Navan is a cloud-based platform that manages travel and expense (T&E) for businesses. Founded in the US in 2015, it rapidly expanded to Europe and Asia. Today, Navan's services are available in more than 50 markets, supporting hundreds of thousands of business travelers from companies like Ancestry, Box, Pinterest, Twilio, and Zoom.

Bringing corporate travel on par with consumer expectations

The corporate T&E sector has a reputation for being dated and inefficient. Incumbent solutions can be slow and involve manual offline processes. Because consumer platforms are more user-friendly, 50 percent of today’s business travelers still “go rogue” when booking travel, according to a 2021 guide, making expenses much harder for businesses to manage.

Navan was founded to eliminate the challenges associated with travel and expense management. It gives business travelers around the world a modern booking platform, extensive inventory, and personalized support. With only a few clicks, employees can book their travel and deal with all of their expenses covering everything from hotel bookings to home office equipment. And their employer can access sophisticated reporting tools to manage spending at scale and in real time.

Improving traveler experiences and spend management

Effective payment management is fundamental to Navan’s success. Business travelers must be able to pay as easily as possible, regardless of their location, preferred payment method, or currency. And partners around the world must receive their funds seamlessly. From day one, Navan chose Stripe to help its customers manage spend without having to build and run its own financial platform.

“That’s the beauty of Stripe. You can move a lot faster than you could with traditional players,” said Robin Gandhi, SVP of Product and Payments at Navan. “If we had to build the platform on our own, it would have taken us considerably more time.”

In 2020, Zoom became the de facto global video conferencing tool overnight. By deploying Navan, Zoom’s T&E management and reconciliation went from expensive, cumbersome and time-consuming to competitive, simple and fast.

“Behind the scenes, Stripe plays a vital role, acting as the universal connector which enables all of the flows of money to move seamlessly between businesses around the world, regardless of where the payment was made or where the service was fulfilled,” said Gandhi.

Accelerating global expansion and innovation

By connecting to Stripe’s global payments infrastructure, Navan is able to operate in new markets while easily accepting local currencies. Navan also benefits from the expansion of Stripe’s product portfolio. When Issuing was launched in 2019, Navan saw it as an opportunity to eliminate expense reports entirely. In just a few days, it was able to build Liquid, a solution providing real-time visibility, automated reporting, and an offering of smart physical and virtual cards with built-in controls. Companies that use Liquid are able to easily manage their employees’ expenses programmatically, reducing reconciliation from weeks to under an hour.

Speaking of Liquid’s success, Gandhi added, “Liquid has doubled in growth every month since its launch in 2020 and has already issued nearly 400,000 cards around the world. We’re grateful to Stripe for helping to power this growth as we continue to transform the T&E industry.”