Ping Identity wins back travellers and achieves +45 NPS with Navan

Region

NORAM: North America, APAC: Asia-Pacific, EMEA: Europe, Middle East, and Africa

Headquarters

Denver, Colorado

Industry

Tech

Products Used

• Navan Business Travel
• Navan Expense
• Navan Travel Payments

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Ping Identity, a leading provider of identity security solutions, protects enterprises and their users across the globe. With offices in the UK, U.S., and Singapore, the company has experienced rapid, exponential growth while scaling its global operations.

Travel is critical to Ping Identity’s success; it enables face-to-face customer engagements, sales meetings, and strategic events that drive revenue generation. The company needed a modern travel and expense solution that could keep pace with its growth.

It also needed to win employee hearts and minds. By 2024, Ping Identity’s workforce had almost abandoned the company’s travel platform. Years of issues had eroded trust, leading employees to book off-platform rather than struggle with unreliable technology. 

To avoid losing control of its travel program, the company had to rebuild credibility and prove that corporate travel could be truly seamless.

Before Navan

Ping Identity was managing travel through legacy systems that could not keep pace with the company’s growth. The limitations weren’t just frustrating; they were impacting operations and driving employees away from the platform.

A System In Crisis

“We had issues with failed bookings,” recalls Matthew Row, director of controllership business services, who took over the finance operations team in 2024. “We often had to find workarounds to make sure they would go through.”

Booking failures were just the tip of the iceberg. When Row worked with business leaders to assess the situation, they identified a 38-point improvement plan detailing critical failures across the travel program. 

Inventory Gaps and Pricing Problems

Perhaps the most significant obstacle to user adoption was the platform’s limited inventory, particularly for low-cost carriers outside the U.S. Employees often couldn’t find the flights they needed; when they could, prices were higher than the open market.

“When the price difference is huge, you just can’t justify forcing people to use the system,” said Jason Jago, procurement manager.

Administrative Burden and Lost Visibility

For Viktoria Rethly, accounts assistant responsible for travel and expense administration, the daily reality was exhausting. “It was completely manual and repetitive work,” she recalls. “Every booking had to be submitted and reviewed manually. Due to all the issues with the legacy platforms, the volume of queries and frustrations was much higher.”

Rethly had to spend at least two hours every day on travel administration alone. For Row, the impact extended to leadership bandwidth: “I was managing up to 10 urgent travel issues every day,” he says.

The lack of real-time visibility meant the finance team couldn’t proactively manage travel spend. “We had no visibility at all,” Jago confirms. “Finance wasn’t part of the approval process. We’d only see what had been spent after the fact.”

“

Navan stood out immediately. It was just miles ahead of absolutely every other platform we looked at. You go from something clunky to something very smooth. The transformation is massive.

Matthew Row

Senior Director of Controllership Business Services

Why Ping Identity chose Navan

When Row initiated a comprehensive review of travel and expense solutions, one criterion mattered more than anything else: winning back employees’ trust.

“Our number one priority by an absolute mile was user experience,” Row explains. “We had to win over the business, because if we didn’t, we’d never achieve compliance. Everything else became irrelevant if people wouldn't use it.”

After years of frustration with legacy systems, employees were understandably sceptical of any new platform. Any proposed solution needed to be intuitive and effective enough to overcome that resistance and rebuild trust.

Technology-First, Not Legacy-First

As a technology company experiencing rapid growth, Ping Identity needed a partner that approached travel from a modern perspective. “Other TMCs came at it from the wrong angle,” Row says. “They were old-school legacy providers who’d introduced technology, not a provider that put technology first. The latter is what we really needed.”

“Navan stood out immediately. It was just miles ahead of absolutely every other platform we looked at,” Row adds. “You go from something clunky to something very smooth. The transformation is massive.”

Inventory and Pricing Parity

To banish the ghosts of inventory gaps and pricing disparities, Ping Identity needed comprehensive travel options at competitive rates. Navan’s extensive inventory and market-competitive pricing were essential to bringing travelers back to using the platform. Without inventory and pricing that matched or beat what employees could find themselves, no amount of policy enforcement would succeed. The platform had to earn trust through performance.

Support and Scalability

The team also prioritized responsive support with the capacity to scale as Ping Identity continued to grow and acquire companies. “The mobile app, the ability to get quick responses from chat services, all of the tech-first features that make it real for people — that was critical,” Row explains.

Implementation: Best-in-Class Among Nine System Changes

Ping Identity has implemented nine different systems over the past three years, giving the team extensive experience with technology rollouts. Navan’s implementation stood apart.

“This is by far my favorite implementation,” Row declares. “It was so simple. The organized approach and templates took it to the next level. You just get a list of things you need to do, this is how we do it, away we go. It was a different class to anything else we’ve had.”

Measuring Satisfaction: From 1 to 4.5 out of 5

To quantify the impact, Row surveyed key stakeholders before and after implementation, using the same questions and scoring matrix. The results proved that Ping Identity had achieved its goal of winning back travelers: Internal satisfaction scores jumped from 1 out of 5 to 4.5 out of 5. Net Promoter Score reached +45 — compared to Row’s estimate of -45 under the previous system.

“

The volume of queries has massively decreased because Navan’s support is so helpful, and employees can be self-sufficient on the platform.

Viktoria Rethly

Accounts Assistant

Time Savings: Two Hours Daily Returned to Productivity

For Rethly, the transformation has been life-changing. “I save at least two hours per day — maybe more when you add up all the incoming queries and questions,” she shares.

Row’s experience mirrors this efficiency. “I’ve gone from managing up to 10 urgent travel issues a day to having none,” he says. “It’s a combination of Rethly being amazing, but also actually being able to work within a system that allows her to do her job properly.”

Navan Travel Payments: Real-Time Visibility and Accountability

Navan Travel Payments eliminated another major pain point: employees having to use personal credit cards for company travel. “We never had a card solution, so everybody had to expense everything on their personal cards,” Row explains. 

Beyond employee experience, Navan Travel Payments transformed financial management. “Travel Payments gave us real-time visibility into every booking and transaction,” Jago says. “It made reporting simpler and removed friction from our reconciliation process.”

For the first time, Ping Identity gained true departmental accountability. “We never had that departmental breakdown of spend before. The accountability was very hard to track,” Jago shares. “Now we can see right away which departments are spending, and we know who to ask for context.”

“

We’re a fast-paced, fast-growth company. Sometimes things need to happen really quickly. The fact that people can request a purchase card and have it fully approved within an hour is amazing.

Jason Jago

Procurement Manager

Smart Features Supporting Fast-Paced Growth

Navan’s flexible payment features have proven particularly valuable for Ping Identity’s rapid growth. “The purchase card feature has been really helpful,” Jago explains.

Recurring virtual cards simplify subscription management, while the notification system proactively alerts the team to potential issues. “If the company card balance is running low, we get notified, so we can proactively move money,” Rethly says. “It’s not like before, where travelers were frustrated because their booking didn’t go through. We don’t have to reactively approach it. That was a game-changer.”

Substantial Financial Benefits

“Beyond time savings and user satisfaction, we’ve already seen very significant financial benefits,” Row reports. The combination of better pricing, policy compliance, reduced off-platform bookings, and administrative efficiency has generated meaningful ROI.

Looking To the Future

As Ping Identity continues to expand through growth and acquisitions, Navan provides the scalable foundation needed to support them on their journey.

“Every time we wanted to expand to another region, we used to face a business case and months of painful implementation,” Row explains. “With Navan, we’ve got the ability to massively scale, which is absolutely huge for us.” Now, the team can focus on leveraging Navan’s analytics and dashboards for more proactive travel programme management. “As we learn more about the data, we can start using it better,” Jago says. “We want to get to more real-time analysis rather than just month-end.” The vision extends to strategic supplier relationships. “We’re looking at how we can use Navan’s analytics even more strategically — identifying travel patterns to negotiate better rates, securing enhanced partnerships with preferred suppliers, and continuing to optimize our program as we grow,” Row shares.

“We’ve built a travel and expense program that scales with us, supports our people brilliantly, and gives finance the control and insight we need,” Row concludes. “Navan has been the right partner at every stage of our growth."