Built for the Unexpected: Reclaiming Spend Visibility in a Volatile Market (Edited Transcript)

Housekeeping & Introductions

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
Hi, everyone. We’ll give a few more seconds for folks to join, and then we’ll get started.

All right—looks like we’re at quorum. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining “Built for the Unexpected: Reclaiming Spend Visibility in a Volatile Market.”

A few quick housekeeping notes:

• We’re recording today’s session, and you’ll receive the replay afterward—so no need to jot down everything on the slides.
• As we go, feel free to drop questions into the Q&A box at any time. We’ve reserved about the last 15 minutes for Q&A, and our team backstage may also respond as questions come in.

Today we’ll talk about what’s happening to corporate spend right now—and what the best-run finance and travel teams are doing in response.

Here’s the core problem: the travel you’re budgeting for today won’t cost what you think by the time it’s actually booked. That’s the reality of corporate spend right now, and it’s quietly breaking the way finance teams plan.

Poll #1

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
Quick poll to start: How confident are you in your travel spend forecast for next quarter? Go ahead and respond—we’ll come back to it.

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
Before we go too far, I’ll introduce myself. I’m Sean Callanan, and I lead the travel product at Navaan. I’ve been in travel nearly my whole life—my family ran a small bed-and-breakfast in upstate New York, so I was the toddler running towels to guests.

In my day-to-day work now, I support travel programs ranging from the largest enterprises to small businesses. I’m joined by Greg—I’ll let him introduce himself.

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Thanks, Sean. Hi, everyone—I’m Greg Komoski, Director of Solutions Consulting at Brex. I haven’t been in travel my whole life like Sean, but I’ve been working in T&E software (travel and expense) for the last 17 years. Before that, I worked in process improvements and internal audit at a Fortune 10 company.

For the last 17 years, I’ve been working with large strategic organizations to guide them in modernizing spend programs and creating efficiencies.

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
Awesome—thanks, Greg. To understand why forecasting is so hard to trust right now, I’ll pass it to Greg to set the scene.

What’s Breaking Forecast Accuracy: External Forces

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Right now, there are forces hitting your budget from outside your organization—things you can’t control. And there are internal forces squeezing you too—things you can control.

Let’s start with the external pressures.

Tariffs and Capacity Constraints

Tariffs had a negative impact. While many have been reduced and may not be impacting day-to-day pricing right now, they can have longer-term effects. When tariffs were introduced, some airlines canceled aircraft orders because tariffs increased the cost of raw goods needed to build and maintain planes—steel, aluminum parts, and maintenance inputs.

That reduced expected capacity. And in a supply-and-demand world, less capacity + higher demand for seats = higher prices.

Fuel Price Volatility

Another pressure we’re all feeling is fuel. You can see it every time you pass a gas station—the price changes constantly.

Airlines experience the same. A few weeks ago, Delta’s CEO noted a $2B hit to quarterly budget driven by fuel costs tied to conflict in the Middle East. Delta expected to pass along 10–15% increases to customers to offset those costs.

These are external forces you can’t reliably forecast into a traditional budgeting process.

Foreign Exchange (FX) Volatility

FX volatility is the cleanest example if you run a global program. Currency moves hit you on every cross-border transaction.

FX doesn’t show up as one obvious line item. It erodes your budget one transaction at a time—and compounds:

• A trip approved in one currency settles in another weeks later
• Supplier invoices shift
• Card FX fees accumulate

Small percentages become real money when scaled across global spend.

Pricing Algorithms & Revenue Management Are Moving Faster Than Budgets

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
On top of that, revenue management has evolved dramatically.

Airlines used to have about 26 price points per flight and updated pricing a few times a week. Now, pricing is dynamic and continuous, with much more flexibility and more frequent changes.

And it’s not just airlines. Across travel verticals, revenue management systems—including AI-driven approaches (not only large language models)—are recalculating prices at enormous scale.

One travel provider is recalculating prices up to 168 million times per minute. That changes everything.

As a result:

• “Best time to book” has changed—or disappeared
• The same hotel room can appear under multiple rate plans and change constantly
• Post-booking price drops are more common
• Budgeting off last year’s numbers becomes extremely difficult

I’ll pass it back to Greg.

Internal Pressure: Expensive Capital, Lean Teams, Higher Expectations

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Everything we covered so far is outside your control. You can’t call the Fed, argue with pricing algorithms running millions of times, or stop a currency from moving.

So let’s flip the camera around to what you can control inside finance.

Cost of Capital Has Changed

In 2021, money was effectively cheap—near-zero rates. You could absorb volatility. That’s not true anymore.

CFOs are reacting—not by blindly cutting, but by reallocating:

• 52% are redirecting operating expenses/investments
• 46% are redirecting capital expenditures

Zero-based budgeting is back. Vendor negotiations are back. When capital is expensive, every dollar of leaked or unmanaged spend hurts more than it did three years ago.

Spend Shifts + Hiring Constraints

Hiring is frozen at many companies. Finance teams can’t add headcount, but the workload keeps growing—classic “do more with less.”

Budgets are shifting into T&E (due to higher travel costs and software spend), but fewer people are available to manage it.

Tooling Gaps: Spreadsheets and Manual Close

Many teams are still using:

• File exports
• Spreadsheets
• Manual matching during month-end close

Month-end close can take days. CFOs cite siloed departments and outdated tools as major obstacles to cost management.

When you can’t add people, your leverage is visibility and automation.

And expectations are up: leadership wants faster close, real-time answers, and “AI-level efficiency” from teams already underwater.

AI: Raising the Bar (and Providing Leverage)

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
Adoption of AI varies by industry and job function. The pace is fast, and it can feel overwhelming—new tools, new workflows.

But we’re seeing that teams embracing these technologies are finding major benefits:

• Automating custom travel spend reporting that previously took hours, now minutes
• Improving underlying travel data mapping (for example, mapping rates across multiple lodging sources to a single real-world hotel room)

Greg Komoski (Brex):
AI has raised the bar on both sides. It powers dynamic pricing externally—and it also creates efficiency internally.

The world now moves faster than quarterly processes can handle. In many cases, quarterly forecasting doesn’t work anymore—you need something closer to daily forecasting.

Teams pulling ahead are using automation to see and control spend in real time. Data is your greatest asset, and using it to make real-time decisions is how you gain an advantage in forecasting.

What “Real-Time Visibility and Control” Looks Like

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
If the answer is real-time visibility and control, what does that mean in practice?

Leading companies do three things. Before we jump in, we have another poll.

Poll #2

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
How many separate tools does your team use to manage travel and expense today? Answer on your screen and we’ll talk through it.

You can’t control what you don’t see. Most teams can’t see clearly because:

• Travel lives in one tool
• Cars in another
• Expense in a third

Data lands in three places, and nothing reconciles until month-end. By the time you spot a problem, the money is already gone. Every disconnected tool is a blind spot.

Consolidation isn’t about fewer logins—it’s about one source of truth so data aligns and you can act.

Many companies treat policy as a document. People ignore it and finance cleans it up after the fact.

The shift is enforcing policy in real time—at booking, at the point of spend—so out-of-policy spend is caught before it happens. You can set dynamic guardrails by team and trip context without requiring a human to approve every action.

Savings aren’t only at booking: recouping unused tickets adds up.

One example: Canva moved to an all-in-one setup, and 94% of bookings now come in-policy. Policy stops being something people work around and becomes an automatic guardrail.

Finally, controlling travel costs starts before the card is swiped—it starts with the inventory a traveler sees at search.

At Navaan, we connect to a wide variety of global content sources, including 40+ direct supplier connections, to ensure:

1. travelers can book what they need without going off-platform, and
2. the company gets the lowest possible price.

On average, Navaan customers see about a 16% reduction in travel spend.

But travel is only one slice. What happens when you connect it with the card in the employee’s pocket and the month-end close? I’ll pass to Greg.

Why the Gaps Between Systems Create Blind Spots

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Historically, blind spots come from one root cause: everything lives in separate systems.

The old model: a lodging card / ghost card is plugged into the TMC. Transactions settle. At month-end you reconcile the statement back to trips, travelers, and accounting codes—often in Excel with pivot tables.

That process is time-consuming and creates hundreds of hours of manual work:

• matching the trip
• matching the traveler
• coding the transaction
• feeding data into the ERP

Global programs add more complexity with currency conversion and FX fees: you book in one currency, settle in another, and the mismatch makes one-to-one reconciliation harder.

So what works better?

The promise of Brex + Navaan is a simplified workflow with visibility and control across the three areas we discussed.

How Brex + Navaan Work Together (Integrated Payments + Travel)

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
It starts with the shopping journey—making sure travelers can see the content they need so they don’t go to consumer sites to book off-platform.

Then policy is applied dynamically in-platform—reflecting market rates and your policy structure (including destination tiering and caps).

That creates a seamless traveler experience from search to booking to managing changes and cancellations—because business travel changes.

All of that connects to Brex to bring it under one roof, giving you one view of spend rather than stitching it together at month-end.

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Practically, it works like this: for each travel booking, a virtual card is created in Brex for that transaction and tied back to the trip.

That enables seamless reconciliation: transaction → trip → traveler, with traveler details and coding captured automatically.

This eliminates the old “dump a lodge card into a booking tool and reconcile later” workflow.

It also improves global coverage: with this partnership you get 60+ countries and 30+ currencies, which helps reduce FX fees by aligning the card currency with the booking/spend currency (for example, avoiding giving Canadian employees USD cards for CAD spend).

That’s both cost reduction and operational efficiency.

Customer Outcomes

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
One example: Penn Group reduced monthly reconciliation time by 73%, saving about 62 hours per month across the company.

Employees went from spending about 2 hours on expense reports to 30 minutes.

A travel and expense program should let employees spend time on value-generating work—and free finance teams from manual stitching and reporting so they can meet higher expectations.

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Another example: Scale AI. Their VP of Finance said:

“Brex Pay for Navaan represents the highest level of achievement in global integrated payments. It brings the best of both worlds together and allows us to spend more time focused on scaling and innovating.”

Also, SeatGeek cut T&E costs by 50% and automated nearly 100% of accounting entries with Brex.

Legacy platforms are reactive. Modern platforms drive cost out in real time—with upfront controls and card controls at the point of swipe—creating compounding savings.

Companies that unify spend and travel control costs better than those stitching tools together. In today’s environment—expensive capital and lean teams—the gap compounds quickly.

Q&A

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
We’ll move into Q&A now. Add questions in the Q&A section and upvote the ones you want us to answer first.

Q: How do you differentiate versus competitors?

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
At the core, both Brex and Navaan provide industry-leading capabilities across travel, expense, and cards—packaged under one roof. You don’t need to manage many tools or spend hours reconciling data at month-end. You also don’t need to compromise your travel policy due to tool limitations. This increases efficiency, improves control, and drives higher platform adoption by travelers.

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Brex is built from the ground up and built directly into the Mastercard network, giving control and scalability. That lets us innovate faster because we aren’t reliant on processing partners.

Also, with the recent acquisition by (and integration with) Capital One, we’re in a strong financial position with a long-term trajectory to support customers.

Q: We already have corporate cards and a booking tool—why change?

Greg Komoski (Brex):
It’s not the cost of the tools—it’s the gaps between them where manual reconciliation and blind spots live.

The evaluation is: are your tools working together seamlessly? Is spend visible in real time? Many legacy platforms have transaction delays because they rely on clearinghouses or file feeds.

Brex, being directly integrated into the Mastercard network, provides real-time transaction visibility—improving the end-user and finance experience.

Q: How fast can this go live?

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
From the Navaan side, implementations and integrations can go live in as little as 30–60 days.

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Similarly on the Brex side—underwriting happens in real time. International card rollouts can be complex, especially in EMEA, but Brex simplifies that. Many customers go live with the full platform in around 60 days.

Q: How does policy enforcement at the point of swipe work?

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
Your travel policy is loaded into the booking tool so controls are enforced during booking. Then, at the point of swipe, that policy is also available on the card the traveler uses.

If a transaction is out of policy, the traveler is given a reason. If it’s approved, it goes through. The process is automated.

Closing

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
We’re out of time. If you take one thing away today: in the real world, the winners aren’t the ones who predict better—they’re the ones who can see and control spend as it happens.

We’ll send out the recording, and we’ll follow up on remaining questions. Thanks for joining, and Greg—great chatting with you today.

Greg Komoski (Brex):
Thank you, everyone.

Sean Callanan (Navaan):
Thanks, everyone.