Alex Holmes Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, MoneyGram
Since MoneyGram was announced as the title sponsor for the Haas F1 Team in October 2022, the money transfer business has found unique ways to activate its brand through the partnership with the team, aided by the growing popularity of Formula 1 – as MoneyGram chairman and CEO Alex Holmes explains
GP Racing: Alex, you’ve been with MoneyGram since 2009, could you tell us about the company?
Alex Holmes: In its various guises, MoneyGram has been around since the 1940s and our primary service operates across 200 countries to enable families to send money back home. A lot of the business is driven by migration – so people who leave their home country then look for opportunities in other markets. It’s an $800bn industry in terms of money that’s moved home every year and MoneyGram has a 5% market share of that.
Traditionally money transfers were a cash-to-cash business where a consumer walks into one of our 450,000 locations around the world, for example a Post Office in the UK, and then sends money to another country. As the world has changed with mobile services, in the last decade we’ve become a more digitally focused company and now over half of all our global transactions are digital.
GPR: Why did MoneyGram enter Formula 1?
AH: There are a lot of reasons for that. Firstly, I’ve found sport to be a great unifier: as much as there is a battle between fans and rival teams, it also brings people together. Brands that are involved in sports have a higher value with fans.
Secondly we needed to change the perception of our company as we became more digitally focused. And also we became a private company, so we needed to increase our value and accelerate growth. We had been getting interest from NBA, NFL and Premier League teams, but simply putting a logo on a jersey didn’t make sense for us – and no football team is going to change their name to MoneyGram FC.
The younger demographic watching Formula 1 is an important factor too. When we look at our walk-in consumer, around half are over the age of 40. But on our website, over 60% of users are under the age of 40. The average age of people watching Formula 1 is 32 years old. In contrast Major League Baseball, the average viewer is 57 years of age. So it made sense for us to promote and partner with a team in Formula 1.
GPR: Tell us about the association with Haas?
AH: We were approached by other F1 teams as well, but we felt Ha
