Airwallex and McLaren turn Lando Norris's mind into Formula One's newest brand film

Deal type: Brand campaign extension | Sport: Formula 1 | Announced: ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, McLaren's 1000th race

A global payments platform builds a second act with its Formula One partner, using technology on a driver's face to say something about speed in business.

Airwallex and the McLaren Mastercard Formula One Team have released "What Next?", a new brand film built around World Champion Lando Norris. The campaign follows last year's "Shifting Perspective" and pushes the partnership further into content territory, treating a driver's face as the canvas for eight stories about ambition, disruption, and staying ahead of the next corner. Timed to land alongside McLaren's 1000th race milestone at Monaco, the release turns a heritage moment for the team into a fresh brand moment for its fintech partner.

The production

The film comes from Airwallex's in-house Brand Studio team, working with Amsterdam production company Whale, shot inside the McLaren Technology Centre. The technical hook is a high-definition 3D mapping system paired with infrared camera technology, projecting visuals directly onto Norris's face in real time. Layer an in-car radio style voiceover on top and the 45-second modular hero film puts viewers inside the cockpit mindset rather than watching from the grandstand.

The choice to build this in-house says something about where Airwallex is putting its marketing budget. A lot of fintech sponsorship money goes toward media placement, logo rights, and hospitality. Airwallex is instead funding original production, treating the sponsorship as a platform for storytelling rather than a billboard.

Matt Jennings, global creative director at Airwallex, framed the campaign as a statement about approach as much as speed:

"Airwallex, like Lando and the McLaren team, is always looking at the next challenge, never settling for good enough and instead always asking, 'What Next?' This campaign celebrates our shared mindset to build better at speed, as we move towards a bolder, borderless economic future. We also want this film to demonstrate how we continue to challenge traditional sponsorship conventions, telling visually compelling stories through our partnerships that culturally resonate and offer genuine emotional impact."

Branding or distribution

This is a branding play, and a well-built one. Airwallex isn't embedding payment rails into McLaren's operations or processing transactions at the track. The deal is about visibility and association, placing Airwallex alongside a Formula One team at a moment engineered for maximum attention.

What separates this from a straightforward logo deal is production value. Most branding plays in fintech sponsorship stop at a shirt patch or a trackside board. Airwallex is spending on custom technology and a production team to make its brand story feel native to the sport rather than bolted onto it. The 3D face-mapping treatment turns Norris into the medium, not just the messenger, which is a more expensive and more memorable way to run a branding campaign.

The distribution muscle here belongs to the media plan, not the payment product. Sky picks up the film to run alongside its F1 programming in the UK, and both Airwallex and McLaren push it across their own social channels. That's a smart use of paid and owned media working together, but it stays firmly on the branding side of the ledger. There is no embedded checkout, no payment infrastructure inside McLaren's ticketing or merchandise flow, and no fintech rail running through the stadium or the paddock. The value exchange is visibility for Airwallex and production budget and creative reach for McLaren.

Why Formula One works for this kind of brand story

Formula One has become one of the most efficient sports properties for fintech brand building. The sport skews global, high income, and technology literate, which mirrors the customer base fintechs like Airwallex are chasing. Race weekends generate a steady drumbeat of content moments, giving sponsors regular opportunities to refresh a campaign rather than running one static asset all season. Airwallex's "What Next?" tagline leans directly into that overlap, positioning a borderless payments platform around the same idea of always looking to the next challenge that defines a sport built on split-second decisions and constant refinement.

The bigger pattern

Airwallex has now built a football and Formula One footprint in parallel, following its partnership with Arsenal F.C. and an ad campaign with Spike Lee. The company is stacking marquee sports properties the way a global brand builds a portfolio, using each partnership to reinforce the same message: a fintech built for speed, scale, and businesses without borders.

Stacking multiple properties like this is itself a strategic signal. One sponsorship can look like an experiment. Two or three across different sports and different audiences starts to look like a sustained brand platform, which is a stronger position for a fintech trying to build trust with enterprise customers who are watching how seriously a payments company invests in its own brand.

For fintechs watching from the sidelines, the lesson isn't the size of the check. It's the willingness to commission genuinely new content rather than recycle a logo across placements. Sponsorship budgets in sport increasingly reward brands that show up with a story, not just a name, and Airwallex's willingness to fund custom production alongside its media rights is a template other fintechs entering sport sponsorship should study closely.

Want the next fintech x sport deal decoded like this one? Subscribe to the FinTech in the Arena newsletter.