Navan launched its payments product for current customers, but the rebound in business travel led to increased demand from unsolicited prospects — so the team needed to fortify its risk management strategy

Navan is an all-in-one travel, corporate card, and expense solution designed for both finance teams and employees.

This fast-growing company started as a travel and expense solution, but introduced their payments product, Navan Expense, in 2020 to become a one-stop shop for its customers. 

Initially, the company only sold the new product to current customers who were already using Navan. But with the rebound in business travel at the beginning of 2022, Navan Expense started getting more interest from unsolicited prospects outside of the current customer base. 

“When any business adds a payments offering, that comes with more risk because now you're taking on short-term credit risk with customers,” Sr. Director & Head of Risk Management Rajat Bhatia explained. 
“And when you have a quickly growing business, adding controls and risk management can slow down or impede that growth. So we needed to find a way to manage risk while maintaining the momentum in our business.” 

Thankfully, Rajat, a seasoned financial services leader, had been brought on board in 2021 to build the risk management ecosystem from the ground up.

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Rajat went looking for a solution that his team could start using to review documents immediately 

Out of all the various solutions Rajat and his team looked at, Inscribe was the only one they would be able to use right out of the box. That meant they could get started right away using Inscribe’s web app while they waited for their engineering team to integrate the API. 

“We had a team of risk management and operations people who needed to be able to screen customer documents immediately,” Rajat said. “And Inscribe gave us the flexibility to do that. Because we were able to use the web app for those customer documents, Inscribe was able to help us prevent fraud on day one.” 

Rajat said that one of the major motivators for choosing Inscribe over other vendors (in addition to the fact that his team was able to start using the solution right away) was the integrations with solutions like Alloy and Lendflow. 

Now, Rajat’s team uses Inscribe as part of the KYC/KYB process to ensure that prospects coming through the door are valid business entities. When the initial automated KYB checks put up a red flag or even fail, they ask for additional documentation like a bank statement, utility bill, or IRS tax document from the business to validate their EIN or legal presence. Those documents are then checked by Inscribe for signs of tampering or manipulation. 

If a customer is deemed legitimate during the onboarding process, then the underwriting team begins reviewing documents to assess credit risk. They use Inscribe for this process, as well. If a bank statement wasn’t collected during onboarding, they’ll ask for one the during underwriting process and use Inscribe to verify the document’s authenticity. 

Rajat enabled his organization to expand their total addressable market for their payments product while intelligently managing risk

Rajat believes that one of the key elements of being a risk management leader is to never be complacent. 

“Everyone in the industry needs to keep evolving, because the adversary — the people trying to commit fraud — are smarter, better resourced, and more creative than we can even imagine,” he said. 

Because Navan works primarily with businesses, Rajat said that Inscribe saves them $100,000 or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each time a fraudulent document is detected. 

“The platform pays for itself,” he said.