Background / Problem
Founded in 2015, Navan (formerly known as TripActions) is an all-in-one travel and expense management super app that makes travel easy, providing finance teams and travel managers with optimal visibility, cost savings, and control. The company has over 8,000 customers and over 2,000 employees.
Like many customer-centric software companies, Navan decided to branch into embedded finance and build on its travel and expense management software by offering its customers a corporate card offering. Combining travel payments and the workflows that depend on those payments just makes sense, as businesses can stay on top of payments and expense reports in one place.
The rollout required Navan to fund the corporate card purchases, and to do that, it needed to raise an asset-backed credit facility from Goldman Sachs. When Navan raised debt capital, the company's finance team needed to manage a large asset-backed credit facility for the first time, which brought new data, operational, and reporting challenges.
Financial operations at a software company, of course, are quite different than financial operations at a financial technology, corporate card, or lending company.
For instance, Navan needed to be able to programmatically generate an accurate, comprehensive borrowing base every time it needed to draw money from its credit facility. In addition, it needed to start tracking financial and portfolio metrics in order to comply with debt covenants.
In short, Navan sought to streamline its capital markets operations and make the most of its credit facility, but without slowing down the rest of the business or having to spend time hiring new team members, since the cost of either of these routes could have stretched into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Solution
Working with Finley's Capital Markets team, Navan was able to digitize its credit agreement and use that information as a sort of "configuration file" for automating the rest of credit facility operations. That means that when Navan's Finance team clicks "Submit Funding Request" in Finley, it can be certain that the outputs of the funding request have been checked for accuracy, as well as compliance with credit agreement stipulations.
As part of the implementation, Finley successfully connected with Navan's existing card processor, data and analytics tool, and financial reporting systems. These data integrations ensure that Navan's analytics and reports are always up to date, and that Finley can serve as a capital markets "source of truth."
Today, Finley functions as air traffic control for Navan's credit facility management. It helps the Finance team access money, stay on top of key reports and transactions, and centralizes all key documentation and risk information in a single platform.
Impact
Since launching with Finley, the Navan team has been able to:
- Save dozens of hours monthly by executing accurate funding requests to Goldman Sachs with a few clicks
- Mitigate the risk of losing access to capital by having views of covenant, financial, and other types of capital risk
- Stay focused on ensuring the growth of TripActions Liquid, rather than having to worry about funding the program
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