“From a reliability standpoint, when you think about the product integration, the fact that we can power financial operations for a company of McLaren’s scale, if we can do it for them, trust me, we can do it for you too.”

Fintechs have entered the arena, literally, as they kick off sports sponsorships across leagues and geographies. From Major League Table Tennis to the Dallas Wings WNBA team, startups tackling diverse use cases (payments, wealthtech, and beyond) have identified sports-focused audiences as viable brand-development and customer-acquisition pathways. 

But few financial-technology players have as much airtime as Singapore-based Airwallex, the Series F company offering international payments and financial solutions across 60 countries for businesses like TikTok, Deel, and Navan. Through its tie-up with Formula One (F1) car racing team McLaren, which includes the company facilitating McLaren’s global payments needs, the fintech’s branding has been festooned on the league leaders’ trademark orange car, associating its corporate journey with McLaren’s engineering prowess and international outlook.

As any marketing leader who has taken a peek at sports sponsorships knows, these kinds of opportunities don’t come cheap. So what market-growth variables and evaluation metrics would make a big-budget sports sponsorship deliver ROI for a startup player, certainly less known than other McLaren brands, like Google and Mastercard? Fintech Nexus spoke with Jon Stona, VP of Marketing at Airwallex, who negotiated the company’s deal with McLaren, and who continues to drive Airwallex’s sports-focused marketing strategy — for constructive advice on best considerations for those in a similar seat. 

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

What were those conversations like two years ago to move in this direction on the marketing front? 

Marketing is one of the newer functions at Airwallex. Around two-and-a-half years ago, we started establishing the foundations. We have some fairly lofty global ambitions, and the momentum has been there, but when we think about how to further accelerate that, two things tend to be quite important with financial services: awareness and trust. And when we were looking for ways to accelerate and build awareness and trust fairly efficiently, we considered a variety of options. At the time, so much of our marketing mix was really focused on lower-funnel performance marketing, but we knew we’d have to build a brand. When we started thinking about the most efficient way to do this at scale in multiple markets, we saw sponsorships as a fairly attractive proposition for several reasons. 

The first is, we kicked off our McLaren partnership last year. When we were analyzing the opportunity in 2023, sponsorships were fairly undervalued as an asset class: during Covid, crypto companies kind of flooded into the space during one of its moments of acceleration, and then you saw a downturn, and so a lot of blockchain and crypto companies had to leave their sponsorships due to financial challenges of their own. We saw all this excess inventory that rights holders had that they were eager to rebalance into other brands. 

The sports angle also tends to be much more multi-dimensional and more lasting. You have so many more facets to tell the story. You have the human aspect of the actual drivers and the teams themselves. You have a lot of content. You have a lot of IP. You have corporate hospitality. There are so many more touchpoints that you can use. 

The third piece is that you also have an already kind of interested base of folks that you can tap into, because many folks already have that emotional affinity and resonance to a particular team or to a particular sport. Especially if you’re trying to quickly build trust and awareness, you already have this kind of primed audience that you can tap into. 

Lastly, when you deconstruct what trust is, a lot of it is credibility, reliability, and intimacy. A sports sponsorship, particularly if it’s the right sport and the right team, can really help get you that credibility fairly quickly. Take McLaren: the fact that they’re a heritage brand, and that they work with the likes of Google and Mastercard, is a signal to the market to say we’re a serious company. We can do the sponsorship to begin with, and be in this category of similar tech players. And from a reliability standpoint, when you think about the product integration, the fact that we can power financial operations for a company of McLaren’s scale, if we can do it for them, trust me, we can do it for you too. So there’s that reliability. And then the intimacy piece, because you’re connecting with folks at a human level, they’re already invested.

Operationally, how did you make the sponsorship work with McLaren? And, was F1 the no-brainer sport you considered out the gate?

It was a fairly lean team. I ended up negotiating the deal with a lot of my own time. There wasn’t really a big sponsorship team. And then we worked with an agency, Sportfive, who was our partner to facilitate all of that discussion as well. They were a good kind of middle person to help broker the deal. On our side, it was very lean, and we worked closely with our legal teams to get the deal done quickly. 

We surveyed a lot of different sports, and we surveyed a lot of different teams as well. We liked F1 because the global nature of the sport really aligns with Airwallex’s kind of global ethos. The global facets of F1 include international drivers, international teams, international fan bases — we’re talking about tens of millions of people tuning into the races — and there’s this international road show for corporate hospitality across 24-odd cities throughout the year, and so that really aligned with our expansion plans. Looking at the success of the Netflix show Drive to Survive, as well as the movie with Brad Pitt, we saw continued momentum, especially in the Americas. Last but not least is the engineering prowess in F1, which aligned with Airwallex’s ethos around precision and a really strong focus on engineering. 

McLaren’s winning record right now probably helps. 

There’s more air time than when we entered the sponsorship: They weren’t number one, right? (I jokingly tell McLaren that they weren’t number one until we sponsored them.) When we started negotiating with them, they were, I think, fifth, and then at the end of the season, fourth. But we saw the momentum and we saw the opportunity because of their technology prowess. So it was very much a momentum story, and that’s, again, the type of story that we’re telling at Airwallex as well.

What processes do you have in place to gauge the efficacy of Airwallex’s sponsorships?

We do a semi-annual brand survey across all of our core markets. We started introducing questions specifically around the McLaren partnership, asking questions around added trust and added consideration. We’ll continue to kind of add questions into that survey. The second piece is looking at it from a pipeline perspective: strong commercial opportunities for our sales and partnership teams. How much new pipeline is being sourced? How much new pipeline is being influenced, both from a customer and partner angle? You’d be surprised how many frozen conversations tend to get unlocked when you can start to actually engage in corporate hospitality with folks, especially for a sport that they intimately follow. 

The third piece, which we don’t meticulously track, is we’ve anecdotally seen the impact on employee sentiment. Some of this comes out in our semi-annual engagement surveys as well, but especially when F1 rolls into particular countries where we have offices, there’s pride when an employee’s mom sees our logo on the TV.

What would expanding sponsorships look like? What sports are you looking at in addition to F1?

We’re actually exploring both, but I think, realistically, it would likely mean new sports, but also geographic coverage, because we might want to go deep in certain markets. And so while McLaren is a global sponsorship, we’re also exploring, let’s say in Australia, let’s say in the US, what might be a more region-specific sport. We’re looking at music and arts as well. And if you think about a lot of how we’ve activated our McLaren partnership, it actually has been few trying to fuse art and culture and sport together. 

I think there’s definitely opportunity in terms of football or “soccer”, especially with the World Cup right around the corner. But as we enter and continue to push into markets like Canada, that’s where hockey starts to become interesting. When we think about Australia, that’s where the Australian Football League becomes interesting. Then there are properties like Premier League teams in England, which might have a push into Europe, but it still have global appeal.

Are there any mistakes you’ve made over the past two years on the sponsorship front that you would encourage others to avoid? Lessons learned?

Definitely lessons learned. Off the bat, it’s important to really go in knowing why you want to do this and what you hope to achieve. Be very clear around your objectives, because that will also determine the quantum of investment you make and the types of partnerships that you enter. I think the biggest mistake we’ve made is that there’s a lot more we could have done to amplify the partnership, particularly through our social channels. When you have such rich IP and when you have teams and drivers and athletes that are so beloved, we spent a lot of time building out a great platform — called “Shifted Perspectives” — to tell the story, but I think there’s just a lot more that we can be doing through our social media channels to bring it to life. So I think that’s probably where we’re trying to put more emphasis this year.

If you go on to a lot of brands’ YouTube channels, you see these talking head videos, sometimes including cheesy sports analogies. These videos get maybe 25 viewers. We wanted to take a different approach. So “Shifted Perspectives” goes back to the ethos of McLaren, and thinking about entrepreneurial success stories, which often involve taking a personal frustration or professional frustration, shifting your perspective, and turning it into an opportunity. Canva’s founders, for example, were frustrated with how slow design was; Airwallex started ten years ago as a coffee shop in Melbourne whose founders were frustrated with international payments. 

We’ve worked with a couple artists so far, including Michael Murphy, who made a statue where from one angle, it’s [McLaren driver] Lando Norris, and then, as you walk around and shift the perspective, it ends up morphing into the Airwallex logo. The point being, we have this platform, but we’re trying to activate it not through talking heads, but through culture, and through art topics that resonate with people at a human level. I’d rather send someone a video of “Shifted Perspectives” sculptures than a 40-page case study on fintech infrastructure, which I know no one’s gonna read. 

Trying to keep the creativity going even after you’ve signed the deal. 

Signing the deal is 10%. Ninety percent is actually what you do with it afterwards. Sometimes folks forget that it doesn’t really matter if your logo is on a car, but it’s how you tell that story. It’s where the real richness is: how you use that IP, how you fuse that IP and sports sponsorship into everything that you do, because it’s a wasted investment if you approach it in a silo. We have to use it as a creative multiplier. We have to take that very prominent IP and weave it into our performance marketing, weave it into our content generation, weave it into Airwallex on socials. That’s how you get the leverage. I think the audience really appreciates that: They can tell when you’re just writing a check, as opposed to really investing in another partner.