Think about Venmo: getting my dollar to your pocket is the model of simplicity. So why is getting my Australian dollar to your Argentinian pocket prohibitively more complex and expensive? Because of intermediaries – toll-takers. Access to payment rails, international banking, currency exchange, local banking – every step has someone extracting way more cost than the value they add.  

Get rid of all those archaic intermediaries and there is no reason why you can’t have an effortless experience between any country through any payment method. 

Why Cross-Border Payments Are Still Broken  

To date, cross-border payments have been stitched together, at best, with payment service providers (PSPs) solving localization at one side of the transaction and banks solving the movement.  

This multi-party structure means there are:  

1. More transfers
2. More conversions
3. More settlement days – more friction in the funds flow than what is actually needed.  

And solutions aren’t universal: the providers who can handle payments from Turkey to the US aren’t the same ones who can move money from Japan to Canada. The payment operations burden for business trying to operate globally can get massively complex very quickly.  

The cross-border payments ecosystem evolved this way gradually. For a long time, only select currency pairs mattered and sending money through wires was “good enough.” As demand increased for more pairs and more payment methods, providers kept bolting on incremental solutions. Some incumbents have solved pieces of these challenges, but the customer experience remains clunky and disjointed. There hasn’t been true innovation in this market in years. 

Now, enterprises are under greater pressure than ever. Global operations have scaled, but the predictability of global operations systems has decreased dramatically.  The complexity of payment operations has ballooned, and the inflexibility of legacy providers is increasingly exposed.  

Geographic flexibility is straining existing solutions, and that’s before factoring in the explosion of new payment methods. Consumers now expect to get paid how they want, not just when they want. An Argentinian Contract Developer wants to get paid in stablecoin and will choose the company or platform that offers it. Enterprises need flexibility in both the where and the how of payouts, creating demand for extreme customization.  

One buyer we spoke with said they are managing more than 75+ vendors just for their global payouts today. No one has solved for ubiquity across both geographies and payment methods, and that remains a tremendous gap in the market. 

The Vision for a Single API, Single UX World 

Enter Aran Brown and Eddie Harrison. After years’ operating and innovating inside the current ecosystem, they saw the gap and had a clear vision for how to solve it. Navro will unify every payment across every payment corridor through a single API and single user experience. They are well on the way to achieving that vision. 

They’ve built a full-stack payment platform that supports cross-border collections, currency conversions, and global payouts. Today, Navro serves enterprise customers across 35+ geographies and enables settlement, holding, conversion, and payout into +140 currencies across countless payment methods, including real-time payment networks.  

The infrastructure is purpose-built for high-volume enterprise use cases and is already powering payments for hundreds of large corporations and more than 1,000 pension schemes (retirement funds for US readers).  

Underlying the technical platform is a sophisticated multi-jurisdiction regulatory strategy, and a best-in-class compliance operations team. Navro has secured key licenses in the UK, EU, and North America, earning credibility with tier-one banking partners that now provide their core infrastructure.  

Top tier compliance, licensing, and banking partnerships have earned Navro the right to compete for most complex and demanding customers.  

Their licensing framework doesn’t just protect the business, it enables it. It’s both a moat and a growth engine. Navro is rapidly expanding: this year alone, they expect to secure a minimum three additional licenses – US, Hong Kong, and Dubai – and another five payment methods to the platform. 

When I was at Amazon, solving localized payment operations was an obstacle every time we launched into a new geography. Most providers are single method or single geo. To meet our growth ambitions, we either had to force existing partners to react or find new partners altogether.  

Navro is already flipping that conversation. They are leading customers into new markets and new business models. While other players are talking about how long it’ll take to get live, Navro is talking about how to get live tomorrow. 

The Signal We Couldn’t Ignore 

The right choice is hardly ever the easy choice.  

From inception, Navro made a non-obvious choice to take the hard route, and it was a choice that many investors would not have understood. To serve best-in-class global customers, you need best-in-class global bank partners. To secure those, you need a best-in-class global licensing footprint.  To achieve that, you must build best-in-class compliance operations from day one.  

Navro built the right way, and it was hard. They spent time and resources upfront building those fundamentals, and now they’re winning because of it. It was a difficult trade-off: slower speed to market, and more partner dependency early on. But those choices are being validated in the market, especially in the payroll and marketplace segments where payment complexity is exploding.  

For me personally, the biggest signal was Navro’s ability to secure their bank partners.  

At Amazon, working with the seller team on cross-border payouts, I saw first-hand that the traditional software platforms weren’t sufficient. Going directly to a global bank was often the only efficient path, and I saw how much rigor, scrutiny and diligence tier-one global banks impose before onboarding new partners.  

When I saw that Navro, still a very young organization, had moved through that same process faster than we had at Amazon, it was a signal I could not ignore.

When I saw that Navro, still a very young organization, had moved through that same process faster than we had at Amazon, it was a signal I could not ignore. It was a clear indication that something special was happening at Navro.  

The Relentless Builders Behind Navro 

There is a tenacity within Aran and Eddie that you hope for in every founder you back. One advisor I spoke with during diligence said, “Aran won’t leave sweat on the field, he’d leave a leg.”  

I hope that’s not necessary on the battlefield of payments, but I am glad to know that’s the kind of founders we partnered with. Jokes aside, it’s that tenacity that secured Navro their global bank partners, and it’s the same grit that’s winning them billion-dollar commercial relationships. 

It takes unique founders to have the foresight and conviction to build differently. You need to know exactly where you are going, and believe the world is headed there too, to choose the hard, non-obvious road.  

Aran and Eddie are those types of founders. They have deep industry experience, giving them the perspective and expertise to know what and how to build; plus, they have the ambition to re-shape their industry into something truly different. In one of our first conversations Aran said, “I want to be regulated in every country.” We might debate that strategy in the years to come – but what matters is that Aran isn’t thinking small.  

Backing The Team That Builds the Future 

There’s no reason why the experience of global payouts shouldn’t feel as simple as using Venmo.

Aran and Eddie’s approach aligns exactly with the broken elements of the cross-border payments ecosystem – too many players adding too little value, too much cost, and too much complexity.  

By being directly regulated, by partnering with tier-one global banks, and by integrating directly into every payment method, Navro is eliminating the intermediaries that slow the system down. They are creating a truly differentiated platform, one that gives customers flexibility to scale their business objectives, rather than fighting payments complexity to achieve them.   

Today, the pain of cross-border payouts is most acutely felt by large enterprises with sensitive, high-complexity payments – like Employer of Record (EOR) platforms. But there’s no reason why the experience of global payouts shouldn’t be as simple as using Venmo. Aran and Eddie have the vision to make that future a reality, and the experience and conviction to get there. 

In getting to know Aran and Eddie, one theme came up consistently: a commitment to “best-in-class.” Whether it’s their compliance team, their licenses, their bank partners, or their customers, Navro has built the right way.   

At Jump, we see our investment in Navro as an opportunity to return that sentiment; we have the good fortune to partner with best-in-class founders leading a best-in-class team and join a Board with best-in-class investors. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Navro.  

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Jump Capital is an investor in Navro. Views expressed represent the opinions of the author and Jump Capital. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and references to specific companies and their capabilities do not constitute investment recommendations or guarantee future performance.