I always hated getting reimbursed for expenses. Spending 14 minutes figuring out how to deduct an $8 beer from a $23 lunch because it wasn’t part of the spending policy seemed like a terrible use of time.

But I always wondered, “How do CFOs choose expense management software?” Is there one that’s the obvious choice, or is it kind of a crapshoot?

So for this issue, I’m doing a showdown among four expense management solutions – Expensify, Brex, Ramp, and Navan – to see if any of them hit their narrative out of the park.

Expense Management software is a fully mature category. To win in a space like this, you can either claim to be the best, own a niche, or de-position incumbents.

To Evaluate a Narrative, You Have To Put It In Context

Every narrative has a job to do. Figuring out what that job is depends on how mature a category is.

Expense Management is as mature as they come. Concur is the old-school player here. It was founded in 1993, back when Seinfeld was just on Season 5. In software years, it’s 217. Today, expense management software is used by any business that has moved past things like paper checks, landlines, and Windows XP. Depending on the segment, adoption is around 70-90%.

In mature categories like this, you have three ways to win:

1. Convince buyers you’re the best
2. Find a niche and own it
3. De-position competitors

Options 2 and 3 give you the option to define a new market category, btw. 🏴‍☠️

There’s a fourth option (try to outspend competitors on sales and marketing), but if you’re reading this you already know that’s not the game you want to play. That’s like trying to win WWI by sending 110,000 troops to the battlefield because your opponent sent 100,000.

A strong narrative will support one of these three strategies.

The Contestants: 3 Hot VC-Backed Startups 🔥 (and One IPO Gone Cold 🥶)

Here are the four companies we’ll spend the next 2,000 words with:

1. Ramp. Series D, raised over $1.8B and is currently valued at $7.7B. Founded in 2019. Based in the Big Apple.
2. Brex. Series D, raised over $1.5B and is currently valued at $12.3B. Launched in 2017 and based in SF.
3. Navan. Series G / debt-financed and raised $2.2B. Looks like it’s valued at $9.2B. Based in Palo Alto and founded in 2015.
4. Expensify. Publicly traded, market cap of about $200M (down from $4B in 2021). Founded in 2008. They eked out a profit in 2019 and lost money every year since then. (Maybe they need help with expense management? 😎)

Brex, Ramp, and Navan are essentially peers, but I wanted to include Expensify because it still has a huge market presence. It was a hot company at IPO, but since its stock is a dud today, it’s a good reminder that early hype doesn’t always equal long-term results.

Expensify was the prom queen when it IPO’ed in 2021. But with its stock down to around $2 (from a high of $48), it’s not even invited to junior prom.

How I’m Picking The Winner

As I did with Notion in the last issue, I’ll rate each brand on five criteria. Then we’ll see who emerges as the winner:

1. Point of View. Is there a unique take on the problem or solution?
2. Clarity. Is it obvious who the solution is for and what it does?
3. Strategic Alignment. Does the narrative get the right job done?
4. Memorability. Is it easy to remember what the brand stands for?
5. Distinctness. Are the claims made different from competitors?

Point of View (POV)

A good POV means a brand believes something. It has a unique perspective on the problem or the solution that you can choose to agree or disagree with. It’s hard to find brands with a good POV, so scores above 5 are rare.

Expensify will help you “save time on expense management.” Boy, I sure hope so. Can you imagine buying software that makes you spend more time managing your expenses? Claiming to “help your business succeed every step of the way” and “provide valuable insight” is about as vanilla as it gets. Score: 2/10.

The closest Brex gets to calling out a problem is this line: “As a finance leader, you love control. But most company spend happens outside your team.” It also makes passes at “giving you control” and helping you “spend smarter.” OK, there’s an implied problem around “lack of control”, but what are the consequences? This idea doesn’t have enough bite to it. Score: 4/10

With lines like “control spend and optimize finance operations”, “no more costly errors”, and “builds healthier businesses” Ramp also hints at the idea that running finance is a bit messy and out of control. But like Brex, I couldn’t walk away with a clear picture of what issue is really being addressed. Score: 4/10

Navan has a more obvious opportunity for a good POV, but it doesn’t take it. Unlike these others, it has a native travel solution. It could have spoken deeply about what’s wrong with a non-native approach, but it falls short of driving that idea home. Too bad, this could have been a win. Score: 3/10.

🥇POV Winner: Brex

Brex makes a start at a POV by hinting at a “lack of control” in its message, but it never really brings the point home. Still, it’s the best of this group.

Clarity

Clarity comes from making it obvious who the product is for and what it is. If buyers are confused about either, it adds friction.

Expensify is supposed to be a “financial management super app.” WTF is that? You can find out what Expensify does easily enough by reading through the feature list, but that headline is a waste of space. Expensify is equally for “working for yourself” or “overseeing the finances of a global enterprise.” Which is to say, it’s for no one in particular. Score: 3/10

You know someone was going to say it. Brex is the “AI-powered spend platform.” I know we are supposed to crap on the term “AI-powered” in 2024, but Brex at least gives examples of how AI works in its product (although they are a bit vague). Brex also claims to support startups, mid-sized companies, and enterprises, but the overall vibe leans towards modern, tech-forward companies. Score: 5/10

Ramp gets some bonus points for not leading with an “AI-something” headline, and for giving clear examples of how AI delivers an improved experience. That’s how it should be done. The product pages make it easy enough to figure out the platform, but Ramp isn’t clear on who it’s for. Other than calling out “modern finance teams” there’s little to resonate with a particular business type, industry, or mindset. Sigh. Score: 5/10

Navan doesn’t fuss around with fancy terms. It’s “the only integrated Business Travel & Expense solution.” Navan doesn’t describe why this integration matters, but at least it’s easy to grok. Navan’s also better at calling out its audience, with pages that speak directly to travel managers, office admins, and finance teams. Like its competitors, though, it still tries to appeal evenly to the full gamut of company sizes. Score: 7/10

🥇Clarity Winner: Navan

By calling out some specific roles that others don’t address directly, Navan lands with more clarity on who its product is for.

Strategic Alignment

Strategic Alignment means the narrative is effective at supporting the right category strategy. For mature categories, those options are (1) convince buyers you’re the best; (2) find a niche and own it; and (3) de-position incumbents.

If the Expensify team isn’t mad at me yet, they will be after reading this. 🤬 As the elder statesmen of the group, Expensify can’t de-position incumbents (that’s them). And we already know it’s not niching down. Its only option is to convince you that it’s the best. Does it pull that off? Nope. While companies like Salesforce can do this by speaking to dominant market share or a massive partner ecosystem, Expensify can’t make strong claims about either. Its head-to-head comparison pages come down to feature count. Score: 2/10

As a relative newcomer, Brex has all three strategic options on the table. But it’s not clear which lever it’s pulling.Seeing it de-position Expensify as “dated” made me grin. But its comparisons to Navan and Ramp are a mix of tactics. It’s “better” than Navan (“Brex does travel — and so much more”) but more niche than Ramp (“Ramp is a small business credit card… Brex [is for] global scale”). With its focus on AI, it could do more to de-position everyone else (and maybe define a new market category in the process) but it doesn’t quite get there. Score 5/10

Ramp has the same strategic options available to it as Brex, but it’s the same story. I’m not sure what job Ramp’s narrative is trying to do. When Ramp compares itself to competitors, what I’d want to see is a fundamentally different claim that clearly sets two options apart. But Ramp sounds like a nasal, nit-picky IRS auditor calling out technicalities that you weren’t even aware of. Well, we have procure-to-pay automation with three-way matching and overbilling protection, which Navan does not, so clearly we’re superior... Score: 4/10

Navan is the only company I’m happy with here. Yeah, they do the same-old feature comparison list (where they naturally come out on top). But on all of its head-to-head pages, they do make the kind of “fundamentally different” claim I was looking for with Ramp: “Navan is an ‘all-in-one’ solution that combines travel and expense management on one app. Others do not.” I love this. It’s simple, and it sticks. Navan could level up with better language, but the fact that you don’t have to read through an eye chart of a feature table to see the difference is huge. Score: 7/10

🥇Strategic Alignment Winner: Navan

I love how Brex gets the boxing gloves out and smacks Expensify in the jaw by calling it a “dated platform.”

Memorability

Does it stick? If the narrative leaves a clear and distinct idea of what the brand stands for in your brain, it gets a higher score here.

I hate to keep railing on one brand. But it’s part of being objective. Expensify may have a cool visual identity but there isn’t a single word, phrase, or idea from its website that sticks in my head. Try it yourself. Anything? I didn’t think so.Score: 2/10.

I dinged Brex for not explaining enough about its AI functionality, but the consistent use of the term at least connects Brex with “AI-powered” in my head. The idea of “control” is sticky too. But there’s no phrase that Brex hammers hard enough to really plant itself. Score: 4/10.

Ramp has a pretty broad platform, but it manages to land the idea that it saves you money. Lines like “spend smarter”, “prevent overspending”, “control spend” and “save 5%” leave a decent impression, but it could do more to emphasize these notions. Score: 5/10.

Navan tries a word that others haven’t: magic. It’s nestled near the top of the homepage. Too bad it only uses it once. That could have been an interesting way to describe its native travel and expense integration, but they must have run out of courage. But Navan still makes good use of “native”, “all-in-one”, and “integrated” to leave a mark on your mind. Score: 6/10.

🥇Memorability Winner: Navan

Ramp does a decent job of leaving you with the idea that it will save you money. Statements like this helped with the Distinct Claims score too.

Distinctness

To rank well in Distinctness, a brand needs to convince buyers it can deliver specific, tangible things that others cannot.

At least Expensify doesn’t completely fail on this one. It claims to "Save up to 75% of your team’s time with Expensify” (vs the old-fashioned way). It’s buried halfway down a product page and lacks verification, but it’s mostly a distinct claim nonetheless. Score: 4/10

Brex makes a similar claim but it’s more believable. On average, its customers save “4,250 hours per year.” It also claims 99% policy compliance. That’s unique. And I like how it hints at the idea of “control” that we saw earlier. Score: 5/10

“Save an average of 5% with Ramp” is pretty solid. No one makes a similar claim. And since Ramp dedicates a whole page to this idea, it’s given the attention it deserves. Nicely done. Score: 6/10.

Navan is the only one making a claim about a native, integrated travel solution. Good work there, but I have to take some points off because it doesn’t describe the benefit. Navan makes another distinct claim, though: “you’ll never need to submit an expense report again.” A totally different proposition from making expense reports more efficient. Score: 7/10.

🥇Distinctness Winner: Navan

I gave Navan extra credit because they were willing to make claims that competitors were not – like eliminating expense reports entirely.

Who Won Overall?

None of these brands were terrible, except for Expensify. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s the oldest of the cohort, but since it doesn’t have a dominant position or unique product, it puts it in a tough spot.

I went into this thinking that Ramp or Brex would come out on top; their websites look much slicker. But it was Navan that came out ahead. It didn’t knock it out of the park on any particular metric, and there’s definitely room for improvement. But instead of relying entirely on claims that its product is better or more capable, it’s the only one in the group that defined its solution in a meaningfully different way from the status quo.

Total Scores:

Expensify: 13/50
Brex: 23/50
Ramp 24/50
Navan: 30/50

🏆 Overall Winner: Navan

The Takeaway: In Crowded Spaces, It’s Easy to Be Perceived as a Commodity

Most of you reading this are probably competing in a category that’s already mature. That means buyers are generally aware of the solution, they’ve budgeted for it, and it’s simply a matter of making the right choice.

Operating in this environment is both a blessing and a curse, though.

It’s great that there’s already existing demand for your category; you can generally skip demand creation in your sales and marketing and move straight to demand capture.

But the challenge is that there are plenty of options for your buyers to choose from. Why should they choose you? As we saw in the expense management space, most brands don’t make a clear, unassailable case.

Instead, you’ll find a lot of sizzle, and a lot of feature comparisons, but little steak. Without a a good way to stand out, I’d be fascinated to find out what each of these brands spend to acquire the next dollar of revenue.

Vague terms like “super app” don’t mean much. Speaking to everyone from solopreneurs to enterprises stretches the message too thin. This approach to narrative is why Expensify ranked so poorly.

While no brand got excellent marks, each one could level up their marketing prowess with a better narrative.

If I were Brex or Ramp, I would think about leaning into the problems caused by a “lack of control” and try to de-position other solutions as poorly suited to address this. If AI could solve this in a meaningful way, they’d be onto something.

Navan already has some raw material for a good POV. It needs to lean into the problems caused by a non-native travel and expense platform and show buyers who care about both why that disjointed approach won’t make them happy.

Since Expensify is the legacy player, my hunch is that its product is outdated and in need of a revamp. But that’s exactly where a good narrative can help, too. By showing the market an exciting vision for where it’s headed, it could capture and retain more customers until that vision became a reality.

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