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

06/25/2026|Peter Renton

Yuval Refua is the Chief Product Officer at Navan, the global travel and expense platform he joined seven years ago when it was still just a travel booking service. Since then, he has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up, turning the company policy that used to live in a PDF into code that runs on the card itself. This conversation matters because T&E is one of the most universally disliked workflows in business, and Navan is rethinking it from scratch just as AI and agentic commerce start to reshape how companies spend.

What We Covered

Falling in love with credit cards at American Express
Why Navan started as a travel-only booking service
The reconciliation pain that led to launching a card
Coding company policy directly onto the card
Real-time approval the moment you swipe
Why travel-first beats procurement-first
Context as the key to managing distributed spend
Going global with VAT, GST, per diems and mileage
The e-invoicing wave hitting more countries
The GTA model for revealing complexity gradually
The Expense Admin Companion and recommended actions
From single approvals to bulk to full automation
The Visa partnership and the Connect product
Waymo for travelers, Formula One for finance

Key Takeaways

The expense report exists to answer a question that company policy already settled. Coding that policy onto the card removes the work instead of automating it.
Starting from travel gives Navan context (where the employee is, why they are there, who they are visiting) that procurement-first tools lack, which makes per-employee limits far smarter.
Going global is less about features and more about mastering country-by-country tax, e-invoicing, per diem and mileage rules.
The path to full automation runs through trust. Navan moves finance teams from a single recommended action, to bulk approvals, to hands-off automation, which is also how it intends to handle agentic spend.

About Yuval Refua

Yuval Refua is Chief Product Officer at Navan. He started two companies of his own early in his career before moving into fintech and product management at Thomson Reuters, then American Express, where he developed a deep love for credit cards and the rails behind them. He joined Navan around seven years ago and has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up.

Cleaned Transcript

Yuval (00:10): 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. We 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 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 is trying to optimize for saving one second in every lap. They’re trying to save for every dollar that they can save.

Peter (01:04): 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 Refua, the Chief Product Officer at Navan, the global travel and expense platform. Yuval came to Navan around seven years ago after building his product chops 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 Navan 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. In our conversation, we talk about how Navan 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 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.

Peter (02:28): Welcome to the podcast, Yuval.

Yuval (02:30): Thank you. Nice to be here.

Peter (02:32): Nice to have you. So let’s kick it off by giving us some of your 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 (02:45): Yeah, well, I mean, I did have two startups of my own when I was growing up, and I was going into the financial world, worked in S&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 at American Express, where I developed an actual love for credit cards and credit card rates. I know it sounds funny, but it’s one of those things, you know, you have some sort of a love for something that you really like and you really enjoy how it’s working. And Amex was a fantastic opportunity to understand the inner workings of everything and what you can build on top of it. And I think there are still endless solutions that you can build on top of credit cards in general.

Peter (03:33): So then what attracted you to Navan? What was the hook that got you to leave American Express?

Yuval (03:38): I mean, after a lot of time at American Express, I got a phone call from Navan about seven years ago. They were telling me about the travel product and 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 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 (04:29): Right. So when you arrived at Navan, there was no expense product. It was really just a travel booking service.

Yuval (04:36): Yep. Navan was a travel booking service, growing very, very fast. One of the first problems that we saw is we had clients that are booking with us and are using their credit card, you know, Citi, 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 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 painless reconciliation, which was a real pain point in the travel business.

Peter (05:28): 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 approach it? Like, when you arrived, was there a nascent product or did you really create this all from scratch?

Yuval (05:44): When I arrived, it was mostly a lot of company support people and CSMs that were helping clients to do that reconciliation.

Peter (05:54): So there wasn’t an expense product?

Yuval (05:57): No, there wasn’t an expense product. And it took a while for us to get to expensing. So we started by having just the payment product to support that reconciliation. And once we had a credit card solution in the market, users wanted to start using it. What happens if you’re checking out of a hotel and you want to pay at checkout? You don’t want to pay in advance. So you want to rent a card, 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 wanted to go into expensing as well to create a really good, fantastic expensing solution for our product.

Peter (06:51): Okay. So then you’ve got your expense management, your travel, obviously they work seamlessly together. So I’m starting to see Navan more and more in the fintech press and people talking about it. But for those who aren’t really all that familiar with Navan, why should someone who is in fintech be paying attention to what Navan is doing?

Yuval (07:13): Well, Navan is the only solution that was built from the ground up with 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 teams are doing, they actually spend eighty percent of their time chasing after those T&E expenses, even though they only account for twenty percent 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 Navan 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 expensed something, it allows your company to have the flexibility and the ability to go through that flow very, very fast and with a hundred percent accuracy.

Peter (08:21): Okay, so the T&E space you just talked about there, it’s been around for decades. There have been legacy players for a long time. Even some of the technology companies from the twentieth century have offerings like this. What was the shift that makes Navan necessary today?

Yuval (08:40): 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. The 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 a long time ago. It’s in a PDF document. It’s called the company policy. 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 a Navan 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 (09:58): And so there are the legacy players I just talked about. There are also the fintech players. There are fintech companies that started in expense management. And if they were here right now, they would argue that they are the DNA of expense management and they’ve expanded into travel. How are you different to the fintech companies that started with expense management?

Yuval (10:19): So most of the 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 a very contained problem. It usually involves a handful of trusted individuals in the company. And you can easily give an employee a 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 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 the employee is spending on, where the employee is, what the context is, who they are 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 (11:48): 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 gonna jump on a plane and go to Singapore. That’s just one example, obviously. But how are you adapting where you’ve got totally different types of needs from that person who’s changed their behavior?

Yuval (12:14): I think that’s exactly right. So there are a couple of things, both on the travel side and the expense side. And you’re right, T&E is dynamic, it’s highly variable. It involves 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 the policy is 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’s swiped, the expense is going through policy assessment. It collects all the information that we need. You don’t need to use separate tools, 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 (13:17): Yeah, 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 and I just asked him what he uses for T&E. He said we use Navan, and I asked him how his experience was, and that’s basically what you just said there. He does quite a bit of travel and he said the thing that was great is it all happens automatically. Is that sort of what you want? How are you positioning it so it’s better than what they have right now?

Yuval (13:49): 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’ll tell you, 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 teams. For finance teams, 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 traveler experience, but they still want to have everything within their control or 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 diems in Poland are different, and 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 visibility that companies want while still having a very easy, simple, fun experience for the traveler themselves, that’s the secret to our success.

Peter (15:37): 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? Are you in every country in the world as far as understanding what their rules and taxes and all that sort of thing are like? Or tell us about your global footprint.

Yuval (15:57): 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 diems and mileage on the expensing side, you can think about even the traveling side. There are 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 in reclamations they can have. So one of my recent favorites has been the changes in e-invoicing. That is a global thing that has now started happening a lot this year and is going to continue in September with a lot more countries coming online. Every country is different. Every country has their own e-invoicing solution. They’re all trying to solve the same thing. They’re all trying to solve the problem of how do I prevent 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. Those are some of the fun things that we’re working on.

Peter (17:14): Yeah. And I imagine it gets very complex, right? Because you’ve also got things like commuting deductions, which vary dramatically between countries. You’ve got local tax compliance. I mean, the tax compliance can be different between counties. How are you managing all of that?

Yuval (17:32): Yeah, I mean it gets very complex. It requires local expertise. It requires having the right setup. From our perspective, 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 cares 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 travel manager that cares about the experience of their employee and how to save costs 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, it’s funny, we call it the GTA model, Grand Theft Auto. I don’t know if you ever had a chance to play that game.

Peter (18:36): I have a nineteen year old son. I’m exposed to that game regularly.

Yuval (18:39): So the game is very simple, right? When you start GTA, you don’t really know how to do much. The 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, we expose those new functionalities. This is when we bring them on board, we show them 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 (19:30): So with that, I want to talk about the finance teams now that are working at your clients that are trying to make sense of all of what’s coming into and out of Navan. I was reading that they’ve got this Expense Admin Companion, which automates general ledger coding and policy checks. So what is the role of the human finance admin for a company that has implemented Navan?

Yuval (19:56): Yeah. So for finance admins, I believe that they want to be more productive as well. 2026, everybody’s talking about AI. 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, spending less time chasing after employees and managers, and worrying about the company’s strategic decisions and where the company is supposed to go. So what the Expense Admin Companion allows you to do is we try to learn how every specific company behaves, what their appetite is 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 in the expense companion is 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, 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. 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 that once we have one recommended action and we gain the trust of the finance team, or one suggested response and we gain the trust of the finance team, we can then move very quickly, with the finance team just saying, okay, I see a thousand transactions. I trust you already that you know me and you know my level of appetite for spend. 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 fast. And that really allows finance people to get away from the day-to-day management of expensing, chasing after receipts, chasing after employees, and focus on more strategic things.

Peter (23:09): So have you quantified how much time you’re saving the finance teams? What can you talk about there?

Yuval (23:16): I don’t have to guess. We’ve actually done a survey with Forrester Consulting recently and they came up with a return on investment of 376% with a payback period of less than six months. In terms of productivity, it’s about one point two million dollars in total productivity savings between finance teams and employees. We have 80% of employees’ time savings in submitting expenses. And 40% in finance and accounting time in terms of managing and reconciling expenses. Actually, one of my favorite stats is a very micro-level stat. 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 is one employee went in, basically took 26 receipts, dropped them in the chat, and successfully submitted 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 (24:42): 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 tease that out a little bit more when you say AI-powered? I presume it’s more than just that expense chat that you’re talking about?

Yuval (25:01): It goes back to what Navan is, right? We’re a global AI-powered business travel and expense platform. 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 how we build all of 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 actually provides the right value for the users, in a way that people actually enjoy using them, that people save time, that people save money. Because you’re using your AI product, we hold ourselves to a very high standard when it comes to releasing those AI solutions.

Peter (26:08): 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 (26:22): 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 closely on a product 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. You can bring in whatever card you want and we’ll connect it to our platform in a way that it behaves like a Navan card. It still goes through the same approvals, the same reviews and everything else in it. So Visa is a true partner for building everything that we’re doing.

Peter (27:28): So we’ve talked a lot about expenses, but we haven’t talked much about payments yet. And I’d love to get where you’re innovating inside Navan on payments.

Yuval (27:40): 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, and sometimes it’s all about explaining why the expense happened, and how can you bring that into 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 policy is assessed in real time. And the second piece, another thing that we’re doing in the payments world, is we’re heavily investing this year on going global and exposing more currencies in more places for our customers, and really connecting all of that into that one global experience with full visibility and controls for finance teams.

Peter (28:31): We live in interesting times and I 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 form factors. So where do you see the travel and expense space heading in the next, say, three to five years?

Yuval (28:56): If we stay focused on our principles, it’s kind of easy to see where the world is going. So if you think about it from an expensing perspective, on the user side, what the users are looking for is automation and simplicity and for things to be done for them. We call that the Waymo experience. We don’t care how you get there, you just want to get there. 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 done automatically for you so they’re out of the way. For finance teams, it’s very, very different. It’s 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 they’re being spent, who’s out of policy, who’s in policy, and then they’re also looking for full control. They want to be able to steer the wheel and optimize, like a Formula One is trying to optimize for saving one second in every lap. They’re trying to save every dollar that they can save. So that means having control over the spend. When we’re talking about agentic commerce, that is obviously coming, right? Agents are going to come in, they’re going to start spending money on behalf of companies. Finance teams 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 and certain agents not to come in, to block them. And they really want to control all of that spend, and also being able to stop things the second they want to, right? 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 one that takes finance teams and follows our principles around explaining to finance teams why we are doing certain things, what is the rationale behind our AI, making sure that you have a human in the loop that can choose 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 aren’t always the ones that know the reason for why something is being spent. They want the responsibility to be distributed around the company to managers, to VPs, and all of that. So being able to gain the finance team’s 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 that will allow them to spend the way spend is going to be done three or five years from now.

Peter (31:57): Okay, we’ll have to leave it there, Yuval. Really interesting chatting with you. Loved learning more about Navan, and best of luck to you, and as you said, the interesting times will continue.

Yuval (32:07): Thank you very much.

Peter (32:14): 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. Navan 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.

Navan, card data, credit cards, expense management, travel