Nav helps small businesses manage their finances, access credit, and now use banking products like business checking and a reloadable charge card. As those products expanded, the expectations around notifications increased significantly. Customers needed immediate alerts when something changed in their account, including transactions, large deposits, balance thresholds, or new device sign-ins. These were not marketing messages. They were essential to trust and safety.

Nav did not have a unified system to deliver them.

Over time, notifications had spread across several disconnected tools, each handling a different part of the experience:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud for marketing campaigns

• Mandrill for legacy credit alert emails

• Auth0 for authentication emails

• An older internal service that was no longer actively maintained

None of these systems were built for real-time transactional updates. Salesforce could not support the engineering driven workflows required for banking alerts. Mandrill persisted mostly for historical reasons. Engineering lacked a consistent and reliable way to send messages tied directly to product events.

When Nav’s product teams began building the new checking account, the requirement quickly became unavoidable. The product could not launch without dependable notifications. Engineering estimated that building a multi-channel system in-house, including support for email, SMS, push, routing logic, user preferences, limits, and provider integrations, would take months.

The business needed to ship much sooner, and notifications had become a launch critical blocker.

Nav needed a dependable multi-channel foundation, and they needed it quickly.