmus explains that’s why it’s important to keep underwriting on the credit risk side at the core of such business.

“If it’s done right, you can use [BNPL] for sophisticated budgeting to spread out your payments. You can effectively use it as a good cash flow management tool.”

Ever ambitious, Rasmus left Klarna after seven years to pursue the CEO and Head of Corporate Development roles at Avarda, under TF Bank. Having fallen in love with fintech, it was finally time to take on the top leadership role of his career. Yet leadership is often about collaboration, as Rasmus would soon learn by partnering with Checkout.com while at Avarda.

Partnering for payments performance

Technology partnerships can help to unearth customer insights. In his capacity as Avarda CEO, Rasmus appreciates the granularity and speed of payment data availability from Checkout.com. “Payment performance for me is one of the reasons we wanted to partner with Checkout.com. I love data, I love the tech piece of the business, and everything that surrounds the transaction.”

When it comes to payment performance, Rasmus sees the goal as creating a better customer experience. He’s eager that from the customer’s point of view, the payment “should just work”. That’s why “seamlessness is synonymous with payment performance,” in his view.

The challenge is to find the balance of serving the customer with as little friction as possible, while doing it as safely as possible. “This is what I believe Checkout.com is really good at, and we have a very close relationship with Checkout.com, overall. We talk often with key account teams to figure out the best fit for our merchants.” He sees an affinity between Avarda and Checkout.com because the two businesses value close collaboration, and pursuing innovation in enterprise payments.

Rasmus explains that collaborating with a payment services provider (PSP) is particularly beneficial when scaling into new markets. “If we can serve our merchants and consumers in a better way by having strong partnerships, such as Checkout.com or other partners, rather than building it ourselves, then that is what we need to do.” Partnerships also offer the additional benefit of in-market payment expertise from years of operating in the region.

Innovating for the future

Avarda was founded in 2015 as part of TF Bank, so Rasmus could build new systems on a structure that was already scalable. This helped to support the pursuit of even more efficient payment solutions. For him, staying close to Avarda’s merchants is the best way to figure out how to innovate. After all, merchants have the best understanding of how they want to pay and how to build stickiness through loyalty.

For Rasmus, what makes Avarda stand out in the payment solution space is the way it enables merchants to retain and activate customers through additional channels. For instance, Avarda offers merchants the ability to sign up members and communicate with them through the payments flow.

“How I believe we need to stay innovative is the fact that we are payment nerds. We always want to keep up on trends. We want to understand each micro piece of the customer journey and we want to make it better. Then it’s about prioritizing what to start with, and being able to course-correct rather quickly because this landscape changes so drastically.”