00:27:57 · Michael Sindicich
[00:27:57] S1: Well, actually, yeah, I was gonna say that the two most important things we track ahead of revenue is NPS and CSAT. And so we are really, really happy and proud to say that our CSAT is a 96%. This happens anytime you contact our support team or our agent, Ava, our AI agent Ava. And to have a 96 score, like think about when you call your travel agency, it's because your flight was canceled, delayed, you need to rebook, you need to collect an invoice from a hotel, you're not sure where your credit card is, whatever. And 96% of people are saying that it's five star service. And so we're very, very happy about that metric, and it's something we track all the time. It's also a big part of our ethos is the orchestration between when can an AI agent handle these tasks and when does it need to go to a human agent. And the last thing we want is for people to, you know, be on the phone screaming like, representative, representative. And so that kind of handoff is so seamless and so something that we focus on to deliver that really healthy score. The other one is NPS, so net promoter score. Our NPS is around 45. And if you think about traditional, you know, travel and expense management tools, typically they're around zero NPS score. Like, no one likes to use, you know, your traditional travel system. And so us focusing a lot on that is I think the two most important things that we do. And again, it ties back to our value of it's all about the user. Then comes, you know, the different things afterward, like revenue and gross booking volume and payment volume and some of these things.
00:29:33 · Miguel Armaza
[00:29:33] S0: So when I hear travel and expense software, you think of SaaS revenues. But in reality, about 90% of the company's revenue is transactional. Call it reoccurring. So help us understand a little bit of the structure of the company today, the main drivers, and yeah, maybe we'll start there and there's lot to talk about about the company.
00:30:04 · Michael Sindicich
[00:30:04] S1: Yeah. So we make revenue in a few different ways, but to your point, the majority of it is usage based. And we were never really a SaaS company. Sometimes SaaS is dead, maybe that was good for us. Now SaaS is kind of coming back, maybe, I don't know. The way we make revenue is by people using the solution. And what we'll charge is, one, think about us as a marketplace with a lot of suppliers. You've got millions and millions of hotels and different airlines and car rental companies. And these companies pay what's called a commission back to the travel agent. What they're doing is basically paying a commission to be in the platform, in the marketplace, accessible. But then, two, their support agents don't need to support it. So, for example, if a traveler books a flight on our platform, our travel agents support. They change that flight. They cancel the flight. They work with the traveler throughout that journey. And so that's a bigger part of our usage revenue is coming there, which is also nice because the customer is not paying for that. And it's revenue that we get to generate, which is cool. The suppliers are definitely customers of our platform, but I'm talking about a B2B company. And then what we'll also charge is a trip fee. And so when someone on our platform books a trip, traditional agencies would charge one fee if it's offline booking, like you called someone or emailed, a different fee if it's after hours, a different fee if you book just a hotel online. And it was this big menu that when we came to the market, we said, like, Enough with that. We want to be very transparent and show you exactly what you're paying. So we charge you one trip fee per whole trip. So that means if you're doing five multi city bookings and hotels and all that, but leaving, coming back, that's one trip. And you can call us as many times as you want. You can email us, whatever you want to do. So that's another part of our revenue. And then the other parts are like the SaaS licenses for the expense management software. So we charge, you know, per active user per month seat type transaction. And then we also charge... Or we don't charge. We make interchange from our credit cards. And so we we make, you know, interchange overall. We give a portion of that as a rebate back to the customer, and then we get to keep the difference of the interchange.
00:32:26 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
And then we obviously pay for the cost of capital and and, you know, funding the customer's accounts and things like that as well. But those are kind of the main ways that we would make money as a company. [00:32:39] S0: Related to that, you have a few channels driving your growth and your volume. You have the direct sales channel, but you also have partnerships, And I guess there's a little bit of tension with your partners because you, in some way, for spend management, you offer competing products, but also these partnerships have to make sense. Otherwise, you wouldn't do them. Maybe talk about that, why pursue these partnerships? We've talked about Art Levy, common friend. You were on the trenches with him, working on the Brex, Navan partnership. That's one. But there's others.
00:33:21 · Michael Sindicich
[00:33:21] S1: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, first of all, partnerships in, I think, Fintech or travel are endless. Like, you can think of every supplier as a partner. So every hotel, airline, etcetera. You can think of, you know, the Stripes, the Adyen, the Airwallex, like, the Fintech infrastructure, Visa, MasterCard, Amex. Like, these are partners. You can think about, you know, VAT reclaim services or OCR technology that's powering, you know, reading receipts. The whole thing is, in my mind, like one big partnership ecosystem that delivers a solution that powers a great experience for the end user. So that's like a starting point of how we think about it. The next piece is, you know, who do we choose to go and partner with, and why would someone like a Brex make a good example? And for us, first and foremost, we want to deliver the best traveling experience to travelers. Sometimes that means we're building everything ourselves and selling what we're building. Sometimes it means that we're partnering with somebody else and delivering that solution together. And one thing that Brex was really good at is they were focused on really building infrastructure to be able to issue globally in different currencies. And for us, you know, we're thinking about a company, we're going to be, you know, the most global, most in-depth point of sales, legal, agreements, everything travel. And we're not going to build the world's biggest bank. We're not going to become a bank. We're not going to have the most capital out there. We're not going to offer the best rebates and the best payment terms and all these types of things. So was. And we were continuing to go upmarket. And we built a solution called Connect which allows our travel and expense solution to be paired with any other corporate card because we partnered with the networks. And so someone could use a different corporate card than Navan's, but when you swipe it, you immediately get feedback. Was it in policy? Was it out of policy? Do you need a receipt? If you click the link, you can take a photo. If your admin requests, you know, you need a photo for over $75 or something. So we built this really amazing technology to then be able to go and partner with every other bank and networks and not need to force larger companies to change out their credit cards, which, like, they don't necessarily wanna do.
00:35:42 · Michael Sindicich
And using that technology, understanding Brex's massive scale with currencies and global issuing and really attractive rebates and payment terms, we said, hey, you you guys have something with travel, we have something with payments and expense. But if we think about some of the customers that we have, probably the best solution would be a combination of our T and E and your payments or your payments and expense and our travel. And let's figure out a way to partner together to offer these solutions to the market. And that's what we did. And that's kind of how we approach all the different partnerships that we do. We probably won't ever partner with like, you know, a travel management and booking tool system that's a little too close to our home. And I say that, but I would say that for countries where we operate in because sometimes we sell a very large corporation and they might have a lot of employees and operations in a country that we don't operate in today. And that is where we'll actually find a partner. We just acquired a company called SmartTrips in Brazil a couple weeks ago, and they were our partner in Brazil for large companies who had operations there. It was working so well. The the customers were really happy, and so we ended up acquiring SmartTrips. And we did the same playbook with a company called Trippier in India as well. And so that's kind of one of our inorganic growth strategies is to partner with global companies that we think it would take forever for ourselves to get licenses be able to operate in that market.