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

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**Kate Moody** (0:44)
Hello, 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. So 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 Kirsty Spickett, CMO at Zilch, who are the official way to pay for recently crowned Premier League Champions Arsenal. Welcome to the show, Kirsty. Please tell us a bit about yourself and Zilch.

**Kirsty Spickett** (1:44)
Thanks, Kate, and hi, thanks for having me on the show. As you said, I'm CMO at Zilch, where I lead brand, marketing and customer growth strategy.
Zilch itself is a consumer payments platform. We 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. It's a partnership that for us has driven both brand and commercial objectives for this year. We're very excited about what next season will hold for us too.

**Kate Moody** (2:16)
Awesome. 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 Sokin, 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.
James, great to have you join us. Please tell our listeners a bit about yourself and Sokin, please.

**James Hannaford** (2:37)
Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Keay, 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 I've 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.
Ultimately, we do this to remove the friction to global growth and scale. We do it through a number of products, FX, international payments, and a number of global treasury solutions. As you've touched on, we've delved into football this season, and last with Nottingham Forest and most recently Manchester United, amongst some other sporting sponsorships. We're absolutely chuffed to be here talking to you about, without doubt, our favorite topic and favorite part of the job.

**Kate Moody** (3:30)
Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us as well.
Last but by no means least, we have Deborah Keay, CMO for International Consumer at JPMorgan. JPMorgan's UK retail bank, Chase, is the official banking partner for the Home Nations football teams, which includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland national teams. Deborah, again, would you mind giving me a little bit of an introduction to yourself and your role, please?

**Deborah Keay** (3:52)
Yeah, sure. 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 JPMorgan Personal Investing in the UK. We were a nutmeg, we just rebranded to a JPMorgan brand now.
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.

**Kate Moody** (4:29)