Californian RegTech Navan has launched a new AI-powered Audit Engine designed to help enterprises detect fraud, compliance risks and policy violations across business travel and expense transactions in real time.
The new system introduces more than 45 configurable audit checks, including built-in anti-corruption and bribery screening, enabling finance teams to identify high-risk activity such as transactions involving sanctioned individuals or politically exposed persons.
By integrating global risk intelligence used by financial institutions, Navan aims to strengthen transaction monitoring and close compliance gaps that often occur between payment processing and traditional audit checks.
The Audit Engine builds on Navan’s existing travel and expense platform, which already reviews millions of transactions against company spending policies at the point of purchase. Expenses that comply with policy are automatically approved, while potentially problematic transactions are flagged for review.
According to the company, around 75% of transactions are automatically approved, allowing finance teams to focus on the remaining 25% that present higher risk or require additional scrutiny.
Yuval Refua, Chief Product Officer, Payments & Expense at Navan, said, “Finance teams typically rely on multiple systems or headcount to identify risk, fraud and policy violations. But protecting the business is fundamentally a data and volume problem – and Navan’s AI is uniquely positioned to solve that.
“Our Audit Engine uses multiple LLMs to test every transaction against customizable audit checks. Acting as a force multiplier for finance teams, Navan eliminates hours of detective work and lets them focus only on the transactions that truly require human judgment.”
The system screens transaction data, receipts, travel activity and trip participants to detect anomalies. Since the beginning of the year, Navan has flagged two million transactions, including around 30,000 cases of excessive tipping and hundreds of AI-generated fraudulent receipts that traditional systems failed to identify.
Additional audit triggers include weekend spending, receipt mismatches and purchases of prohibited items such as alcohol or tobacco.
Kylee Bloodworth, Senior Director of Global Accounting at Pendo.io, said, “We previously had to review every single expense report. Now, thanks to auto-approval of expenses within our thresholds, we save at least ten hours each week. Plus, employees are reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses with five days of approval, which is much faster than before.”
Navan’s new anti-corruption and bribery screening capability aims to address a critical compliance challenge for global organisations: identifying transactions involving sanctioned or politically exposed individuals.
Such risks are often monitored through separate compliance systems that operate outside travel and expense workflows. Navan’s new check integrates directly into the transaction process and can be activated with a single click, screening every transaction without alerting potentially non-compliant parties.
The Audit Engine is now available globally to all Navan customers, while the anti-corruption and bribery screening feature is currently in beta ahead of a broader global rollout.
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