'Signing is the easy part': How Airwallex turned sport into a global growth engine

As the Formula 1 season opens at Albert Park this weekend, Airwallex is entering year three of a sports sponsorship push that has quietly become one of the most ambitious brand-building plays in global fintech.

The Melbourne-founded payments and financial platform is now live with three major international properties, McLaren Racing in F1, Arsenal FC in the Premier League and Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants, while also layering in more local plays across Australia and New Zealand through AFL club Essendon and iconic New Zealand Super Rugby Club, the Blues.

It marks a shift from a single global sponsorship to a portfolio approach that mixes worldwide visibility with local credibility. And according to Jon Stona, vice president of global marketing at Airwallex, it is already delivering “a material impact” on the business.

“What we've seen is that it's had a material impact, not just on trust, but also consideration,” Stona says. "This is critical in financial services, especially for a challenger brand."

He says the McLaren partnership in particular has helped sales teams unlock larger conversations in-market, accelerated existing pipelines and delivered an internal dividend too, with employee pride and recruiting lift flowing from the visibility of elite sport.

“A really wonderful byproduct has been the growth in employee sentiment. There’s so much pride especially when a Grand Prix comes into town. Mum and dad will see it and instantly recognise it. We see the impact even on our recruiting pipeline of candidates wanting to join the company. It’s right across the board."

The timing is strong. McLaren arrives in Melbourne as reigning 2025 constructors’ champion, while Lando Norris topped the 2025 drivers’ standings. Meanwhile Arsenal’s 1-0 win over Brighton on 4 March keeps it at the top of the Premier League table and pushing for its first league title since 2004.

Airwallex’s newest global partnership - the San Francisco Giants jersey patch deal - will debut this MLB season, adding a high-impact US platform just as the company ramps its American ambitions.

Why sport? It works

Airwallex’s sports strategy began with McLaren, at a moment when Stona argues the sponsorship market had briefly reset.

“You know, at the time, coming off the back of Covid and also the crypto winter, what we saw was that there were a lot of sports properties and rights holders who ended up having inventory that was, I think, fairly undervalued,” he says.

Airwallex also wanted a faster route to trust and brand awareness in new markets. 

“The sports sponsorship angle is really interesting for us, because it's dynamic in nature. It's not like an out-of-home placement that goes away after a certain point of time or is just purely two dimensional," he says. 

“We see it being multifaceted and dynamic. You have content, you have hospitality, you have the actual athletes and drivers and you have the IP that you can then use intelligently through the rest of your marketing communications.

“I think one of the most important aspects which makes it multi-dimensional is the fact that it can be a real product story. No partnership that we enter into is purely a logo play. We need to be a partner. We are integrating Airwallex into your products. That's that authentic story that we're going to tell.”

That integration theme now sits at the centre of how Airwallex positions its partnerships. The Essendon deal, announced this week, includes official financial software status in addition to the jersey placement, with Airwallex’s spend and expense management tools set to be deployed across club operations.

Activation is the real work

If there is one line that keeps coming up in Airwallex’s playbook, it is that signing the deal is the easy part.

“So much of it also comes into how you activate,” Stona says. “Signing a deal is the easy part. Actually activating and making it relevant to people, that’s where the real magic comes in.”

His critique is blunt: too many brands spend everything securing the rights, then have little meaningful investment left for activation. 

Airwallex instead treats sport as a “multiplier” across the marketing funnel, feeding its IP and access into content, events and performance marketing rather than isolating sponsorship as a brand-only layer.

“For us, we flow it into everything that we do,” he says. “Our event strategy, our content strategy, our performance marketing makes use of that IP. Our job is to meet our customers and prospects where they are.”

That idea matters particularly in B2B, where marketing has historically struggled to create emotional connection.

“One of the challenges that has held B2B marketing back is that it's just felt too impersonal. At the end of the day these are human beings that we're trying to build relationships with,” Stona says.

From global to hyper-local

What is notable now is how Airwallex is evolving the sponsorship portfolio. Stona described McLaren as a “truly global” platform, a single property with worldwide reach designed to build brand salience quickly.

Arsenal then became a hybrid play: global appeal combined with strategic importance in Europe as Airwallex pushes deeper into the UK and broader EMEA. Year three marks the shift into local and regional partnerships designed to embed the brand market by market.

“So the third year of activity, now we start to move into the regional and hyper-local sponsorships. For us that means AFL in Australia and Super Rugby in New Zealand.”

That approach now extends to the US through Airwallex’s partnership with the Giants, a move tied closely to the company’s San Francisco expansion.

“San Francisco is our home in the US, and the Giants are one of the city’s most iconic institutions,” says Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Airwallex.

“We’ve been building here quietly for years, but this partnership marks our bold commitment to the city’s future.”

And the logic, Stona says, is not simply choosing the biggest team.

“It’s more important to show that you're in this for the long term,” he says. “For us, it's like, let's get in with you now, because we want to be committed to you with the journey… not just when you're on top.”

That positioning is particularly visible in the new Essendon partnership, which the club framed around its “Fly Together” vision and a younger team in place for the 20026 season.

Impact beyond spreadsheets

For a marketer operating in a CFO-shaped category, Stona is unusually candid about the limits of measurement.

“We measure what we can. But data should never trump common sense,” he says.

Airwallex uses brand surveys by market and looks at trends over time rather than short windows. Stona says the company wanted a full year of McLaren data before adding Arsenal, and additional evidence across both before expanding further.

There is also some self-awareness about the risks of leaning too heavily into sport. In year one, Stona says Airwallex pushed sponsorship messaging too far and needed to rebalance toward the core product story.

“You don't want to be known as just a sports brand at the end of the day… our story is that we are an AI native financial operating system building the future,” he says. “At the end of the day, that’s the message we want to send out.”

Why this matters for Airwallex

This sponsorship surge is landing alongside a broader global expansion push, particularly in the United States. Airwallex crossed US$1 billion in annualised run rate revenue in October 2025 and has positioned the Bay Area as a key growth engine, including establishing San Francisco as a second global headquarters alongside Singapore.

The company has also flagged a US$1 billion investment into US expansion between 2026 and 2029.

In that context, sport is doing a specific job: compressing trust-building timelines, opening doors with larger businesses and giving a fast-scaling brand cultural legitimacy in markets where “Australian fintech” is not yet a default category leader.

As Melbourne kicks off the new F1 season this weekend, the bigger story is that Airwallex now has a repeatable sponsorship system: global fame, then local credibility.

As Stona puts it: “So much of it comes down to how you activate.”