Beyond the booking: How Navan scaled global card issuing with embedded finance

For most business travelers, a trip ends when they get home. For corporate finance teams, that’s when the real work begins—reconciling receipts, matching expenses and enforcing spend policies across multiple disparate systems. Since 2015, Navan has built its platform around simplifying corporate travel. But as the company scaled globally, it realized that booking a flight or hotel was only half the job. Finance teams needed real-time visibility into spend, while travelers expected a seamless payment experience from reservation to reimbursement. To solve this challenge, Navan partnered with Adyen, a global financial technology platform, to bring multi-currency card issuing directly in-house. Key impact at a glance - €1B+ in transaction volume on Visa cards issued together across the US, UK and EU - 3,800+ enterprise customers onboarded across nine markets - 99.9% transaction success rate The challenge: scaling without multiplying complexity As Navan expanded from a travel booking platform into a full travel, expense and payments solution, launching a global card program became central to their strategy. However, scaling internationally meant navigating complex local regulations, separate banking relationships, multiple currencies and strict compliance obligations. Building a fragmented solution for every new region simply wasn't sustainable. "The risk of not getting this right was losing trust with our customers," explains Yuval Refua, Chief Product Officer at Navan. "If a traveler checks into a hotel in the middle of the night and their corporate card doesn’t work, that is a big problem. Embedding issuing capabilities into the Navan platform gives us greater control over the customer experience and allows us to solve that for our customers." Less complexity with one financial stack Rather than coordinating with multiple local banking partners in every region, Navan leveraged Adyen’s single financial infrastructure to access multi-currency card issuing, automated KYC and account funding through a single integration. "Having Adyen show me a unified platform that I can code against, that I can work with and that exposes all those geographies and currencies for us in real time, is priceless," says Refua. "It makes every market look exactly the same and allows us to run." By consolidating global issuing onto one platform, Navan’s customers gained unprecedented spend control. Because transactions process in real time, finance leaders can monitor spend as it happens, enforce policy controls right at authorization and eliminate the headache of post-trip expense reconciliation. Turning a cost center into a value engine Bringing card issuing in-house didn't just improve spend visibility—it fundamentally shifted Navan's business model. Traditional payment processing is often treated as an operational expense. By embedding financial products directly into its platform, Navan turned expense management into a core value driver and revenue generator. Between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, the partnership achieved massive scale: - Surpassed €1B in issued card volume across Visa programs in the US, UK and EU. - Maintained a 99.9% transaction success rate across global operations. - Supported spend management for over 3,800 enterprise customers. Looking ahead: one connected journey Now live across nine markets, Navan continues to expand its use of Adyen’s platform beyond card issuing to include business accounts for fast reimbursement and acquiring capabilities for customer repayments. The goal remains clear: deliver a completely connected journey that helps businesses manage every step—from booking travel to controlling spend and closing the books. See the full story Interested in seeing how embedded card issuing and spend management work together in practice? Read the complete Navan case study to discover how Adyen helps platform leaders drive revenue and streamline global payments. Learn more about how Adyen powers embedded finance for platforms here.