In a sentence: The MoneyGram Haas F1 Team wanted an international payment solution for paying suppliers around the world in multiple currencies that would be easy to use and cost-effective.

About the team

The MoneyGram Haas F1 Team are the youngest team competing in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship. With their headquarters in North Carolina, USA, they also have offices in the UK and Italy. Their car is also an international one, with Ferrari in Italy a major supplier.

With this international nature, Haas were making plenty of intercompany payments across borders every year, as well as paying suppliers in approximately 10 currencies.

We sat down with Team Principal, Guenther Steiner, and Global Head of Finance, Tom Capocci, to see how TransferMate has allowed Haas to keep every dollar on the track.

The Challenge

Operating an F1 team is a complex, international business. Good processes and logistics are the foundation for making the car go fast on race day – without them, the support team and drivers won’t have the right tools to perform.

“The challenge, always, is that you need to move a lot of people around the world many times. Next year we have 24 races,” said Guenther Steiner. “We’ve got a place here in the UK, we’ve got our race team, and we’ve got a technical base in Italy within Ferrari, because we use also the Ferrari wind tunnel with about 100 people in Italy, about 90 people here, and about 25 people in the US.”

With Haas operating across so many countries over a single season, and with their in-house operations spread across three countries, there was constantly funds flowing across borders, and their previous payments solution wasn’t working. 

“There’s a lot of complexity behind paying everyone in various countries around the world, and there was a lot of delays and issues, in terms of trying to coordinate that in one solution,’ said Tom Capocci. ‘And, with our previous solution, we simply didn’t have what we needed.”

The high-value items, such as the engine and parts from Ferrari, were also more costly than they needed to be. Large FX commissions meant that when Haas bought the car engine from Ferrari, the payment method itself was costing them unnecessarily.

The Solution

The Haas finance team needed a reliable, secure, cost-effective and easy-to-use international payments solution to meet these challenges. Enter TransferMate.  

“TransferMate gives us a one-stop shop solution. It is kind of an all-in,” said Tom. We can go on it and make all our payments in one hit with all the different currencies to all the suppliers around the world. The portal is really good. It’s quick, it’s efficient, it’s easy to get onto, and there’s a lot of good controls as well, which is obviously important from a finance perspective. There’s checks and balances in place to make sure everything is correctly signed off.”

The TransferMate solution has also allowed Haas to keep the money on the track, and not being paid out to third parties.

“When I speak with the board, it’s a lot about money,’ said Guenther. “Our race team is nothing else. In the end, it needs to be a business. It’s not a hobby – a race team. It is a lot about money and how you spend it, how efficient you are, what can you do. I never say, ‘don’t spend money’, but spend it wisely.”

“We see less bank fees, we’re seeing costs savings on rates when making payments, we’re seeing increased efficiencies within the finance team, and we’re moving less around within our own existing bank accounts” continued Tom on the same theme. “It’s a really good story to tell {to senior executives} and it’s a bit of a no-brainer when we’re able to save money on something like payments. It means we can invest more in the car and that’s a great thing to say.”

While the system saves the Haas team time and money in terms of cost and processing time, it’s also given a simple solution to deal with the complexity of international payments in multiple currencies.

“You set up a supplier very easily in the system. It checks that the details are legitimate, which is obviously a very important thing that we need to do, and it follows right through to the payment process,” said Tom. “We’ve got reporting on the back end as well, so we can see everything that we’ve paid, and we can track it to infinite detail if we need to.”

The Results

With TransferMate’s solution in place, the Haas finance team can now make payments and move money around the world with more efficiency and cost-effectiveness. 

“In the old days of F1, it was a lot more important to have lots of money,” concluded Guenther. “If you can keep on throwing money at it, at some stage, you can fix problems. But now we’ve got the budget cap in place in F1. So, now it’s more important to have a balance in spending and make sure that you’re not wasting it in stuff which doesn’t make you go faster.”

The Final Word

“I would recommend TransferMate. It’s a really good platform – very easy, simple to use for international payments. It’s helped increase the efficiencies of the finance team and brought cost savings associated with that as well.”

• Tom Capocci, Global Head of Finance, MoneyGram Haas F1 Team

To learn how your organization can use the TransferMate online payment portal, contact the team or sign-up here.