Podcast: Center CEO Naveen Singh on a card-first approach to T&E

Modern technology is empowering finance professionals to gain greater insight into spending on travel and other expenses across their organizations.

For the sixth episode of The Travel Is a Human Emotion Podcast, Spotnana Founder and Chief Product Officer Sarosh Waghmar spoke with Naveen Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of expense management platform Center, about the evolution of expense management technology and the benefits to customers of partnering with Spotnana.

Singh discussed the benefits of Center’s card-first approach to expense management, how Center empowers finance professionals, and the promise of AI to further improve finance workflows.

Driving innovation in expense management

Singh founded Center because he saw how technology for credit cards and expense management were creating new opportunities to improve visibility for CFOs and deliver better experiences for employees.

“We saw a couple of interesting trends emerging around the idea that financial software, by way of the credit card and expense management software, were going to merge together,” said Singh. “They could really be delivered as a deeply integrated package by one vendor.”

In the past, credit card transactions wouldn’t appear in an expense report until they were manually stapled and submitted. By taking a card-first approach to expense management, Center is able to provide real-time visibility into spending and greatly reduce the burden on employees to report their transactions.

“What we basically said was, how do we deliver such a delightful experience, that for 95% of [purchases] it’s literally as simple as the swipe of the credit card,” said Singh. “Moving away from that idea of batch-based [expense reports] towards a transactional and more intelligent model that can only be possible if you pull the data from the card in real time.”

AI and the future

There are many applications of AI that Singh expects to provide benefits to Center customers, including automated budget policy creation.

“For example,” Singh said, “if you’re going to come in $200,000 over budget for the next quarter, you could, in the future, query your expense management system and say, ‘Hey, how do I actually create policies to save $200,000?’

“There’s a huge amount of opportunity for quickening the pace of decision making and automating huge parts of the expense management process that today are manual, even in the best systems out there.”

Integrated travel and expense

In the ten months since Center launched its travel solution powered by Spotnana, Singh has seen customers embracing combined travel and expense.

“We’ve been really fortunate to now have over 150 customers having adopted the integration that we’ve built and we’ve learned a lot,” said Singh. “Like with any journey with real customer feedback with real data, we get better and better. We’ve seen a lot of really compelling feedback around the availability of inventory, the consumer grade experience of the booking tool.”

Singh also noted the close level of collaboration between Center and Spotnana.

“How do we strengthen that integration even further?” asked Singh. “How do we build even more of a frictionless experience where we can continue to make it feel like these products were designed together? And then how do we start to apply really some net new innovation? How do we unify policy application and management across all channels of travel booking?… I’m frankly proud of the work that both our teams have done.”

The experience of working for Steve Singh

Both Waghmar and Singh took a moment to reflect on their professional journeys with Steve Singh.

Waghmar described the first meeting with Steve that led to an investment in Spotnana. He also reflected on how Steve has shaped Spotnana’s core strategy.

“I think the single biggest thing I’ve learned from him is that if you want to call yourself a platform, you have to earn the right,” said Waghmar. “And the only time you can call yourself a platform is when other people build on top of you and create more value and make money.”

For Naveen, a key takeaway was Steve’s focus on leading with values and principles. “The centrality, the importance of values and principles in every facet of your life – personally, family-wise, professionally – is of foundational importance,” he said.  

Want to learn more about how Spotnana allows expense management providers to provide better experiences to their customers? Subscribe to the podcast or get a demo today.