Gross profit, net compliance: Navro's view on stat & tax payments

The Paypers sat down with Eddie Harrison, Co-Founder at Navro, to figure out the challenges faced by companies with their statutory and tax payments and how they can be overcome.

Many payroll and payment providers focus primarily on salary disbursements. What risks do companies face when statutory and tax payments sit outside the core payroll flow, and how does Navro address this gap?

These payments are not separate use cases. In practice, they are often the same and closely linked. However, businesses regularly treat them as separate flows, largely because of the complexity involved. This leads to the use of multiple service providers, different partners, and fragmented payment networks.

As with many complex systems, things work neatly at a small scale. Having said that, as more jurisdictions and regulatory layers are added, the system quickly becomes more fragile, manual, and prone to failure. Managing payments then requires significant process across different payment providers and tax authorities, not only at a global or national level, but down to individual states and regions.

Take India, for example, where multiple state-level taxes apply. Or Spain, which is often assumed to be straightforward but can be surprisingly complex when it comes to tax payments. Depending on whether you are paying at a national level or intoin specific regions such as the Basque Country or Navarre, you may need different providers and different payment methods.

All of this creates substantial operational overheads and a high potential for error. In the context of net salary payments, mistakes lead to frustrated employees. In the context of stat and tax and stat payments, errors can result in fines and penalties for businesses. Taken together, this makes it extremely difficult for companies to manage everything effectively within a single, unified platform.

Your company positions itself as closing the ‘final mile’ of global payroll. From your perspective, why has statutory and tax payment execution remained a challenge in the industry, and what makes this type of integration particularly complex across borders?

It requires a dual-track network strategy. You need one network for payments, and a second, equally robust network for tax and statutory compliance. Just as a payment in Brazil may require Pix, a payment in the Philippines might need a connection to GCash, and in Kenya, it could be M-Pesa. The same principle applies to statutory and tax payments. Each country has different authorities, partners, and operational flows.

The challenge is that this is so complex that even mapping out how to do it becomes a barrier for most companies, let alone building the infrastructure and activating it within a single platform for corporates operating globally. As a result, most providers entering the workforce payments space focus on net salaries, which are already difficult, and on contractor payments. Contractor payments are relatively simple by comparison and can be handled with minimal infrastructure.

At that point, most providers stop and do not go any further. The regulatory burden and compliance requirements are simply too high. We see it differently. We do not believe you can seriously serve global corporates with all each of their workforce payment needs, including pensions, statutory benefits, tax authorities, and net salaries, unless you are committed to supporting the full picture.

At a minimum, tax and statutory payments can represent 20 to 30 percent of the overall payment flow, which makes them worthwhile on their own. At their best, they become a decisive advantage that unlocks the entire industry from a competitive standpoint.

Real-time visibility and proof of payment (PoP) are central for payroll compliance. What kind of solutions can materially improve audit readiness, reconciliation, and regulator confidence?

Many of these transactions are not just payments. They are a combination of a government or local authority filing and the payment itself, with the two working in tandem. Timing is critical, and corporates need certainty that both the filing and the payment have been completed successfully.

We have already built a global, real-time net payments network that includes SWIFT rails, around 70 ACH-based payment networks, real-time payment schemes across 130 to 140 key currencies, and coverage in roughly 60 to 70 countries. We have also added options such as stablecoins and e-wallet payments for specific edge cases, although it is worth noting that very few tax authorities accept those methods. Until now, however, tax payments sathave sat outside of this capability.

By bringing tax and statutory payments into our existing platform, large enterprises gain the same level of visibility and control over these payments as they already have for salaries. That means a single view across both net pay and tax obligations.

Previously, even with a strong global payment network, companies might still need to manage 50 to 60 separate local tax relationships. Many of these authorities are not API-driven or technology-first. In some cases, the process still involves sending paperwork by email to an accountant in a remote region and waiting for confirmation that the payment has been completed.

What we have built is designed to remove that complexity. By abstracting it away, we allow customers to receive clear confirmation, and, where possible, real-time confirmation, that their tax payments have been successfully made, just as they do with net salary payments.

Global expansion often comes with growing fragmentation in banking partners, accounts, and local processes. How do companies like Navro enable scale across jurisdictions while maintaining compliance, speed, and reliability?

This is largely a quality challenge. In many markets, there are fast routes to move money using orchestration layers, multiple partners, and multiple platforms. However, these approaches often rely on networks built on top of other networks, with downstream dependences on entities you do not have a direct relationship with or control over. That becomes a serious issue when you are dealing with highly regulated tax or statutory payments.

Navro has been very deliberate in how it builds its infrastructure. Whether we are working with a bank or a local partner, we start from first principles and ask which path delivers the most robust, compliant, and high-quality user experience. That discipline extends to the coverage a partner can offer, the licences they hold, and the credit rating of the bank involved. For example, we would not route tax payments through a non-AA-rated bank in an emerging market. These are large, meaningful sums of money, and the risk profile matters.

If you are processing 10 million in net salaries, you might be sending 3 million to a single bank in one transaction. That makes it critical that the underlying network is exceptionally robust. We have invested heavily in doing that foundational work.

The harder part is that, in many cases, there is no modern, API-first connectivity. This is not like Banking-as-a-Service or embedded payments, where years of fintech innovation have layered technology on top of legacy systems. In tax and stat payments, we are often starting from scratch. Navro is among the first to tackle this problem at scale.

We work directly with local partners, many of whom still rely on manual processes and have little more than email, shared files, and basic documentation. We wrap our technology around those legacy workflows to create structured, reliable processes. As a result, our customers see the same level of visibility and control for tax and authority payments as they do for salary payments, even though the underlying systems remain deeply legacy.

With regulatory expectations on the rise, looking ahead, what will become non-negotiable in global payroll and stat & tax payments over the next few years?

There is no global standard for statutory or tax or statutory regulation. In many countries, it simply does not exist, and the variation between regions and states can be significant. We have already touched on examples like Spain and India, but this fragmentation exists across much of the world, with layered state and local taxes.

In India, for instance, taxation is not determined solely by the location of the legal entity, but also by the location of the employee. An employer might be registered in Haryana, while an employee lives in Delhi. That employee will fall under a different tax code from colleagues who live in Haryana, even though the locations are only a short distance apart. This creates substantial complexity, and it is not something that will ever be addressed by a single global regulation dictating how tax or statutory payments should be made.

Because of that, the industry must work around the complexity rather than expect it to be standardised away. The pressure for change is not coming from the top down through regulation, but from the bottom up. Large corporates, in particular, are raising their expectations around how their funds are handled. They want to know whether funds are protected in transit through safeguarding or equivalent regulatory frameworks, and what level of diligence has been carried out on the underlying payment network.

There is a significant difference between using a highly regulated EMI with direct connections to government-backed banks for tax payments, and routing funds through a small in-country accountancy firm operating via a tier-three local bank account with no safeguarding in place. Historically, corporates have been forced to build a patchwork of local relationships, sometimes relying on a single individual in a country to handle filings and payments.

Our goal is to remove both that complexity and the associated risk. We ensure payments are made over robust financial networks, so that, for example, a tax payment in Italy is routed through the strongest banks in the country. Rather than using lightly regulated digital accounts or lower-tier institutions, payments go through double-A-rated banks on a highly regulated platform, with full end-to-end visibility for the customer.

About the interviewee

Eddie's career spans both B2B and B2C markets across payment acceptance, issuance, and payment infrastructure. Eddie has run Global Strategies, Financial Networks and Product for his entire career. He is also a seed investor within the FinTech community. Now, he’s combining it all to build Navro’s Curation platform and make scaling simple.

 

 

 

About the company

Navro is a payments curation platform providing large global businesses with a single connection to move money, curating the optimal rails, routes, and compliance for every payment.