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.

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This episode is part of our occasional Fintech Revealed series, where we do an extended deep dive into one topic with two industry experts. The topic today is vertical fintech, and I am joined by Matt Hennessy, the Business Lead at Increase, the modern banking infrastructure company, and Jamie Fox, the General Manager of Fintech at Tekion, the AI-native cloud platform that runs the entire business for auto dealerships across the US, Canada, and the UK.

Tekion built its embedded banking on Increase, so the two of them give us both sides of the same story: the platform that lives inside the dealership and the infrastructure that connects it to the banking system. We get into the surprisingly large money flows inside a single dealership, why paper checks still beat instant rails for many operators, how compliance and trust get engineered into the product, and just how big this embedded banking opportunity gets.

What We Covered

• What vertical fintech is and why it matters now
• The money flows hiding inside a single car dealership
• Why outbound dealer spend is roughly 2x inbound
• Operating account vs. ledgering account adoption paths
• Dealer-to-dealer payments as a ledger change with zero rail fees
• Instant rails: RTP, FedNow, and Request for Payment
• The persistence of paper checks and the cost to operationalize them
• Direct Fed access vs. layers of middleware
• Compliance as code, codified into the product
• Building trust in building blocks
• Where agentic payments and "know your agent" fit in
• How large the embedded banking opportunity ultimately gets

Key Takeaways

• Owning the financial system of record inside core operating software is the defensible position in an age when light "systems of engagement" can be replicated with AI.
• Outbound payments, not inbound, are the bigger prize: US auto dealerships pushed out roughly $1.3 trillion in 2024, about 2x what they took in.
• The barrier to instant rails is education, not technology. Many dealers do not know RTP or FedNow exists, or that they can pay a vendor any day of the week.
• Trust cannot be launched all at once. Holding a dealer's operating cash is a different level of trust than processing a payment they can fall back on, and it is earned in building blocks.

For the founding story and more about Increase, check out my conversation with CEO and Founder Darragh Buckley from last year.

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Elliott Lorenz took an unusual path into consumer lending, moving from applied mathematics and high-frequency trading into the business of pricing credit risk. Today he is the CEO and co-founder of Edge Focus, a technology-enabled private credit firm that sits between consumer lending platforms and the institutional investors who want to deploy capital into the asset class. In this episode, Elliott explains how the firm's credit engine works, why speed is its biggest edge, and how he reads the recent wave of criticism aimed at private credit.

What We Covered

• From engineering and applied math to high-frequency trading
• What Michael Lewis's Flash Boys got right and wrong about HFT
• Spotting an edge in LendingClub's public loan data
• Turning a data-science hobby into Edge Focus
• The Origin credit engine and how it makes decisions
• Expanding a lender's credit box with an orthogonal view of credit
• Modeling with a single month of payment history
• Updating a credit model within a day
• The Lens portfolio analytics tool
• Where alpha comes from beyond the underwriting model
• Fraud and asset liability mismatch in private credit
• Building the EDGEX ABS shelf and partnering with Fortress
• Proving ML models are free from bias
• Where consumer lending goes over the next few years

Key Takeaways

• Edge Focus competes less on having a single better model and more on combining technology, capital, and platform relationships in one package, which Elliott calls the firm's "big unlock."
• The firm can incorporate even a single month of payment history into its models and push an update within a day, letting it react to macro shifts faster than firms that wait 12 to 24 months for data.
• Most of the recent private credit criticism falls into two buckets, fraud and asset liability mismatch, and Elliott sees the fraud cases as largely idiosyncratic and the redemption problems as a function of investors misjudging illiquid assets.
• Because Edge Focus invests its own capital alongside partners rather than acting as a pure technology vendor, its incentives are tied directly to loan performance.

About Elliott Lorenz

Elliott Lorenz is the CEO and co-founder of Edge Focus, a technology-enabled private credit firm focused on consumer lending. He trained as an engineer and applied mathematician, earned a master's in finance from Princeton, and spent several years in high-frequency trading before bringing those modeling techniques into consumer credit in 2013.

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