Why CurrencyTransfer.com Partnered With Leeds United FC

Over a year ago, I randomly got inundated by sports marketing agencies. As someone who has always been fascinated by the business of sport, I got curious. So, we began discussing internally if we should partner with a historic team. The idea, while large in nature, raised a few eyebrows. We knew measuring precise ROI across all rights would be a tough exercise, but the more I got into the nitty gritty details, the more I believed in this channel as a driver of new business. In the sales versus branding debate, I’ve always leaned on the side of creating an experience-based acquisition funnel. The greatest companies in the world don’t just sell. They create a brand that stands for an experience.

In this post, I will share some of the key practical and tactical reasons we’ve become the ‘Official Global Payments Partner’ of Leeds United FC. 

Optimise Transfer Dealings

Within 30 minutes of meeting the CFO of Leeds, we knew a partnership could help Leeds United not only increase their bottom line, but that our global payments marketplace could optimise some of the manual processes around their foreign activity. In the frantic world of international payments, it was clear Leeds United needed a FinTech focused, proactive, and trusted foreign exchange partner, that could get the job done. Handling multi-million pound transfers with time pressures can be complex. We knew we could deliver.

Check out Angus Kinnear & Emma-Louise Jones from LUFC on why they partnered with CurrencyTransfer.com

MiniMultinationals in Yorkshire

Outside of helping the club, the next step was to build a business case for Yorkshire as a target market. Leeds is one of the fastest growing cities in the UK and continuing to grow according to the Grant Thornton Vibrant Economy Index. It’s the second centre of banking and this historic ‘one club city’ is at the epicentre of this rapid development. Despite Brexit, Yorkshire has not dampened local business appetite for going global. A recent piece of research by Deloitte showed amongst 500 scale-up businesses, a third of them had already expanded overseas, and 51% targeting international growth in the next three years.

One club city

As a marketer, having a closely-knit, almost ‘tribal’ community is a dream come true. By building relationships from partners to end clients, you can quickly establish network effects. In short, partnering with LUFC gave us a central point from which to begin B2B efforts in a market we truly believe in. Spreading yourself too thin is never a place a marketer wants to be hanging out and this gave us the perfect focal point.

 See how CurrencyTransfer.com’s award-winning payments marketplace can help your business go global today!

Founder-Official Partner Fit

As a serial entrepreneur himself, we quickly understood owner Andrea Radrizanni and CEO Angus Kinnear have big plans to engage with the local start-up business and tech ecosystem. Talking to these folks in the language of ‘pilots’ ‘MVP’s’ and ‘Problem-Solution fit’ showed strong early synergy between CurrencyTransfer.com and LUFC.

Aside from many of the standard, cookie cutter ‘Matchday Rights’ we knew we could embark on some really innovative partnership activation campaigns, to mutual benefit. In the pipeline, our respective teams are working on an intimate CEO Dinner Series & Sports Tech Demo Day, forward-thinking concepts that we will collaborate to mutual benefit along with other breakthrough activities.

Are you a Sports Tech company who wants to pitch senior club officials in April with your solution? Email me - [email protected]

Content is King

We believe every brand should market like it’s actually 2018, not 2008. Aside from building a great product, we want to portray ourselves as a thought leader in the industry, providing meaningful and valuable content to our clients and followers. From engaging 1-1 with our community on social media to intense content production across our written, voice, and video channels.

Let’s be honest. Talking about currency all day long isn’t the sexiest subject, however much @FxPlew tries (Check out our COO Paul Plewman’s daily vlog)! We see enormous upside and underpriced attention when ‘Social Selling.’ Leveraging our partnership with Leeds United has given us unique content opportunities and we believe when you set the creative content bar very high, and amplify, the output can be remarkably effective.  We quickly discovered that the digital team at Leeds have the same mind-set and this has been a very fruitful relationship for us.

 Crushing in our passion (the smart way)

Football often keeps me up at night, whether it’s West Ham’s woes, following Hendon FC in the Non-League or plotting England’s unlikely path to the final in Moscow this Summer. As an entrepreneur, my passions combined and I’ve developed a strong interest in the business of sport. This curiousity, combined with our team’s love for both business and football, would provide the passion that we need to grow and seemed like a smart move from all angles that we looked at it.

We are an incredibly data driven team, and approach the partnership from a measurement perspective like we do all other marketing activity. Leeds United is measured as a P&L centre. We regularly: set quarterly ROI targets, audit pipeline metrics, monitor lead gen activity and develop sprints around partnership activity.

Thus far, we’re seeing soft benefits emerge that don’t generally show up on a CRM or Google Analytics report; Trust in our product, excitement from our employees and biz dev opportunities emerge from the wider deliverable FX industry. The combination of the brand building and the strength of this partnership have delivered fantastic opportunities.

Final thoughts

To close, this partnership could never have been accomplished without the support of our board and for this I am tremendously grateful. From the beginning, the vision and enthusiasm for this partnership rubbed off, and by the end, we were all excited and motivated to pursue our ‘Official Global Payments Partnership’ with Leeds United.

Thinking of partnering with a football team? I'd love to give value and share my insights, [email protected]