If you’re searching for “sofort payment” because you found the string sofort in a PSP dashboard, a legacy checkout integration, or a payment_method_types array, the short answer is: it’s a discontinued German bank-transfer method, and what you’re looking for now is Klarna Pay Now. The longer answer explains why it disappeared and what changes when you migrate.
What is Sofort?
Sofort (from Sofortüberweisung, German for “instant transfer”) was a bank-redirect payment method built by Sofort GmbH. Customers paid directly from their online banking account instead of a card, without entering card details at checkout. Klarna acquired Sofort GmbH in 2014 and ran it as a separate brand for a decade before folding it into its own products (Stripe, GoCardless).
At its peak, Sofort was one of the more recognized alternative payment methods (APMs) in DACH ecommerce, alongside PayPal and SEPA direct debit. GoCardless has cited approximately 3 million Sofort transactions per month and more than 35,000 merchants using it. That figure predates deprecation and has no primary source behind it, so treat it as a rough historical marker, not a current metric.
How Sofort payments worked
The flow was a standard bank-redirect pattern, similar to iDEAL in the Netherlands:
- The customer selected Sofort at checkout and chose their bank from a list.
- They were redirected to a Sofort-hosted interface and logged in with their existing online banking credentials.
- Recipient and payment amount fields were pre-filled from the merchant’s order.
- The customer confirmed the transfer with a TAN (transaction number), typically as part of two-factor authentication.
- They were redirected back to the merchant’s site, and the merchant received confirmation that the transfer had been authorized.
This satisfied PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication requirement by design, because the customer authenticated directly with their own bank rather than through a merchant-controlled flow. The underlying settlement ran over SEPA Credit Transfer rails. The merchant got fast confirmation, but actual fund clearing followed normal bank transfer timing, not instant settlement.
For merchants, the appeal was straightforward: no card data touched their systems, and the risk of chargebacks dropped, because the transfer was confirmed by the bank at the time of purchase rather than disputed after the fact. That combination, real-time confirmation plus no stored card data, is why Sofort spread beyond Germany into more than a dozen European markets before its deprecation, even as its usage stayed concentrated in DACH.
Sofort and Klarna: acquisition, rebrand, and deprecation
Klarna’s 2014 acquisition of Sofort GmbH didn’t change the payment method’s behavior for a decade. Sofort kept operating under its own brand and its own sofort identifier in PSP APIs. That changed starting in 2023:
- November 1, 2023. Sofort stopped accepting new merchant applications.
- January 1, 2024. Sofort ceased operations in Italy and Poland.
- September 30, 2024. Existing merchants lost Sofort functionality; Klarna’s own timeline marks October 1, 2024 as full discontinuation.
- March 31, 2025. Stripe removed Sofort from its integrations entirely (Solidgate, Stripe Documentation).
Klarna’s stated reason was consolidation, not regulation: folding Sofort’s bank-transfer flow into Klarna’s own branded “Pay Now” product rather than maintaining two parallel payment brands. Other PSPs set their own cutoff dates after Klarna’s. Fabrick’s payment orchestration docs list Sofort ending in September 2025, for example, so “is Sofort still active” partly depends on which processor you’re asking.
Germany’s other major bank-redirect method, Giropay, was discontinued around the same time, on June 30, 2024, with Wero positioned as its replacement (Hyperswitch). Two of DACH’s longest-running local payment methods disappeared within months of each other. That’s a sign the region’s bank-redirect landscape consolidated hard in 2024, not that any single method failed on its own merits.
Why Sofort mattered for DACH markets (and what replaced it)
Germany’s ecommerce payment mix has never been card-dominant the way the US market is. Per the Handelsverband Deutschland (HDE) Online Monitor 2024 (via Hyperswitch):
| Payment method | Share of German ecommerce |
|---|---|
| PayPal | ~28% |
| Invoice (Rechnungskauf) | ~27% |
| SEPA direct debit | ~17% |
| Cards | ~11% |
Bank-transfer and BNPL methods, the category Sofort and Klarna’s newer products both sit in, made up a meaningful share of the remainder.
That payment method diversity isn’t optional for merchants selling into Germany.
Up to 82% of German online shoppers abandon a purchase when their preferred payment method isn’t offered. (EHI Retail Institute/Statista, via Cross-Border Magazine, 2025)
A merchant that supported Sofort and didn’t migrate promptly risked losing that segment of checkout entirely, not just seeing a minor conversion dip.
Klarna Pay Now is the direct replacement. It keeps the same bank-redirect mechanics, customer authenticates with their bank, merchant gets fast confirmation, but adds capabilities Sofort never had: dispute resolution and partial refunds (Stripe Documentation). For a merchant that only knew Sofort as “the German bank transfer option,” Klarna Pay Now is a close functional match, not a different product with a similar name. The gap is mostly in what happens after payment: Sofort gave merchants no built-in way to handle disputes, so those had to be resolved manually with the customer’s bank. Klarna Pay Now brings that process inside the PSP relationship.
Sofort vs. other European bank-redirect methods
| Method | Region | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sofort | Germany, Austria, wider Europe | Discontinued (2024-2025) | Replaced by Klarna Pay Now |
| Giropay | Germany | Discontinued (June 2024) | Replaced by Wero |
| iDEAL | Netherlands | Active | Dominant Dutch bank-redirect method |
| Klarna Pay Now | Europe-wide | Active | Sofort’s successor |
The pattern across this table is that bank-redirect methods in Europe are regionally specific and change more often than card networks do. A payment stack built around a hardcoded list of local methods needs someone watching for exactly this kind of deprecation. Sofort and Giropay both went away in the same year, and there’s no reason to assume iDEAL or Klarna Pay Now are permanent fixtures either.
Integrating Sofort: what developers were dealing with
Before deprecation, adding Sofort meant a PSP-specific integration: enabling it in payment_method_types, handling its redirect flow, and building webhook or callback handling for its confirmation events. That’s the same pattern every bank-redirect method requires, but with its own field names and edge cases per PSP.
Documentation for deprecated payment methods has a way of outliving the method itself: pages built when a method launched rarely get pulled down or flagged once a PSP retires it, so a developer searching today can still land on a listing that never mentions the deprecation at all. That’s exactly the kind of gap that costs an integration team a wasted afternoon before they realize the method they’re reading about no longer processes transactions.
Migrating from Sofort to Klarna Pay Now
The work required depends entirely on how Sofort was integrated:
- Hosted checkout or hosted UI (Stripe Checkout, Solidgate’s hosted page): the PSP handled the swap automatically in most cases. Merchants on these integrations needed no code changes.
- Direct API integration: code changes were required everywhere
sofortwas referenced explicitly. Stripe’s migration guide lists four separate surfaces to update: Payment Element, Checkout Session creation, Invoicing payment settings, and direct PaymentIntent creation, plus any subscription or SetupIntent flows using Sofort for recurring payments (Stripe Documentation). - Connect platforms: platforms had to set Sofort to “off by default” in dashboard settings and update their own merchant-facing documentation.
This is the same shape of maintenance burden that shows up every time a PSP changes its payment method roster. A change that originates entirely outside your codebase still requires you to touch four or more integration points if you’re calling the PSP’s API directly, and to remember every place that reference lives across subscriptions, one-time payments, and platform configuration.
Accepting Klarna Pay Now through a payment orchestration platform
The reason the Sofort to Klarna Pay Now transition is worth understanding isn’t really about Sofort. It’s what it reveals about direct PSP integrations generally. A merchant routing through an orchestration layer makes that same change once, at the configuration level, because the orchestration layer, not the application code, owns the mapping between a local payment method and the underlying PSP call.
That’s the same argument that applies to any local payment method your platform needs to support as you expand into new markets. Each one is a separate integration surface with a separate deprecation risk, and maintaining them directly multiplies your integration surface every time a provider changes its roster. Orchestra doesn’t prevent Klarna from deprecating a payment method. It does mean that when a PSP retires one method in favor of another, your application code doesn’t need to change to pick up the replacement, and your team isn’t the one that has to notice the deprecation email before a customer notices a broken checkout.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Sofort payment?
Sofort (Sofortüberweisung) was a bank-transfer payment method that let customers pay directly from their online banking account instead of a card, widely used in Germany and Austria. Klarna, which acquired Sofort GmbH in 2014, deprecated it starting in 2023 and fully discontinued it by late 2024.
Is Sofort still available?
No, in most cases. Klarna closed Sofort to new merchants on November 1, 2023, and marked it fully discontinued October 1, 2024. Stripe removed it from its integrations March 31, 2025. Some processors set later cutoff dates, so check your specific PSP’s timeline before assuming it’s already gone from your stack.
Is Sofort the same as Klarna?
Not the same product, but the same company. Klarna acquired Sofort GmbH in 2014 and ran it as a separate brand for a decade before consolidating it into Klarna’s own “Pay Now” bank-transfer product.
What replaced Sofort?
Klarna Pay Now. It uses the same bank-redirect mechanics as Sofort: the customer authenticates with their own bank and the merchant gets fast confirmation, but it adds dispute resolution and partial refunds, which Sofort didn’t support.
Why was Sofort discontinued?
Klarna’s decision was commercial and strategic: consolidating bank-transfer payments into its own branded product rather than maintaining Sofort as a separate legacy brand. It wasn’t driven by a regulatory change.
How do I migrate from Sofort to Klarna Pay Now?
If you integrated through a PSP’s hosted checkout, the swap likely happened automatically. If you integrated directly against a PSP’s API, you need to remove sofort references from every surface that used it, payment method lists, subscription flows, and platform settings, and add Klarna Pay Now in its place. An orchestration layer that already supports Klarna Pay Now turns this into a configuration change instead of a code change.
Why does my PSP dashboard or SDK still say “sofort”?
Legacy code, PSP dashboards, and third-party SDKs often keep the sofort identifier as a holdover even after the underlying payment method has been deprecated and replaced. Seeing the string doesn’t mean the method is still processable; check your specific PSP’s current documentation before assuming it works.
