About Us

Welcome to Fintech In The Arena! 🥎

The place where fintech meets sport, and where that intersection finally gets the analysis it deserves.

Every now and then, fintech companies are signing sponsorship deals, putting logos on shirts, and naming stadiums. Most of the coverage stops there.

Fintech in the Arena starts there.

The question this platform asks, every time, is a simple one: is this a branding play or a distribution play? A logo on a shirt is branding. Payment rails inside a stadium are distribution. That distinction changes how you read a deal, how you evaluate one, and whether you should be doing one at all.

The platform

We are a fintech-first intelligence platform covering the business of sport sponsorship. Articles, case studies, a weekly newsletter, a live deals tracker, and in-depth reports, all built around one question: what is fintech buying when it partners with sport?

Everything here is free. The website is open. The newsletter, which goes out every Sunday, is where the analysis goes deepest, one deal decoded, the week's news rounded up, and the strategic angle that turns information into insight.

The person behind it

Marcel van Oost has spent almost a decade building one of fintech's most trusted independent media platforms, Connecting the Dots in FinTech, growing it to 130,000+ subscribers and earning a reputation for clear-eyed, well-sourced coverage of the industry.

What Marcel kept noticing, alongside all of that, was fintech's growing appetite for sport. The partnerships, the announcements, the capital flowing toward clubs and tournaments and athletes. And the near-complete absence of anyone analysing it from the fintech side of the table.

Marcel's network, his credibility, and his years of trust are rooted in fintech. That is the vantage point Fintech In the Arena is built from. A platform that understands what fintech companies are trying to solve when they look at sport, and helps them think through it with clarity.

Who reads this

CMOs and brand leads inside fintech companies evaluating sport as a channel. Sponsorship and partnerships teams at banks and payment companies. Investors tracking where fintech capital is flowing. Agencies and rightsholders trying to understand what fintechs want and why deals fall apart. Anyone who follows this space and wants more than a press release.

Subscribe to the weekly newsletter. Every Sunday. One deal, one roundup, one angle.