Trustly CEO Johan Tjarnberg.
Trustly
The boss of Swedish financial technology startup Trustly says an initial public offering for the company is still a year or two away from happening, even after a 51% jump in operating profit.
In an exclusive interview with CNBC, Johan Tjarnberg, CEO of Trustly, said that his firm still needs time to prove the value of its open banking technology to investors before going public.
“We need another year or two to really demonstrate to the market that open banking is happening happening, it’s here,” Tjarnberg told CNBC.
“For me, there is so much we want to demonstrate to the market in terms of user adoption, merchant adoption. We still need some time to execute on our existing playbook.”
Trustly is holding out on an IPO even after reporting a strong set of financials. Results shared exclusively with CNBC show the firm reported revenues of $265 million in its 2023 full year.
Growth accelerated significantly in the second half of the year, Trustly said, climbing 27% compared with the same period in 2022. That was as transaction volumes spiked 48% over the same period.
Tjarnberg told CNBC that the company’s performance in 2023 was heavily driven by the growth at its U.S. business. Trustly merged with American rival PayWithMyBank in 2020.
“We invested a lot into the U.S. market,” Tjarnberg said. “We were roughly 20 people there four years ago; we now have 500 supporting the U.S. market.”
Tjarnberg said that, in the first quarter of this year, Trustly saw heightened growth in areas like utilities, retail, and travel, with 22% of volumes coming from those core verticals, up 44% over 12 months.
Chipping away at Visa, Mastercard?
Trustly increased operating profit by 51% in full-year 2023, with adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization) climbing to $51 million from $33 million in 2022.
That was as overall transaction value processed during 2023 climbed by 79%, to $58 billion.
Trustly helps companies integrate the ability to accept payments via open banking technology.
This tech lets consumers make payments directly to a merchant’s bank account without the need for an intermediary such as a card issuer.
It provides an alternative to incumbent credit card programs such as Mastercard and Visa, which charge merchants high fees for transactions.
In the U.S., Tjarnberg said, Trustly is seeing heightened demand from merchants “trying to take down costs,” as high card processing fees have made them more price-conscious.
“There is no secret that our objectives and ambition is to bring a good alternative to other payment methods, including cards,” he told CNBC.
Open banking is a trend which has gained significant momentum, particularly across Europe.
That’s thanks to the introduction of regulations which require banks to open their clients’ account data and payment functionalities to third-party firms.
It has paved the way for new entrants into finance including fintechs, startups and tech companies. Founded in 2008, Sweden’s Trustly competes with the likes of GoCardless, TrueLayer, Volt, Bud, and Yapily.
Future product plans
Trustly expects to launch a feature that allows its merchants to set up recurring payments for customers. That will be targeted at things like telecom packages and subscription-based music streaming services.
Tjarnberg said Trustly is “bullish” on the mobile space, particularly in the U.S. after having seen early success in mobile billing partnerships with the likes of AT&T and T-Mobile.
Trustly is used by more than 9,000 merchants worldwide including Facebook, Alibaba, PayPal, eBay, AT&T, Unicef, Dell, Lyft, DraftKings, Wise, and eToro.
Trustly is majority-owned by venture capital firm Nordic Capital, which owns a 51.1% stake in the business. Alfven & Didrikson is its second-biggest backer, with a 11.1% stake, while BlackRock holds an 8.9% stake.
Aberdeen Standard Investments and Neuberger Berman own 0.7% and 0.9% stakes in Trustly, respectively, while others including the Trustly management and employees own 27.4%.
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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