B2B brands partnering with sports teams is not a new thing – but it’s not often you see a scale-up brand in a position to partner with a football giant like Manchester United.
Despite being founded in 2019, UK fintech brand Sokin has done just that, announcing a multiyear agreement today (14 August) with the Premier League club to become its official global payments partner, with similar deals struck with the British & Irish Lions and Nottingham Forest earlier in the year.
For its chief growth officer James Hannaford, the decision to involve the brand in sports is a simple one, coming down to building “credibility” in the market. He points out that if you’re a CFO considering moving £100m in payment volume from Barclays to Sokin, for example, that irrespective of the savings on the bottom line and the strength of the deal, if just “one person” in that room doesn’t know who the brand is then there’s immediately a “seed of doubt” on the decision.