Interview: Zahir Abdelouhab, SVP EMEA, Navan

How is Navan faring in the French market?

Zahir Abdelouhab - Navan France currently employs around fifty people in Paris. However, we also have customers in the provinces and in Monaco. And we regularly have to travel to meet local needs.

What is the profile of your customers, and how is it changing?

Zahir Abdelouhab - We started with small structures, with many customers from the French Tech. We're gradually working our way up the ranks, and already count a number of multinationals among our customers. We have some major projects in the pipeline, and a team dedicated to major accounts.

Could you go back over the change of identity that became official a few months ago?

Zahir Abdelouhab - That's long gone now. We wanted a name that would reflect our evolution and be more in line with our current aspirations. We are the only 'superapp' on the market to cover travel, cards and expense accounts. A few players have come close to this positioning through external acquisitions, but no one has developed it internally in a fully integrated way. There was also a desire to democratise our application. We have strongly developed the section dedicated to personal travel, with a rewards system. When an employee books a business trip, if they opt for an economical choice in relation to the median prices and the company's policy, they are rewarded on their personal account. It's a win-win system.

What does this personal travel business represent?

Zahir Abdelouhab - I don't have the precise figures, but it's already significant. It's still a minority compared to our pro business, and we don't intend to go to the general public for the general public. But it's growing. Our idea is that the user experience is the spearhead of our solution. If the user is satisfied with the tool, the company has visibility over what it is doing, so control is simpler for the finance teams. And that in turn helps to reduce or optimise costs. But it all starts from one thing: the user has to be happy to use the app. For example, the app makes it very intuitive to book a flight and then change it. It may seem absurd, but in 90% of cases at historic agencies you have to call to change your flight. Once the flight has been booked, the application also suggests hotels close to the office and displays the ratings given by other employees. Employees can also find out if any colleagues are travelling at the same time as them, and opt for neighbouring seats on the plane...

In recent months you have also made your connection to OpenAI official...

Zahir Abdelouhab - We are the first travel agency to integrate generative AI into the application. Avaor "our automated virtual assistant" can help us on a daily basis to deal with trivial changes. It can be used, for example, as a virtual concierge to check flights between Paris and Paris. Marseille for the following morning before 9am. This type of request does not require an agent to be called.

The chatbots of airlines and TMC were already offering this...

Zahir Abdelouhab - It didn't go as far as booking. These were FAQ chatbots. The difference withgenerative artificial intelligenceis that it's conversational, it's not static. You can ask it open-ended questions, ask it " What's the best way to get to Monaco?". But for us, the user is not just the traveller. Far from it. It's also HR, the administrator, the finance function... That's why we've launched a a tool for optimising business travel programmes. Avawhich is the name of our generative AI, is not just a travel agentit's also a analyst which proactively suggests ways of making savings. So, in addition to the virtual travel agent, we are now offering a virtual account manager to analyse expenditure, generate regular reports by category... Previously, you had to ask the account manager for such a report, which took three weeks to produce. AI analyses the data in real time and makes suggestions. For example, it can generate reports on accommodationThis is where we can really make a difference to business travel. Both in terms of the user experience and in financial terms. Savings can really be made on hotels. We're also enabling companies to make benchmarkingby enabling companies to compare themselves with structures with similar profiles. All of this, of course, while maintaining confidentiality.

What exactly are your links with Open AI?

Zahir Abdelouhab - OpenAI is both customer and partner.

What's stopping other players from doing the same?

Zahir Abdelouhab - What's stopping Peugeot from being Tesla? We're taking it one step at a time. We're leaders, we're pioneers, we're showing the way. Of course, others will follow. But we are structurally built to innovate, and our data management sets us apart. We demonstrated this during the health crisis: 48 hours after the first confinement, we launched the Covid card real-time dashboard for managing business travel. Some people did it two years later. What was stopping them from doing it sooner? When you see historic TMCs that don't have the data to produce real-time dashboards, and that limit themselves to after-the-fact reports, several weeks later...

What next? The field of possibilities seems vast...

Zahir Abdelouhab - It is! What's going to happen more and more is theintegration with payment and expense. We've killed the expense report, it no longer exists with Navan. We do business travel, and we also have an intelligent card, which is not a traditional payment card: our card embeds a spending policy, and creates an expense report that will be sent to finance and reconciled automatically. The time saved is enormous, both for the traveller and the finance team. We can see that travellers no longer accept advance payments.

What are your ambitions with the Train Vs Plane feature?

Zahir Abdelouhab - We've developed this feature so that when you're searching for flights to a destination that's accessible by train, we can proactively suggest the rail option. The majority of air routes in Europe are less than 700 km long. So it's worth considering. It's an incentive. It's more about education than anything else: we're not forcing anything. Our aim is also to help companies anticipate changes in regulations, and to help them raise awareness among their employees.

The timing of the launch coincided with the official announcement of the new regulations...

Zahir Abdelouhab - There were European regulations in the pipeline, and we always try to be ahead of the game. In 2019, we started offering features to reduce the carbon footprint. In 2021, we introduced a suite of tools to offset, reduce, monitor and budget for the carbon footprint. At the time, we had set up a partnership with Neste on the SAF. We are also working hard on rail, where we want to have a much stronger impact than the incumbents, who suffer from a lack of cohesion between the different European rail companies. There are local approaches, but it is very difficult to manage cross-border services. In particular, we want to become the TMC with the largest number of rail references in Europe.

How is the recovery progressing in the French market?

Zahir Abdelouhab - In volume terms, by January 2023 we had exceeded the January 2020 peak. So since the start of the year, on a like-for-like basis, the volume of business travel is higher and we are growing. The business travel crisis is behind us. But the macro-economic context is sensitive. It's complex, because on the one hand there's a desire to control costs, and on the other it's the costs associated with business travel that are essential for creating new links, which will enable us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and thus overcome the crisis. So it's a question of defining how to travel wisely. This is where a player like Navan is relevant, because we can provide all these reports to keep you travelling while controlling expenditure and allocating it strategically. There is a need for a granular level of cost control.

How does a player like Navan position itself in relation to teleworking, which has been boosted by the health crisis?

Zahir Abdelouhab - Le teleworking is playing an increasingly important role. And it's a new way of travelling. In the past, business travel was limited to a sales person visiting a customer, to put it a bit simplistically. Today, a large proportion of business trips involve the employee travelling to the office once a month. We can see this in our data. We have customers who are 100% teleworking. Some major French banks have switched to four days' teleworking a week. With such a pace, some people say that it's not worth staying in Paris. So a policy has to be put in place to cover travel costs and accommodation when these employees converge in Paris. So you need tools to optimise your teleworking programme. And Navan knows how to do this, unlike a traditional agency.