How Navan Coded Company Policy Onto the Card to Kill the Expense Report with Yuval Refua

Yuval Refua: What the users are looking for, they're looking for automation and simplicity and for things to be done for them. We call that the Waymo experience. You don't care how you get there, you just want to get there. Doesn't matter what happens on the way. So you just want your expenses done for you, you want the receipts captured for you, you want the description done for you, you to want. You want all of those things kind of done automatically for you. So they're out of the way. For finance teams, it's very, very different. It's more of a Formula one experience. They're looking for real time telemetry that tells them exactly what is happening in the company, what budgets are being spent, how are they being spent, and then they're also looking for the full control. They want to be able to steer the wheel and optimize, you know, like a Formula one. Trying to optimize for saving one second in every lap. They're trying to save for every dollar that they can save for.

Peter Renton: This is the FinTech one on one podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter renton and since 2013 I've been conducting in depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives. My guest today is Yuval Refuha, the Chief Product Officer at Navarn, the global travel and expense platform. Yuval came to Navarn around seven years ago after building his product shops at Thomson Reuters and then American Express, where he developed a deep love for credit cards and the Rails that power them. He joined when Davaan was still just a travel booking service and he has spent the years since building out its payments and expense products from the ground up. Uh, in our conversation we talk about how Navarn coded company policy directly onto the cards so expenses are approved in real time. Why being travel first sets them apart from procurement led competitors. The staggering complexity of going global with VAT and E, invoicing their partnership with Visa, how, uh, AI is reshaping the finance team's role and where Yuval sees travel and expense heading over the next several years. Now let's get on with the show. Welcome to the podcast, Yuval.

Yuval Refua: Thank you. Nice to be here.

Peter Renton: Nice to have you. So let's kick it off by giving us some of your, uh, career highlights. You've been with some big names in your career. So tell us before you got to Navan, what are some of the highlights?

Yuval Refua: Yeah, well, I mean, I did have two startups of my own when I was growing up, uh, and I was going into the financial world, worked in S and P and banking for a little bit, but then really fell in love with fintech and product management when I was at Thomson Reuters. And from there I moved and I spent a lot of time in American Express, where I developed an actual love for credit cards. And credit card, uh, I know it sounds funny, but it's like one of those things, you have some sort of a love for something that you really like and you really enjoy how it's working. And Amex, ah, was a fantastic opportunity to understand the inner works of everything and what you can build on top of it. And I think it's still endless solutions that you can build on top of credit cards in general.

Peter Renton: So then what attracted you to Navon? What was the sort of the hook that got you to leave American Express?

Yuval Refua: I mean, after a lot of time at American Express, I got a phone call from Navon, um, about seven years ago. They were telling me about, you know, the travel product and how, how it's very much consumer forward and they're trying to look at it as a consumer app and they're trying to solve problems from that perspective and they're looking into getting into payments and expensing and how to expand into that. And as a user that used other legacy systems in the past, I always spent five hours doing my expenses on a Sunday night. And it always seemed like such a waste of resources for the company and a waste of time m for employees. And it was such a painful experience always. So when the opportunity came along to actually create an expense product that people love, I just couldn't ignore that and I couldn't say no to that.

Peter Renton: Right. So when you arrived at Navon, there was no expense product. It was really just a travel booking service.

Yuval Refua: Yep, Navon was a travel booking service, you know, growing very, very, very fast. One of the, um, first, you know, problems that we saw is we had clients that are booking with us and are using their credit card, you know, Citi, you know, bank of America, whatever it is. And at the end of the month, they would get a statement from their bank with all their credit card transactions, and they would get a booking report from their booking tool from Navan. And I remember going to clients and seeing, you know, accountants sitting for hours trying to reconcile how to match those two documents one to the other, and seeing the pain that they're going through. And that's what led us to really come out with a credit card as a product to solve a pain with Reconciliation, which is like a real pain point in the travel business.

Peter Renton: Okay, so then you came to Navan to really build this and obviously you've had great experience with credit cards at American Express. How did you kind of approach it? Like when you arrived, was there like a nascent product or did you really create this all from scratch?

Yuval Refua: When I arrived, it was mostly a lot of company support people and CSMs that were helping clients to do that reconciliation to help from one.

Peter Renton: So there wasn't an expense product?

Yuval Refua: No, there wasn't an expense product. And it took a, um, while for us to get to expensing. So we started by having just the payment, uh, product to support that reconciliation. And once you have a credit card out of the market, we had a, uh, credit card solution. Users wanted to start using it to, you know what happens if you're checking out of a hotel and you want to pay a checkout, you don't want to pay in advance or you want to rent a car, you want to use a credit card for that. So we went into printing physical cards as well to enable users to go through their trip. Once you have a physical card, we had a lot of users who wanted to use that in order to buy coffee and to buy dinners and to do other things. So all of that happened during COVID and we moved from just a credit card provider. We had to go into, you know, we wanted to go into expensing as well to create a really good, fantastic expensing solution for our products.

Peter Renton: Okay, so then you've got your expense management, your travel. Obviously they work seamlessly together. So I'm starting to see Navon more and more in the fintech press and people talking about it. But for those who aren't really all that familiar with Navaan, why should someone who is in fintech be paying attention to what Navon is doing?

Yuval Refua: Well, I mean, Navan is the only solution that was built from the ground up. Integrated travel, expense and payments. The way we do things is in order to solve for actual client problems. If you think about travel and expense, they really go together. Most of your expensing you're doing when you're traveling. And if you think about fintech solutions and what finance team are doing, they actually spend 80% of their time chasing after those T and E expenses, even though they only account for 20% of the company spend. So the majority of the time is spent on those menial tasks that don't account for that much of their spend. And Avan is really creating an expense product that People actually use and enjoy using. It's faster, easier user experiences. Expenses can be overwhelming and time consuming. So when you get real time data that has context about the expense and can explain why you expend something, it allows your company to have the flexibility and the ability to go through that flow very, very, very fast and with 100% accuracy.

Peter Renton: Okay, so the T and E space you just talked about there, it's been around for decades. There's been legacy players, I mean, for a long time. Even some of the technology Companies from the 20th century have offerings like this. What was the shift that makes NAVARN necessary today?

Yuval Refua: I think you're exactly right. Even back in the day, it was all about expensing and submitting an expense report. You take receipts, you staple them. And the thing about expensing is that really, nobody likes expensing. Employee hates it because they have to copy data that exists elsewhere and they have to paste it into their expense report. And finance teams hate it as well because they have to chase down receipts and explanations for months in order to close the books. People are doing all of that work in order to answer one question. Is the $5 Starbucks expense that you did, is it in the best interest of the company? Now, the truth is that that decision was made long time ago. Uh, it's in a PDF document. It's called the company policy. Uh, it already exists. We already know what's in the best interest of the company. So what we've done that was very unique and changes the minds of how people use our expense solution. We took that company policy and we coded it into the card itself. So now every time you swipe, we gather the information for you, we check it against the policy, and we approve and reject the transaction in real time. So today, when an Avant traveler swipes their card, they just get a push notification saying, expense submitted, you're done. And that's what modern expensing really looks like.

Peter Renton: And so there's the legacy players I just talked about. There's also the fintech players. There's fintech companies that started in expense management. And if they were here right now, they would argue that they are, uh, the DNA of the expense management and they've expanded into travel. How are you different to the fintech companies that started with expense management?

Yuval Refua: Uh, so most fintech companies that you talk about actually started from the procurement world. They're thinking about ap, they're thinking about procure to pay and bill pay. And procurement is very, it's a very contained problem. It usually handles a handful of trusted individuals in the company, and you can easily give an employee a, um, monthly budget of $2,000, let's say. But is $2,000 for an employee enough? Is it too much? Is it too little? I don't know. It depends on the context. And the context is really important because if the employee is traveling for two weeks in Singapore, it's probably not enough. If the employee is traveling for one day with their own card, it's probably too much. Because our solution started from travel. We actually have the context. We know how to deal with distributed spend. We know how to deal with the case where you have every employee in the company spending on something. And, uh, we also know how to give the finance admins the control and visibility while still offering an amazing traveler experience. So we created our policy at scale, so the company doesn't have to say $2,000 for one employee. We can really understand what is the employee spending on? Where is the employee? What is the context? Who are they there to visit? And from there we can make smarter decisions about allowing the employee to spend and allowing clients to have the granular level of control that they need to manage that distributed spend.

Peter Renton: How do you adapt to the needs of your customers? I'm just thinking about, like, there might be a salesperson, he's out and about in his local area going to lunch, taking clients to dinners, and that's most of what he does. But occasionally he's going to jump on a plane and go to Singapore. That's just one example, obviously. But how are you kind of adapting where you've got totally different types of needs from that person who's changed their behavior?

Yuval Refua: I think that's exactly right. So there's a couple of things, you know, both on the travel side and the expense side. And you're right. T and E is dynamic. It's highly variable. It involves, you know, a lot of stakeholders, multiple currencies, complex tax requirements. It really needs all of that insight in there because we're based on a travel solution. We know exactly where the employee is, we know why they're going there, we know what is the policy that the company has for every type of spend. And we can apply that in real time. And that's really the benefit of combining travel and expense together, because you can run the employee from swipe to closing the books in the ERP in seconds. So the second it swiped the expense is going through, uh, policy assessment. It collects all the information that we need. Uh, you don't need to use separate tool, one tool for booking One tool for payment, one tool for collecting your receipts. Everything is in one place and we're able to collect all that information in real time and close the books.

Peter Renton: It's funny because I was at an event last week and I knew I was talking to you obviously now, and I was talking with someone. I just asked him how, like what he, uh, uses for T and E is, oh, we use navarn. And uh, I, um, asked him how his experience was and that's basically what you just said there. And he does quite a bit of travel. And, uh, you said the thing that was great is just it all happens automatically. Is that sort of what you want? How are you kind of positioning it so it's better than what they have right now?

Yuval Refua: Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. First of all, we understand that travelers have one need and the finance team have different needs. For the traveler, it's about simplicity. It's about, I don't want to copy information that exists elsewhere. I want you to collect that information for me. So I mean value for me. In the last seven years, my expensing solution has been every time I swipe the card, I get a notification expense submitted, you're done. Because all of that is happening in the background. The traveler doesn't care, doesn't want to do it themselves. They want all the information to happen in the background and all the information to be provided for their finance team. For finance team, the solution is very different. They're looking for ultimate visibility and control, and they don't want to do that at the expense of the travel experience. But they still want to have everything within their control, within their reach. A lot of what we're dealing with actually is about taking those solutions globally. So how do you enable big clients to focus on growing into more markets, whether it's with more currencies or the ability to expense in more markets? Because every market is different, right? Per diem in Poland are different. Mileage expensing in France has its own rules and sometimes you have to do cash advances in Austria. And everything is very, very different. Not to mention the VAT rules and GST rules that are very different from market to market. And I think expanding globally and building all those capabilities, keeping the same control and visibilities that companies want while still having a very easy, simple, fun experience for the traveler themselves. That's the secret to our success.

Peter Renton: Interesting. So then I just want to touch on that a bit because are you saying that if someone's traveling to the more traveled countries that you know how that country works. Have you, Are you in every country in the world as far as understanding what their rules and taxes and all that sort of thing alike or tell us about your global footprint?

Yuval Refua: Yeah, I mean that's exactly the types of things that we're working on day in and day out to make sure that we're there. So in addition to the per diem's and mileage on the expensing side, you can think about even the travel side, there's a lot of changes that are happening all the time when it comes to VAT and gst. And companies are always trying to maximize how much reclamations they can have. So one of my recent favorites has been the changes in uh, E invoicing. That is a global thing that has now started happening a lot this year and going to continue in September with a lot of more countries coming online. Every country is different. Every country has their own invoicing solution. They're all trying to save the same thing. They're all trying to save for the problem of how do I prevent uh, fraud from vat. And they all have different solutions on how to implement E invoicing. We have the specialty of going into each and every country, understanding the inventory that our clients are interested in, understanding how those inventory providers are connecting to an E invoicing solution and understanding how to service our clients in the best way possible in every country and their unique characteristics.

Peter Renton: Right, right.

Yuval Refua: Those are some of the fun stuff that we're working on.

Peter Renton: Yeah. And I imagine it gets very complex. Right, because you've also got things like, um, you know, commuting, deductions which vary dramatically between countries. You've got local tax compliance. I mean the tax compliance, it can be different between counties. I mean, uh, like how are you kind of managing all of that?

Yuval Refua: Yeah, I mean it gets very complex. It requires local expertise. It requires having the right setup. From our perspective, one of our, you know, our number one company value is it's all about the users, all of them, all the time. We understand that companies have different Personas that are trying to solve for different things. We have an accounting team that really care about closing the month and having all the receipts that they need in there to prove that they can close the month. We have a, uh, travel manager that cares about the experience of their employee and how to, and how to get all the inventory in there. And we have a tax team in a company that really cares about the VAT reclamations and we want to be able to service all of them. And you're right about the complexity, it could get really complex. And the secret is how do you expose that level of complexity to the client at the right time and what we do for that. Actually it's funny, we uh, call it the GTA model, uh, Grand Theft Auto. I don't know if you ever had a chance to play that game.

Peter Renton: I have a 19 year old son, I'm exposed to that game regularly.

Yuval Refua: So I mean the game is very simple. Right when uh, you start gta you don't really know how to do much. Uh, first time you jump into a car, the game teaches you how to drive a car, but you don't get that before you get into the car. So we kind of follow the exact same methodology. We understand that our clients need to grow with us and that they have different functionality that they need and as they need those new functionalities and then they expose those new functionalities. This is when we bring them on board, we show them uh, what the flow is like, how to work with it, how to connect it to the ERP systems and how to expose the level of complexity, but exactly the level of complexity that they want. It's a modular system that allows you to change it and give you the level of complexity that you want, but not more than that.

Peter Renton: So with that I'm just, I want to talk about the finance teams now that are, that are working at your clients that are trying to make sense of all of what's coming into and out of navarn. I was reading that there was, you got this expense admin companion which automates um, general ledger coding and policy checks. So what is the role of the human finance admin for a company that has implemented Navaan?

Yuval Refua: Yeah, so for finance admins I believe that they want to be more productive as well. 2026, everybody's talking about AI, uh, they see everybody talk about 10x 10x and they're expected to do the same. What does it mean to be 10x for them? I believe it means becoming more strategic. Spend less time chasing after employees and managers and worry about the company's strategic decisions and where the company is supposed to go and worry about that level of work. So what the expense admin companions allows you to do. What we do is we try to learn every specific company how they behave, uh, what is their appetite for policy changes or approvals or things like that, how to correctly code everything into the gls, how to analyze out of policy spend. So we learn on our companies, as soon as they come in, they all behave a Little bit differently. They all communicate with their employees differently. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the things that we have is in the expense companion we have something called recommended actions. So because we understand your appetite for spend, when we see an expense that goes through and that expense is flagged, or we're not sure exactly what is happening with that expense, we can collect all the information that you need about that expense, we can look at your past behavior and we can recommend an action for you and we can say, hey, you asked us to flag this expense. When that happens based on your past behavior, we recommend that you approve it because it's done by a senior person because this person rarely goes out of policy because et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we've seen you approve those in those scenarios in the past. So that's one aspect of it. Another one is around the communication with the user. Uh, so if you see a user that is missing a receipt, usually what happens is that companies will chase down those users either through our platform, through the chat capabilities or through Slack or whatever way they want to chase down those users and they'll have some sort of a response. Hey, please upload a receipt or please provide a description. Those things can definitely be automated with AI today. Right. We can suggest a response for the admin that sounds exactly like them on how they usually respond to their users. And we're seeing a lot of adoption on those. And you can imagine, uh, that once we have one recommended action and people gain the trust of the finance team or one suggested response and we gain the trust on the finance team, we can then move very quickly for the finance team. Just saying. Okay, I see 1,000 transactions. I trust you already that you know me and you know my level of appetite for spending. Bulk approve all of those, bulk reject all of those based on your recommendation from that bulk motion. The movement to automation is very, very, very fast and that really allows finance people to get away from the day to day management of expensing, chasing after a seed, chasing after employees and focus on more strategic things.

Peter Renton: So have you quantified how much time that you're saving the finance teams? What um, can you talk about there?

Yuval Refua: I don't have to guess. We've actually done a survey ah, with Forcer Consulting recently and they came up with the return on investment is 376% with a payback period of less than six months. In terms of productivity, it's about $1.2 million in total productivity savings between finance teams and employees. We have 80% of employees time savings in submitting expenses and 40% finance and accounting time in terms of managing and reconciling expenses. Actually, if you think about that, one of my favorite stats is actually, you know, it's a very micro level stat. But one of the things that we launched recently is an expense AI chat. And we're always doing a competition to see whether the AI can submit expenses faster and go through the expense report faster than humans. We've seen our record right now as we've seen one employee go in, just basically take 26 receipts, drop them in the chat and successfully submit all of those 26 into 26 expenses in 56 seconds. All of them were approved, all of them went into the ERP. So that's 2.3 seconds per expense. When you compare that to the five hours on a Sunday night once a month that you have to drag and drop all the receipts, I think it's an insane change.

Peter Renton: Yes, yes. That is beyond human capacity. Obviously it's on your homepage here. The AI powered business travel and expense platform. So can you kind of tease that out a little bit more when you say AI powered, I presume it's more than just that uh, expense chat that you're talking about.

Yuval Refua: It goes back to what Navon is. Right. You know, we're a global AI powered business for travel and expense and we're really building the next travel agency on the planet. So we've always been an agency, we've always viewed ourselves as an agency and now it's about connecting AI agents with human agents and being able to orchestrate that in order to get the best service for our clients. I think everything we do is AI first. That's ah, how we build all of uh, our products. That's a lot of what we do in our experiences. I think one of our main principles is that in a world of vibe coded AI demos, it's really important that you focus on how you build your AI products in a way that they're actually providing the right value for the users in a way that people actually enjoy using them, that people save time, that people save money because they're using your AI product. So we hold ourselves to uh, very high standards when it comes to releasing those AI solutions.

Peter Renton: Okay, so I want to go back and talk about your global expansion because I was reading about your partnership with Visa supporting major currencies around the world. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with that partnership?

Yuval Refua: I mean, you said it, right? We understand that Our clients have operations everywhere in the world and that they need that global support. Visa accepts cards in more than 200 countries. They're also a true tech company. It's very easy for us to have a conversation with Visa because we're coming from the same principles. Visa is always at the forefront of innovation when it comes to crypto AI, even beyond that, whatever you want. And their willingness to collaborate with us allows us to deploy our products globally and do it really fast. We worked actually closely on a product, um, called Connect, which basically allows our clients to bring in their Visa card and connect it to our platform. So that could be any Visa card from any provider, not just Navan. Uh, you can bring in whatever card you want and we'll connect it to our platform in a way that it behaves like an Avant card, still go through the same approvals, the same reviews and everything else in it. So Visa is a, a true partner for building everything that we're doing.

Peter Renton: So we've talked a lot about expenses, but we um, haven't talked much about payments yet. And I'd uh, love to kind of get where you're kind of innovating inside navarn on payments.

Yuval Refua: Yeah, a lot of it is what we talked about in the beginning. How can you take the things that a company wants to see? Uh, and sometimes it's about, it's all about explaining uh, why the expense happened and how can you bring that into uh, a connected payment system. So it's about taking that policy, coding it onto the card itself. So every time the card is swiped, the card, the policy is assessed in real time. And the second piece about that. So another thing that we're doing on the payments world is we're heavily investing this year, uh, going global and exposing more currencies in more places for our customers, uh, and really connecting all of that into that one global experience with full visibility and controls for finance teams.

Peter Renton: We live in interesting times and I uh, want to take a forward looking view. The travel and expense space is a perfect application for a lot of AI because it's a lot of disparate data, different formats and different types of form factors. So where do you see the travel and expense space heading in the next say three to five years?

Yuval Refua: If we stay focused on our principles, it's kind of easy to see where uh, the world is going. So if you think about that from an expensing perspective on the user side, what the users are looking for, they're looking for automation and simplicity and for things to be done for Them, we call that the Waymo experience. You don't care how you get there, you just want to get there. Uh, it doesn't matter what happens on the way. So you just want your expenses done for you, you want the receipts captured for you, you want the description done for you, you want all of those things kind of done automatically for you. So they're out of the way. For finance teams, it's very, very, very different. It's more m. Definitely not a Waymo. It's more of a Formula one experience. Right. If you think about it, they're looking for real time telemetry that tells them exactly what is happening in the company, what budgets are being spent, how are they being spent, who's out of policy, who's in policy. And then they're also looking for the full control. They want to be able to steer the wheel and optimize like a formula one, trying to optimize for saving one second in every lap. They're trying to save for every dollar that they can save for. So that means having control about the spend. When we're talking about agenting commerce, that is obviously coming, right. You know, agents are going to come in, they're going to start spending money on behalf of companies. Finance team still want to be in control of that wheel. They still want to see what is happening. They want to direct funds from one focus area of the company to another. They want to enable certain agents to come in, certain agents, uh, not to come in, to block them. And they really want to control all of that spend and being, by the way, also being able to stop things the second they want to. They want to have some sort of an abort button so they can prevent that spend from going too crazy. I think being that trusted partner, being the person that takes finance team and follows our principles around explaining to finance teams why are we doing certain things, what is the rationale behind our AI? Making sure that you have a human in the loop that can choose, uh, the level of involvement that they want to have inside the transaction, personalizing the risk. So every client wants their own personalized level of appetite and risk tolerance and also allowing for distributed responsibility. Because finance teams, they're not the ones that always know the reason for why something is being spent. They want the responsibility to be distributed around the company to managers, to VPs, uh, and all of that. So being able to gain the finance team trust in order to execute all of that and bringing them from single explainable transactions to bulk transactions to full automation will allow us to be that partner for finance team that will allow them to have the way spend is going to be done three or five years from now.

Peter Renton: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. Yuval, really interesting chatting with you. Loved learning more about Navarn and best of luck to you. And as I said, the interesting times will continue.

Yuval Refua: Thank you very much.

Peter Renton: I loved how Yuval framed the whole expense problem. For decades we have made employees staple receipts and finance teams chase them down, all to answer one question. Was that $5 coffee in the company's interest? But as Yuval pointed out, that decision was already made long ago. Written in a PDF called the Company Policy, Navarn simply coded that policy onto the card itself, so the answer comes back the instant you swipe. It's a clever approach to solving this perennial problem, and it makes you wonder why we tolerated the old way for so long. Anyway, that's it for today's show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.