1071. Insights: Fintech's coming home - The growing relationship between fintech and football

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0:41Hello and welcome to Fintech Insider Insights. I'm Kate Moody, Customer Strategy Director here at 11FS. In today's episode, we're talking about two things that we're super passionate about at 11FS, fintech and football. As fintechs have grown into mainstream financial brands, many have turned to football as a way to reach global audiences, build trust and engage younger fans. Sponsorships used to be fairly straightforward. Pay some money, get your logo on a shirt. But increasingly, fintechs are embedding themselves deeper into football ecosystems through payments, fan experiences, infrastructure and community engagement.

1:16So as the World Cup kicks off in Mexico, Canada and the United States, we wanted to take a look at why fintech loves football and in turn why football loves fintech. To do so, I'm not alone and joined by a great panel of guests. First up, we have Kirstie Spickett, CMO at Zilch, who are the official way to pay for recently crowned Premier League champions, Arsenal. Welcome to the show, Kirstie. Please tell us a bit about yourself and Zilch. Thanks, Kate. And hi, thanks for having me on the show. And so, as you said, I'm CMO at Zilch, where I lead brand marketing and customer growth strategy. Zilch itself is a consumer payments platform.

1:51We provide our customers with smart ways to pay through credit and debit. As you just mentioned as well, we're the official way to pay for Arsenal. It's been an incredible season. It's been our first year with them and with Arsenal having just been crowned Premier League champions. So it's a partnership that for us has driven both brand and commercial objectives for this year. So we're very excited about what next season will hold for us too. Awesome way. Thank you very much for joining us. Looking forward to getting your perspectives as we go through the show. Next up, we have a warm welcome to the show for James Hannaford, Chief Growth Officer at Soken, who are the official global business payment solutions partner for both Manchester United, my team just to clear my bias up front and Nottingham Forest.

2:30James, great to have you join us. Please tell our listeners a bit about yourself and Sokin, please. Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Kay, and pleasure to be here. So yeah, Chief Growth Officer here at Sokin, a marketer at heart, I've been a marketer for 20 years and have been fortunate enough to spend the last six seeing some fantastic growth here at Sokin. Sokin ultimately is a global payments platform. And we are built to support businesses operating across borders. And ultimately, we do this to remove the friction to global growth and scale. And we do it through a number of products, FX, international payments, and a number of global treasury solutions.

3:10And as you've touched on, yeah, we've delved into football this season and last with Nottingham Forest and most recently Manchester United, amongst some other sporting sponsorships. and yeah, we're absolutely chuffed to be here talking to you about, without doubt, our favourite topic and favourite part of the job. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us as well. And last, but by no means least, we have Deborah Key, CMO for International Consumer at JPMorgan. JPMorgan's UK retail bank, Chase, is the official banking partner for the home nation's football teams, which includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland national teams.

3:44Deborah, again, would you mind giving our listeners a bit of introduction to yourself and your role, please? Yeah, sure. and thank you very much for having me on. So yeah, as you said, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for our International Consumer Bank. So you will know us as Chase Bank and now JP Morgan Personal Investing in the UK. We weren't nutmeg. We just rebranded to a JP Morgan brand now. And we're having quite an exciting growth time at the moment, as well as operating in the UK for five years. We literally two weeks ago launched in Germany, which so far is going very well. We're very excited to welcome our first customers there and more European markets to come and hopefully more exciting engagement with sports to come as well as part of that.

4:27Oh, fantastic. Well, yeah, looking forward into discussing this topic with all of you. So we've got a fantastic panel. Let's dive in. Just like football, FinTech Insider is a game of two halves. And I'd like to start this one off by looking at the ins and outs of these partnerships. So again, maybe just to get us started, I'd like to come to each of you really to understand And why was getting involved in football such an attractive thing for your business? Deborah, maybe start with you. Yeah, sure. So it's not going to come as a surprise to anybody on this call that football is the national obsession of the UK.

5:04And from a commercial perspective, if we look at our target audiences that we want to engage with and where we can maximise our reach, football is the answer. And it's not just reach in a kind of media sense, it's reach in a sense of being able to participate at those great moments of national attention and national interest and passion around big tournaments. That was one of the things that really drove us to our Home Nations partnership, to be honest with you. So, you know, commercially, it makes complete sense for us to be able to show up at those moments in front of target audiences. But there was another really important driver for us of this particular partnership that we have.

5:46What we love about football is it's universal, right? Its reach is universal. It's grassroots and it's elite. And we're very conscious we're a digital bank, but we want to operate at the heart of the communities that we're serving. So for us, you know, supporting Home Nations teams provided an amazing platform for us to also engage with local communities across the UK. and that's what we did with our coaching program, you know, helping a diverse group of young people to develop their skills in the coaching area. So lots of really good reasons for us to engage with the nation's favorite sport. Yeah, absolutely.

6:25James, what about you guys over at Soak and what were the kind of key drivers for you? Yeah, I mean, I have to agree with everything Debra said. This is ultimately not many sports and not many leagues in the world operate at a truly global level like English football does. So it provides such a great opportunity. For us at Soakin, we are a global business with licenses operating around the globe. So finding a footprint of a sport and teams that can match and marry that is fairly difficult to do. There's not too many other places you can go bar maybe Formula One that carry that weight. And it's truly global by nature and matches is, as Deborah said, an international fan base, which you can't get in many other places.

7:12And for us, of course, as well, our tie into football wasn't cold. Our first external investor was actually Rio Ferdinand. So that gave us a really warm introduction into the world of football, where we knew that we could partner with football clubs rather than just sponsor them, which is something else that's pivotal to us as a business. Awesome. Yeah, definitely. I think we want to dig into that a bit more as we go through the show. But Kirsty, yeah, just to get your perspective as well, just to kick us off, I mean, you mentioned at the start that this is relatively new for you guys at Zilch, this is your first year of dabbling in this space, so it must be fairly fresh for you as a decision.

7:46What were the key drivers? Yeah, so as Deborah was speaking, I was thinking to myself, I second that. And then as you were speaking then, James, I was thinking I third that, but I'm not sure whether that's a thing, so we don't necessarily need to say that. But so at Zilch, we actually didn't start with football. we started with a business problem. So Zilch has great, great product market fit here in the UK. We've built a huge customer base of over 6 million registered users, but we've done that pretty much all through performance marketing. So our awareness considerably lags behind where we've sort of been in the last five years.

8:23As we continue on our growth journey as a business, we need people to know who Zilch is, but really importantly, we need them to understand what it is that we do. So what a consumer would get from zilch. And so, you know, football for us gives what other media channels can't. It gives reach for sure. You know, Deborah mentioned that herself. But for us, it was beyond the reach. It was more about the resonance as well. It gives, you know, emotional engagement, cultural relevance and repeat attention. So very, very different to your traditional media channels. Also for us, it was really critical that we're able to integrate our product into the sponsorship.

8:59And we've done this a number of ways. throughout our sponsorship, but I'm sure we'll get into some of this later in the conversation, but from the designation of being the official way to pay at Arsenal Football Club through to giving fan discounts for paying with Zilch and through our activations, we've ensured that our product critically is integrated into the journey so that this isn't just a branding exercise, it's a brand plus what our product does. So hopefully at the end of this season, Arsenal fans are leaving, understanding not just that we're Zilch, but also what it is that you would get as a consumer from us.

9:31So that's why Arsenal was really compelling. When we met with them as well, they felt like they were winners. I'm sure that every commercial conversation that you have with any football team starts with, we think we're going to win this year. But they said that and they did it for us. So Arsenal felt like a really good, they felt buoyant, they felt buoyed by what the season would hold for them. Just to add to that, I think one thing I miss is, well, the obvious point is the global reach piece and the residents piece in English football especially. But certainly we're all financial brands and with financial brands, you have to have trust in everything you do to your customers.

10:09And the one thing that football clubs bring, certainly top tier English clubs bring, is a level of credibility. Certainly when you go beyond a level of pure sponsorship and you're actually looking at an integrated partnership, that credibility piece is key to everything. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I'm keen, if you're able to share, like sort of a view like behind the curtain almost about like how these relationships start like you know to me it feels a bit like dating like who initiates you know who approaches who like I mean Debra I don't know can you share any of the kind of like starting how did this partnership start what did that look like and I guess is it just about the financial services brand or the fintech picking the football team or does the football team also kind of scrutinize you and look for things from you?

10:52No I think any great partnership and I'm sure James and Kirstie found the same, you know, this is very much a two-way thing, right? And when we started this journey with the Home Nation, so there's, you know, actually four parties, there's four FAs across the Home Nations. And when we walked into the partnership, we didn't start actually with, obviously football was very important, but we weren't starting with, oh, you know, what great assets can we get through this sponsorship? We actually started the conversation with, What can we do to support the wider communities that are engaged in football across the UK and across every region of the UK?

11:37And our starting point was actually our community coaching program, right? And not all the stuff that we knew that we could do to, you know, LEDs around stadiums, you know, stuff on training kit. That's great. it certainly helps us with, you know, measuring an equivalent media value. But we wanted to find a platform through which we could meaningfully create a community program that fitted with the kind of values of our firm. Now, we do a lot in skills development within JP Morgan on a global footprint. And we knew that football is a universally appealing way for people who maybe haven't, you know, come up the traditional career or school path, but have a passion for this game and actually do want to develop their skills on and off the pitch.

12:29So really everything that we started with was around how can we build this community program together and then we'll build everything else commercially on top. And they were absolutely fantastic partners in that process. They really brought all of their skills and experience to the fore. They understood their communities, they understood their fan base, they understood where the challenges were in building a diverse pool of coaches so that people could, you know, see people who look like them in these roles. So that's where we started. And, you know, we continue to build the partnership together.

13:02We explore how well it's performing. We talk about how we can make it even better. You know, when the Lionesses did an incredible job last year at the Women's Euros, you know, we worked with them again to build that great parade which we all participated in to showcase them so you know it's an ongoing really important partnership where we're all tracking the same OKRs and those OKRs are not just about is this hitting brand engagement and preference it's actually about are we having an impact as a team as well. Yeah I took my baby daughter to that parade it was such It's like an iconic moment for me, I think, as a woman.

13:43Take my daughter to that. I mean, she has no clue what happened, obviously. She was only like a couple of months old at the time. But yeah, I feel really proud. I have a favourite picture, a favourite brand moment. There's a little girl in her mum's arms and she's got a chase hat and a chase flag. And she's got this thing that says, when I grow up, I want to be a lioness. And I just think that is what it's about, right? creating that moment of connection, inspiration to young people. It was quite something. Yeah, absolutely. Kirsty, what did the early dating days look like between yourselves and Silch?

14:18It was dating, actually, Kate. I was just thinking my response is, we've quartered with football for a long time. So over the last sort of four years, we have danced around. We've had various conversations. And all the way through those early conversations with multiple different football clubs and sports in general, actually, it was beyond just football, but sports in general. And every time we looked at it, our view was, you know, this is a badging exercise. This is about big brands that just go and plaster their brand all over perimeter boards, shirts. And that was our view of football. And then we met with some of the top clubs, including Arsenal, and they really challenged us on that belief.

15:01You know, they really, they understood quite quickly that this for us was not just a branding. Nobody knows who Zilch is. So that doesn't necessarily help. They need to understand who Zilch is, but importantly, what it is that we bring. So the integration of our products, as I've mentioned, was absolutely critical. So they were able to come to us and challenge those beliefs and challenge that we can integrate our products. We can put meaning behind our product with a sponsorship. This is not a badging exercise. And so through a combination of being really clear when we went into the conversations on what we needed to do, what mattered, how we made our, how we put meaning behind our product and being super clear on what we wanted to do before we negotiated the rights meant that we could create a rights package that enabled us to do what we needed.

15:43I think, you know, we'll talk about this probably later, but lots of brands fail from kind of going into these conversations and negotiating a bunch of rights and then thinking, oh gosh, we've got all of these rights. What else are we going to do? We were super clear. We knew there were five activations that we wanted to do. We knew we wanted our product integrated. We knew the experiences and value we wanted to bring to the fans right from the fall. And so we were able to negotiate the terms that were appropriate. But as I say, it's not a short, you know, it's not a thing that happens overnight.

16:07You don't wake up and think, we want football. You've normally courted this for a little while. And as your brand evolves, you know, when it's relevant for you, we'll become part of that conversation. Yeah, I know. That's really interesting to understand. I mean, James, obviously, so you alluded to your introduction was slightly different, obviously, because of the relationship with Rio Ferdinand. So again, like how did that shape how this partnership started? Maybe you can give us a bit of a behind the scenes look into that. Yeah, so Rio was actually our first external investor into the business and that came about purely because Rio's quite a successful businessman off the field and he's built quite an interesting mix of businesses from his YouTube enterprise beyond outside of football and in that world.

16:53And he got chatting with Verun, our CEO, and was really, I guess, a victim of the friction of global business, moving money around the world, paying high FX fees from the incumbent bank. He understood every problem that we as a business were built to solve. And that really sparked that relationship. And he was our first external investor, and he's still in the business today, and an incredible partner for us. And part of that partnership, from his perspective, is making sure and helping us connect with the right people. And we've been in football sponsorship before, and we know exactly what we want to get out of football and out of sponsorships and partnerships in general.

17:41And we would never call it a sponsorship in its own right. We will only do a partnership. And the partnership for us has to be twofold. It has to generate awareness for us as a brand, but then it also has to generate credibility. And the only way to generate credibility for us is that we can truly integrate into that partner. And for us to do that and for us to feel warm and fuzzy inside, we have to know that we're adding value to that partner or we won't do it. So in the case of Lossingen Forest at Manchester United, they were clubs that were open to conversations around their financial infrastructure and what they do around the globe.

18:24And we knew that we could support and enhance their operations financially. And that's what makes a truly compelling credibility case. So we can build a use case of it and support the club and also grow our awareness off the back of it through the assets. so Rio is obviously a warm connection to Manchester United which is fantastic it really does help we've also recently welcomed Nemanja Vidic as a Soken ambassador as we actually look to grow our engineering footprint and stronghold in Serbia so he's been an incredible help as well another link to Manchester United so just being in that family it has been phenomenal and we're actually up here in Manchester today and tomorrow with the club playing on the pitch as well and meeting some of the greats as part of the tour.

19:13So it's a fantastic club to be a part of. It really is a pinch me moment that we've got to this level of our journey as part of this. Yeah, I would definitely be thrilled if that was me. So I'm very, very jealous right now. Deborah, you alluded, I think, as part of what you were saying earlier, to some parts of these media partnerships or these marketing partnerships are quite data-driven. You are looking for specific metrics and some of them have like broader, less tangible benefits. So when you are thinking about what you want to measure, what can you again maybe share some other particular things that you are looking to be able to measure in data terms as like the outcomes of these initiatives?

19:51Absolutely. And it's really, you know, what we would think of as full funnel. It's measurement at different layers of the funnel for different reasons. So when you go right to the top of the funnel and you think about what it is you want to achieve from a brand point of view, We have perpetual studies in market that give us an idea of how people consider us if they're exposed to the sponsorship versus not exposed to the sponsorship. And we can see very strong performance there. So really, you know, we're moving into year three of our home nation's relationship now. And it's really beginning to bed in.

20:25And we can see what it's doing for our brand in terms of consideration and preference by that association. I think that's been helped by having some of these major activation windows. We had the men's window, men's euros, women's euros. Obviously, we've got the World Cup coming up. So that's a real top of funnel measure. You know, when we talk to the CFO about it, we do sometimes talk about equivalent media value of what the rights are driving for us as well. It's really just a helpful way in which to kind of try and do some sort of, you know, So, well, it's a bit like spending money in this, but it delivers on things like consideration rather than awareness.

21:01So, we measure that. But then if you come down the funnel, it also has a massive impact in terms of consumer, customer engagement as well. So, we do a whole array of prize draws, money can't buy experiences, meet legends, meet players. We take our coaches to meet coaches and player legends as well. Our colleagues have got involved within the business and they get opportunities for those experiences too. And we can measure all of that. You know, how many of our customers are engaging with the draws? It's a very high percentage. It's a very popular part of our Chase experience. You know, how do our colleagues feed back on their engagement in some of the programs as well?

21:46So really, we can give a full funnel view of what we think this relationship is doing for us over time. and we can absolutely see the value trending upwards as we move through this four years of this current cycle of the relationship. Yeah, absolutely. I guess to close out this half, I suppose it sounds like there's been a huge journey for all of you kind of in all these partnerships so far, I'm sure more to come. I'm interested in you, has there been a particular sort of wow moment? Obviously, James mentioned, obviously he's going to be playing on the pitch, things like that, but have there been any wow moments so far from the partnership?

22:22I mean, Kirsty, Steve, is there anything that's really made you smile or kind of really made you kind of feel this was a great outcome for Zilch? Yeah, I mean, there's been quite a few. I think we've got an activation that runs throughout the year that's sort of blown up on us. It's called clean sheets. It's a really simple activation. If Arsenal wins and keeps a clean sheet so they concede Zilch goals, we give them 500, we give away 500 official Arsenal scars for free. and then we show through that journey that the fan will take that we're essentially paying the£25 for that scarf. And this is blown up and it's, you know, because we created something that fans genuinely want to participate in.

23:02But what sort of really, really shocked us in the wow moment for us was that Arsenal told us a couple of weeks ago that the Clean Sheets campaign is their most engaged with social campaign of the season. That includes their own stuff that they post on Instagram. so we had double their normal interaction rate with normal posts so that really surprised us Arsenal's one of the biggest football clubs in the world they work with some of the biggest brands in the world so hearing that we're their most engaged fan campaign of the season was pretty special Yeah, absolutely James, what about you? What's been your wow moment so far?

23:38So we've recently run a campaign the Cross Border Challenge that involved filming at Carrington we had Fernandez, Cunha, Ahmad and Yoro take part in that challenge which was a little bit of fun we're on a bit of a roadshow at the moment to try and humanize everything we do as a financial brand it's so easy to forget about the human element of you as a business so humanizing our brand is a huge part of that and to get those guys involved in that campaign and filming with us with a lot of engagement and laughter was a brilliant part of that. And it's our first real campaign with Manchester United, our first part of that journey, and I'm sure we'll have more to come on that.

24:21But Kirsty, I love your example, by the way. That's awesome work. Thanks, James. Yeah, no, for sure. And Debra, you obviously mentioned kind of that, the photo that you saw of the daughter and the mother and so, again, that sounds pretty wild to me, but are there any other moments that you'd like to share of kind of the partnership so far? Yeah, I mean, I think I've got some personal ones, But I think one of the powerful things that we've seen is we get access to talent through our partnership as well. And we've been running some campaigns with Sarka around coaching and the inspiration that coaches provide for their local communities.

24:58So beyond the pitch, what those people then do with the ripple effect in the community. And the engagement that we've had from those has been absolutely phenomenal. I mean, you know, TV coverage, radio coverage, it really is a real sort of lighthouse moment for us in the programme. So having that access to incredible talent that people really relate to has been one of the big and very powerful things that we have and something that we are obviously planning to do a lot more with as we work with them. For sure. The referee has blown the whistle for half time, which means oranges for me and this panel will be back after this short break.

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