Aran Brown, Founder and CEO, Navro

Today we're meeting Aran Brown, Founder and CEO at Navro. They specialise in helping fast-growth businesses to scale globally by simplifying international payments for them.

Over to you Aran - my questions are in bold:

Who are you and what's your background?

My route into fintech started at Travelex, where I was the only one of 13 trainees in that intake not to have gone to university. Our focus was on creating meetings for the sales team and those that succeeded in the process then went on to business development roles. The role had a very pure commercial focus on revenue targets and I had a great time.

Travelex was a fantastic place to work for someone just starting out in their career as you could gain exposure to lots of different parts of the business and the wider fintech space. Fintech offers such rewarding careers. Moving money around the world is complicated.

And no matter how much innovation takes place, there are always new problems to solve and better ways of structuring the commercials for the benefit of the end customer. Throughout my career since Travelex, my roles have been about tackling these two issues.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I am the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Navro. I'm responsible for the overarching strategic direction of the entire business, which includes overseeing the design of the services, building out the underlying technology platform, bringing on customers and ensuring that we deliver the quality of service that they're looking for.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

Navro is a London-headquartered fintech that helps fast-growth businesses to scale globally by simplifying international payments for them. Previously, businesses looking to expand internationally had to manage a diverse, complex and demanding range of service providers, payment gateways and regulatory authorities. This created significant operational overheads and inefficiencies.

In response, Navro developed the world's first payments curation platform - providing businesses with streamlined and optimised access to the best payment services available in every region globally, all accessible through a single platform, one API, and one contract.

Navro clients can collect funds locally in 35 locations, and hold, convert and make payouts in more than 200 countries and 140 currencies – over half of which are delivered in real-time or on the same day globally.

Tell us how you are funded?

In March 2023, we raised USD 18.3 million in Series-A funding to drive product development and international expansion. Investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Unusual Ventures, and Motive Partners. We were very proud to achieve this amid a slump in fintech investment. The size of investment and calibre of investors demonstrated confidence that we could solve pressing problems for many businesses.

Then, in early 2024, we completed a new funding round to increase our reserves and satisfy the capital requirements of tier-one regulators, clients and banks. Our existing investors contributed a total of USD 14 million in an internal round.

Last month, we completed a raise of USD 41 million in Series-B funding to help accelerate our global expansion plans and enable us to connect more local payout and collection services worldwide. This round was led by Jump Capital, with participation again from Bain Capital Ventures, Motive Partners and Unusual Ventures.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?

Despite the innovation we have seen in the fintech sector over the last decade, coordinating international payments continues to be a significant pain point for businesses — entailing complex infrastructure, high costs, geographic fragmentation and constantly evolving regulation.

High-potential companies struggle to cope with growing payment volumes and there is a huge gap in the market — with inefficient local solutions at one end, and tier-one global providers, inaccessible to all but the world's biggest businesses, at the other. Businesses with international ambitions are left with no option but to stitch together an inefficient, costly and convoluted patchwork of payment solutions.

With existing payments orchestration solutions, international payments typically require 10-15 partners, contracts, and APIs globally, increasing costs as businesses pay for each provider. They must also hand control of the user experience to a third party, which is far from ideal when it comes to reassuring online customers about online safety.

We saw that there could be a better way of solving these challenges and set about developing our payments curation platform.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

Navro is actively processing workforce and supplier payments for hundreds of large corporations, managing payments for over 1,000 corporates and pension schemes across Europe, and empowering global platforms to offer seamless payment solutions to thousands of potential small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Navro's expanding customer base includes major UK pension administrators, a prominent payment gateway in Europe, a successful digital music distribution service, an international insurance platform, as well as a global 'Employer of Record' platform specialising in international workforce management.

Basically, all sectors that need to cater for a wide range of jurisdictions, and complex layers of incoming and outgoing payments to large volumes of businesses and individuals. Navro customers enjoy a number of benefits compared to alternative international payment solutions:

• Faster settlement from PSP partners
• Lower costs through genuinely local payment access
• Less time and fewer staff needed to facilitate international payments
• Improved customer experience - particularly for marketplace sellers
• Faster account reconciliation - through one integrated platform
• Reduced management and administrative burden - fewer partners, one global view
• More working capital as funds spend less time tied up in cross border settlement processes

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

There has been huge amounts of digital innovation in the consumer space when it comes to financial services and ecommerce – whether we're talking about the contributions of neobanks in shaping more intuitive user experiences, or new ways of buying such as through live streaming services.

But when you look at what lies beneath these slick experiences, you find that many of these processes are still running on legacy 1970s infrastructure. We really need to see some innovation at that level too – with digitally native global financial infrastructure.

That said, you'll never be able to eliminate complexity. Regulations are constantly evolving, new payment options will keep arriving and, increasingly, geopolitical tensions play a role too with domestic and regional champions. This creates more choice for the consumer but also more fragmentation for businesses managing payments.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

I think it's important they maintain high standards - particularly on compliance. But for those that enable other fintechs to build on them it's important they don't withdraw or pull up the ladder. Make the barrier to entry rightly high - but don't close the door.

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

LinkedIn is very much a gateway to news for me - the people I respect and know basically curate content for me. My Co-Founder shares the same view on X, so we feel pretty well informed across both platforms.

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

• I may be biased as he's an investor, but Matt Harris from BCV is a fantastic writer, and regularly pens work that informs or indeed challenges the whole industry.
• I met Irina Chuchkina a couple of years ago and was super impressed - she always shares fantastic content that challenges how I think about a whole range of topics.
• Mike Massaro is also someone I admire greatly - he has built a fantastic business in Flywire. But more than anything he cares deeply about company culture (he has built an outstanding one). You can tell this not just from the content he posts - but how the people who have left Flywire talk about the place.

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

Like many, what was once an all-in-one banking app is now spread across a variety of pension, savings, trading, and FX apps. Plum and Freetrade are great—as is obviously Wise. It's also safe to say that the main banks have dramatically improved their apps since challenger banks broke onto the scene.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

One of the more interesting challenges around any new payment method or technology is the education piece - whether it's getting someone to do their first open banking payment or load a virtual card. If you're not in fintech you need to be taught these things and that makes them often inaccessible.

What I'm really excited about is how businesses like Privy and Turnkey are starting to create pre-authenticated wallets to deliver stablecoin payments - which means I can put the money in your hands immediately without having to push you through a bunch of FAQ and processes. This breaks down a huge barrier for scaling adoption in the stablecoin space.

Finally, let's talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

As I mentioned earlier, I think we'll see the emergence of digitally native financial infrastructure as service providers look at options that can give them a genuine competitive edge over legacy infrastructure such as SWIFT or the global card schemes.

Much of the innovation in this space so far has been tinkering with interfaces rather than a rethink of underlying systems. However, blockchain technology, particularly stablecoins, is already making a substantial impact. FinTech companies are already leveraging these innovations to enable their clients to move money with greater efficiency and at a lower cost.

Something else that is impossible to ignore is the role of AI, that will no doubt evolve significantly. We're already seeing AI as a valuable assistant in areas like engineering and marketing, but I anticipate a move towards more ambitious adoption, with AI taking on autonomous task execution within FinTech operations.

While AI will undoubtedly fuel growth, maintaining human oversight to validate outputs and address potential biases will be crucial for ensuring trust and fairness. I think the payments landscape is poised for substantial transformation, with the increasing prominence of real-time payments, especially in sectors such as pensions and payroll.

The era of waiting extended periods for salary advances is likely to recede. Given the current economic climate and the pressures of the cost-of-living crisis, I expect more organisations to offer immediate access to earned wages. This shift towards immediacy addresses a critical need for individuals managing their finances and has the potential to reduce reliance on less favourable credit options.

This isn't just about faster transactions; it's about providing greater financial flexibility and control to individuals in their daily lives. Finally, the overarching direction of FinTech will likely be shaped by a commitment to this real-time capability across various services, all underpinned by robust security measures and a heightened focus on the customer experience.

Thank you very much, Aran!

Read more about Aran on LinkedIn and find out more about Navro at www.navro.com.