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

Naveen Singh: The expense report really starts with the idea of a credit card transaction. And in the old world, that credit card transaction wouldn’t actually integrate and show up in your expense report until it was actually manually stapled together with receipts and itinerary information and submitted on that expense report.

And so what we basically said was, Hey, look, how do we deliver such a delightful experience that for 95 percent of the cases, it’s literally as simple as the swipe of the credit card.

Justin Schuster: Welcome to the Travel Is a Human Emotion podcast. My guests today are Naveen Singh, the Co-Founder and CEO of Center, and Sarosh Waghmar, Spotnana’s founder and Chief Product Officer. Center is a card first expense management platform that announced a partnership with Spotnana in the fall of 2023. And Naveen, I’m wondering if you can take us back to the founding of Center back in 2017. Expense management solutions had already been around in the market for a couple of decades. So what did you see as the gap in the market that you felt still needed to be addressed? 

Naveen Singh: Yeah, absolutely, Justin. First of all, Justin. Thank you Sarosh for having me on. Really appreciate the time here and I’m excited to meet with you guys and talk a little bit more about Center, Spotnana, and the partnership that we’ve been fortunate to put together.

So yeah, happy to start with taking us back to 2017. Look, obviously expense management solutions to your point, Justin, have been around for a couple of decades at that point. Concur was one of the pioneers of the whole category around travel and expense management. And what we like to talk about internally is that expense reporting is an evergreen problem.

It’s one of those business processes that has been around for decades and will be around for decades to come. But every new era of technology brings new opportunities to really go reinvent the process from the ground up. And part of what we saw near the end of our time at Concur was that ultimately there were real gaps emerging relative to the traditional kind of batch-based process that had been so well installed over the past 20 years or thereabouts.

We started to see that patterns of buying were changing. Frankly, they were becoming more consumerized. So you as an employee now would go purchase, whether it was travel or procurement or software subscriptions, you’d go purchase with the suppliers, with the marketplaces of your choosing that could deliver a fundamentally more consumer-grade experience than what perhaps the more traditional legacy tools were offering at the time.

And that was creating this visibility gap for CFOs, for travel managers, for procurement managers, where they were really reliant on the actual submission of an expense report to see all of their spending to be able to control their spending. Ultimately in, in 2017, we saw a couple of really interesting trends emerging, namely around the idea that financial software, by the way of the credit card, and expense management software were going to merge together and they were going to be so tightly integrated that they could really be delivered as a fundamentally deeply-integrated package by one vendor.

And in the process, really close that visibility gap for CFOs, leverage the real time data from the credit card, leverage the the reconciliation technology, the analytics technology that you could pack into that credit card to really be able to close that visibility gap, give the CFO great visibility, give the CFO great controls that worked across any point of purchase, but that also importantly, balance that need for control and visibility with an incredible experience, an incredible consumer-like experience for the traveler, for the employee, the spender.

Ultimately what we saw was a really unique opportunity to both balance that need for control while also doing away with the expense report and delivering an incredible customer experience. So that’s really the kind of going back to the reason why we founded this business. We thought, Hey, there’s a massive opportunity over the next couple of decades to really redefine the idea of the expense report and better balance things for the CFO and for the traveler 

Justin Schuster: You were saying how you saw card and expense coming together and you talk about having a card-first approach to expense management. What does that specifically mean?

Naveen Singh: So yeah, it’s absolutely one of the big calling cards of our solution that we’ve put in market. And to be card first really means that for us, the journey starts with the swipe of a credit card. Whether you’re booking on Spotnana, whether you are buying any goods that you need for office consumption software subscriptions, whatever it may be, the expense report really starts with the idea of a credit card transaction.

In the old world, that credit card transaction wouldn’t actually integrate and show up in your expense report until it was actually manually stapled together with receipts and itinerary information and submitted on that expense report. And so what we basically said was, Hey, look how do we deliver such a delightful experience that for 95 percent of the cases, it’s literally as simple as the swipe of the credit card where we can intelligently reach out to you as the traveler, as the buyer, for only the information that we can’t automatically pull from the credit card and that what we found has really reinvented that experience to move away from that idea of batch based towards a transactional and more intelligent model that fundamentally can only be possible if you pull the data from the credit card in real time. 

So the first half of what I would say to be card led is that kind of end user experience. The second half of it that we’ve really found is that the credit card is starting to be thought of by CFOs, starting to be thought of by travel managers, as the new frontier for controls. The reality is that with the way people buy today.

Having to create a policy that can only be enforced in one channel is not something that is in our view feasible anymore. So you need to have the point of purchase, the point of control really be omnichannel in nature. And the credit card represents a really interesting opportunity to thoughtfully embed controls in a way that works everywhere.

So when we talk about card led that’s really what we mean. 

Justin Schuster: And then as Center was pulling all this together, at some point you thought let’s incorporate travel into this and offer not just a card-first expense product, but also a travel and expense solution end-to-end. What led to that thought and what led to the first meeting with Spotnana?

Naveen Singh: I’m happy to kick that off in this direction. I’d love to hear your views on this as well. But look, travel remains one of, if not the biggest applications of spend management. It’s oftentimes the second largest controllable line item in any CFO’s P&L.

It represents an incredible area of control need and compliance need for CFOs. It also represents, as you guys are reinventing firsthand, A=a really important part of the employee experience, a really important and high leverage part of the traveler experience. And ultimately we looked at this and said, Hey there’s a massive opportunity for reinvention with the work that we’re doing.

What the Spotnana team is doing to really reinvent the managed travel program, right? And bring in, bring better superior inventory built, bring better service to the business traveler. And why can’t that be deeply integrated into the credit card, right? Why can’t the incredible experience that you guys are delivering for the business traveler, Also include the post the full automation of what we all hate post-travel, right?

Which is the expense report. And so we just thought, Hey, look at that deep integration, that ability to take the best of what you guys are doing with the best of what we’re doing and truly reinvent all parts of the traveler journey. While maintaining and, in fact, strengthening compliance for the travel manager, for the travel manager, and for the CFO was uniquely possible with really integrating our two technologies together.

Justin Schuster: And Sarosh, what was your recollection of that first meeting and how did you view the opportunity to collaborate with Center? 

Sarosh Waghmar: I think before I address that if you talk of just how software has evolved, uh, if you look back at this, even today, Naveen will be the first to agree someone whose name comes up again and again is Concur.

They’ve been the market leader and they’ve really defined this space. And what Concur did was phenomenal, but as software-as-a-service continued to evolve, buying habits of procurement leaders changed, buying habits of CFOs changed, and everyone realized that. We don’t need to bundle everything together.

We want the best of the breed. Naveen’s approach on expenses to be card first and build it from ground up from there and the infrastructure around that and Spotnana’s approach was on travel. I think Naveen can chime in here, but if you want to be a platform, I think the big thing is to realize what are the pieces you’re going to build and what are some of the things your partners are going to build on top of you.

If you want to focus and do one thing, do it well. And I think that’s, I think the common DNA between both companies is, we want to focus on our swim lanes and really expand on that and really build trust with customers that we’re really good at one thing. But together, because you’re deeply integrated through these APIs, we can push information to each other seamlessly.

So you’re not dealing with two different companies or two different tech stacks. Now Center and Spotnana together can provide so much more value and they can continue innovating. By being two separate companies, we’re not fighting for the same dollar from an R&D perspective or from an innovation perspective.

And the buyer at the other end now has the ability to say, wow, I’m getting the best of both and they’re tightly coupled or integrated. I don’t have to deal with anything else. As long as I get the best service and the best product that can take care of my audience. And the thing to note is that the audience is the new 20- and 30-year-olds that are going to drive the workforce.

They cannot take 20 minutes to do a trip online. It’s just, this is ridiculous for them. To get on a desktop is ridiculous for them, let alone do it outside the mobile. That’s a heavy lift. At the end of the day, change management is what you need to look out for. And if you can carry that employee and make them do things in seconds and clicks.

That’s where the user experience truly changes. People keep talking about user experience. This user experience between Center and Spotnana can be tightly coupled because they’re deeply embedded. So people are not going from one tool to another. They don’t even need to know. All they need to know is, this is where I’m going to book my expenses.

This is where I’m going to book my travel. And I’m going to deal with it all at one central place. I’m going to make my life easy. With AI coming into the foray, I think a lot of things are going to change. And we don’t even know what we don’t know. At least I don’t. So that’s what I would say.

Naveen Singh: Yeah. And I would just echo everything Sarosh just said. I think that the commonality of DNA between the two businesses really is in taking a first principles approach to reinventing the part of the customer experience that we both uniquely deliver service to. And I think it’s an incredible blessing to be able to drive to that level of focus because you can actually really truly rethink the user experience.

We can rethink what an expense report is really. meant to be about just as Spotnana and Sarosh are able to rethink how a travel program should work and the like. Such an incredible opportunity. 

Justin Schuster: You’re saying that this next generation doesn’t want to spend 20 minutes booking a trip. I have to imagine they don’t want to spend 20 minutes submitting an expense report either.

And AI you brought up also is going to be an enabler of great change and opportunity and a better experience. So when you think about AI, both of you, what are the things that you feel are most exciting that you’re looking forward to being able to deliver through your products? Sarosh, you want to go first?

Sarosh Waghmar: I think for Spotnana, I think it’s early days for us. We’re looking at where we can leverage AI to improve the existing infrastructure, because I believe AI is going to become the next tech stack itself, people will have to build on top of it. We have all these old disparate systems that we’ve been building on top of in the cloud, and that has obviously created a lot more innovation for us.

But where we want to leverage AI is on the servicing side of it. When I know that in seconds, I can make a change for you, tell you all the possible options, predict for you what is the right flight for you to take when you’re stuck somewhere, or the ability for, to break down complex rules, that when we buy things on Amazon, we never think twice about returning it, we just know that we’re going to be able to return it and get that money back.

But when it comes to travel, We have to think 100 different times. Is this refundable? Is this not refundable? Will that credit expire? It is a nightmare to deal with travel. The ability to lock all of this and having the data flow through the travel system, all the different personas in the travel system, all the way to the expense stack is going to be so fundamental.

And I think AI is going to play a massive role in travel around these pieces, at least from a Spotnana perspective of how do we increase the workflows? Because I believe that is where the better user experience comes. 

Justin Schuster: And Naveen, for you, when you think about it on the expense side, what are you most excited about?

Naveen Singh: Absolutely. Look, I think Sarosh nailed the core, Opportunities here that AI is a very foundational layer. That’s going to affect all of us and that gives us all new opportunities to solve for the customer experience. I think, sometimes lost in the gen AI hype a little bit around, a text prediction, image prediction, video generation, I think the enterprise application opportunity is probably just as big, if not even bigger than that. 

And I think that it’s really going to be around workflow orchestration and systems integration. Very similar to what Sarosh is talking about. I think the big applications around expense management are going to go well beyond that.

Receipt automation well beyond recommending expense categories, things of that nature. And they’re actually going to go all the way down to the level of truly extracting meaning from your expense data and actually doing something with that inference that you that meeting that you’ve derived.

I think ultimately where we want to get to is the expense management program should be a self-managing program. It’s not, frankly, something that anybody wants to go spend their days managing expense policies, doing analytics around your expense data. So ultimately we see this as a massive opportunity for truly almost a self-driving workflow for customers to give you a couple of examples of what this could look like.

One big opportunity is to actually identify broader patterns or drivers of spending. For example, you might see, as we recently did, a spike in sales, meals, and gift expenses quarter to quarter. To actually really drill in and understand what drove that requires, even in Center today, quite a few clicks. Quite a few drill downs into expense line item level detail, and frankly, even reaching out to your sales leadership, to your finance organization to ask, Hey, why did we see this rise in our rate of expense? All to uncover that, Hey, this was expenses associated with our president’s club that we held in February.

And ultimately that’s the type of inference that can be made in a really seamless way through AI and surfaced to managers, surfaced to finance in a way that you can actually understand those drivers. Now layering on top of that in an even more, I think, sophisticated way is you can start to coordinate meaningful action that’s at a more abstract or higher level for your business.

For example, if you’re going to come in $200,000 over budget for the next quarter, right? You could, in the future, I think actually query your expense management system and say, Hey, how do I actually create policies to save $200K? Okay. But without touching client-facing travel and without touching these mission critical software subscriptions that I have built a plan to go do that.

And then I think we’ll actually be able to get to the point where the policies that are actually enforced can be created automatically in service of that goal. So I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity for just, Quickening the pace of decision making and really frankly, automating huge parts of the expense management process that today are manual, even in the best systems out there.

Justin Schuster: This is exciting. I think on both sides, and it’s a great example of what Sarosh and Naveen, you were saying earlier about the power of having two companies, each focused on driving innovation in their respective areas, but with modern technology, enabling open architectures that enable them to be fused together and delivered seamlessly to customers.

And there’s a third party in common, Direct Travel, which is a TMC, that’s looking to take both companies to market as part of an integrated tech stack. How are you thinking about that opportunity in that relationship and also the opportunity to work with other TMCs out there?

Naveen Singh: Happy to, look, we’re really excited about the opportunities with Direct Travel. Very similar to our level of excitement about the opportunity and the partnership that we built with Spotnana. I think it plays on that theme of, let’s all bring the best together. The best of what we can go deliver to the customer. And I think when you look at Direct Travel and the reputation that they have in the marketplace, the caliber of service that they deliver is unparalleled.

It’s very hard to beat. And so look, I’m really excited about the opportunity to combine that caliber of service with Center’, innovation around expense with Spotnana on this innovation around travel. I think that the intersection of all three of those. Combined with Troop as well on the meetings planning side.

I think there’s a huge opportunity to really stitch together the best in breed from all four companies and actually deliver that to direct travel customers, deliver it to Center customers, to Spotnana, and to Troop customers. So I think it’s early days but I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity to combine what we’re all best at and bring that to market in a coherent way for customers.

And then in terms of the broader opportunity with travel management companies, look, we’re really excited about building an ecosystem around the credit card. We have discovered and come to this conclusion that payments really are the glue that holds together employee expenses.

And the data that we’re able to generate from that in a timely fashion, because we capture and classify all expense related data with the swipe of the credit card, I think can be something that’s useful to more than just Center. And I think if you think downstream to how a travel management company adds duty of care value to direct bookings in addition to your managed bookings, we have an interesting opportunity to collate all that data together and make it readily available for Direct Travel and for others.

So I think nothing but opportunity here. And we’re really excited to innovate on behalf of TMC partners. 

Justin Schuster: Sarosh, anything that you want to add related to that? 

Sarosh Waghmar: No, I think the first thing is to dispel rumors that Direct Travel, Center, and Spotnana are all going to merge. So I wanted to call that out.

These are three companies doing three very different things. I think we have a common investor and I think the whole premise of this, let’s be honest, was Direct Travel wants to automate its infrastructure. They have a phenomenal service model. They’ve been known for high touch service.

They’ve been an extremely profitable business and every other company wants to invest in the next technology stack, their whole premise is we want to drive the TMC business being tech-driven versus service-driven. And that’s their whole philosophy is that my new tech stack is not just going to be on travel, but I’ll sell T&E as an offering and use that as a base case and go back to my customers.

And provide that offering to them and increase the value proposition. It’s really as simple as that. People have made it sound more than it is, but I think there’s just a lot more noise about this in the industry. And our focus is who Center and Spotnana already have integrated.

We have, I think, over 150-plus customers that are live and consuming this platform of travel and expenses together. We’re using that infrastructure to power another TMC. And Naveen will be the first to tell you prior to Direct Travel, we’ve been talking to other TMCs too, to make this offering of travel and expenses available.

Justin Schusters: So separate companies. Each with their own strategy and destiny. Each that will work with other companies as well. But at least in the case of Spotnana, Troop, Center, and Direct Travel, there is a common investor. What’s it like working for Steve Singh? Suresh, 

Naveen Singh: Maybe you go first on this 

Sarosh Waghmar: I think Steve has played a massive role in Spotnana’s journey, and this is not about the recent news, but I think ,ost people and Steve would hate me for calling this out, but I literally had to hound him to get a meeting with him.

He made me meet every other Concur executive before he actually got on a call with me. And I met the CPO of Concur. I met the CTO of Concur and they interviewed me before I could get a chance to talk to Steve. And several months later, Steve agreed to meet us in New York and we show up at the location and Steve doesn’t show up. This is a true story.

And I’m glad this is being recorded. And then we’re walking back that day and I was thinking, these busy guys. Big shot VCs, they probably have something else going on. So they couldn’t meet me. And I was like, then I’m messaging Steve. Hey, we were supposed to meet a few hours ago. I get a call from him and said, Hey, my calendar got confused, et cetera.

And maybe I can meet you next time. I’m in New York. I refused to hang up the phone and I was convincing him for the next 10 minutes. Let me give you a ride. I’ll take a car. I’ll come and pick you up wherever you are. Just give me 30 minutes of your time from a ride to the airport. And I think I pestered him so much that he said, you know what?

Hold on. Let me figure it out. Alternate my schedule. And we had a half an hour meeting. Later that day we met and went on for two hours and I think we really struck a chord and I think he was convinced on what we were doing and that’s how we got Steve involved with Spotnana. I think since then, this was in 2019 when we met him, then in Jan of 2020 when we kicked off the company.

Since early days, I think the biggest superpower that Steve has had and influence he’s had is that Steve’s never been a VC. He’s always been an operator, someone who knows what it is for entrepreneurs to build, the journey that they’ve had at Concur has been phenomenal. And what they built was just incredible for a company that today still is the market leader in the space.

And mind you, Steve reminds me every day of how much money Concur makes every day and how successful they are and how Spotnana has such a long way to go. But I’m grateful for it because he keeps it real. I think the things that are important to Steve are values and principles.

And I think for Spotnana to evolve from a product to a platform company, Steve has played a very critical role in not only keeping Spotnana and all of us grounded, but making us understand that in this ecosystem, you’re just a player. How are you going to create value for everybody? And I think that’s the single biggest thing that I’ve learned from him is, if you want to call yourself a platform, you have to earn the right to call yourself a platform and the only time you can call yourself a platform is when other people build on top of you and create more value and they’re able to make money off you. Otherwise, you cannot call yourself a platform. And I think that has been a big inflection point in our journey.

And I think obviously collaborating with him, working with him, working for him, I don’t know why everyone thinks that I’m working for him now. I’ve been working for him since 2019. Even he didn’t know it. I think it’s been incredible, but I think very few people are as fortunate at least as I am that have built a relationship with him and for someone at his stature and to decide to come back and lead a company and get involved in the weeds of things. I must have done something right in my previous life. So I’m grateful for that. But at the same time, I’ll tell you if you ask me Steve, between all his portfolio companies is always pushing us, at least pushing me, he always says how Center is doing everything right.

He always compliments Naveen and he says, these are some of the amazing things that Naveen does. And I’m grateful for it because I get to learn all the time what other leaders are doing really well. And that’s a good thing. But I think Steve is demanding, which is a good thing.

Because then it keeps you real. So that’s my two cents on it. 

Naveen Singh: I think he may be saying that same message in reverse to myself and I’m sure to everybody else. So that might be a nice tactic that he has to keep us all humble and keep us all moving in the right direction.

Look I think it’s an incredible story in terms of how you two got together and built the relationship that you built. I’m perhaps fortunate that my relationship with him is a little bit more inbuilt. He is my father. And so I bring it back to something that you mentioned, Sarosh, which is values and principles.

And that’s something that I have now in this phase of my life becoming a father recently myself have realized the importance of, in a way that I just probably certainly never did growing up and probably haven’t over the last 10 years or so. But just the centrality, the importance of values and principles and in every facet of your life personally, family wise, professionally is of foundational importance.

One of the things that I have come to, to build a greater appreciation for in terms of how he carries himself is that it’s all, it’s about the work at the end of the day, right? Even the massive heights that Concur has reached the massive heights that he’s reached that his team that he spent so many decades building at Concur have gone on to achieve.

For him, it always comes back to doing the work, building products, selling those products, building a great team of people that you care about, that you enjoy spending time with every single day and innovating on behalf of customers and building real returns for shareholders.

And I think that’s ultimately what it’s about. Which I think has been very easy to lose sight of in the last five years of company building. We all like to joke about the zero-interest-rate phenomenon that we’ve all that you and I have come up in over the last five or six years.

I think that has allowed just the abundance of capital in our respective categories that has really created a situation where for a lot of people, it becomes about everything other than the simple blocking and tackling of building customer value. And I think that he’s a great reinforcement mechanism for all of our companies to bring it back to the foundational principles.

And those are the things that stand the test of time. And I’m very appreciative to get to work with him. 

Justin Schuster: And Naveen, as you think about how the partnership with Spotnana has gone over since you launched. How are you applying those principles in the way that you serve your customers?

And what kind of feedback are you hearing from your customers? 

Naveen Singh: Yeah, absolutely. Look it’s been an incredible geez, almost 10 months since we GA’d the product offering together. And look, the number one thing that’s on our minds as we launch new services, new features, new products to the marketplace is how they’re going to be received by our existing customers.

And then second to that, how they can help us attract new customers. And we’ve been really fortunate to have now over 150 customers having adopted the integration that we built. And we’ve learned a lot like any journey with real customer feedback, with real data, we get better and better, but we’ve seen a lot of really compelling feedback around just the availability of inventory and the consumer-grade experience of the booking tool.

Just standing apart from what has previously existed in the marketplace. We’re also starting to see real feedback around it, just the quality and the strength of the integration. How expenses flow from booking into the credit card, into the expense management system. And, look at the opportunities for innovation that we’re really going and doubling down on here are, A, how do we strengthen that integration even further?

How do we build even more of a frictionless experience where we can continue to make it feel more and more like these products were designed together? And then B, 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?

How do we start to deliver analytics in a really thoughtful way, starting to leverage some of those advances in AI that we were talking about earlier to really drive better insight, better visibility, better control over, over the employee expense program. So frankly, I’m proud of the work that both our teams have done.

I’m really happy with the early customer response and frankly think there’s just nothing but growth from here. 

Justin Schuster: And Naveen, this is the Travel Is a Human Emotion podcast. So I’ll end with this question. In your experience, what is the connection between travel and human emotion? 

Naveen Singh: Yeah, it’s a great question.

And I’d say that business travel is one of the most emotive parts of professional life. And I think, for us when we went into a hybrid working environment shortly after the pandemic. And connection has been something that we’ve had to now make a concerted effort to really go build that commonality of culture and purpose internally in the organization.

And so I think travel is a real mechanism to build that connection. And then on the flip side of that again, I referenced, I’ve been fortunate enough to become a father recently and, we’re now, thank you very much. Every minute that I’m on the road is a minute away from home, right?

And so the importance of being able to manage disruptions, being able to to just get home is an incredible, incredibly important part of the business travel experience for me now that I know it is for so many other people. So I think it’s one of those really high touch parts of the business travel experience.

Justin Schuster: Thank you so much for joining us today, Naveen, Sarosh. Thank you both. Really appreciate the time.