As per SportsMint sources, A new age Credit Card company, Slice Cards has reportedly replaced Samsung to become the Front-of-Shirt sponsor of Mumbai Indians. As part of the deal, Slice would feature its logo on the front of the jersey of the most popular and successful franchise of the IPL.
The deal size is estimated to be of a whopping 90 Crores for 3 Seasons as Mumbai Indians initiated the process of replacing key sponsors after every three years as done with Samsung and also observed with the signing of DHL Express as the Back-of-Shirt sponsor which replaced Colors TV channel backed by Viacom 18 Network. The last sight of the Samsung Logo on the front jersey of the team was seen in IPL 2021 held in UAE.
Coming to this agreement while gaining the most coveted sponsorship asset of the Mumbai Indian’s jersey, Slice Cards will expect to leverage the association using the MI players and team IP in all their communications along with high exposure across all the MI live games in IPL. Reliance’s efforts in making MI the most valuable team has paid off commercially and this will certainly create new benchmarks for the other IPL commercial teams.
Slice Cards is a VC(Venture Capital) funded fintech startup which provides pay-later cards as a substitute for conventional credit cards targeting the Indian youth who finds it difficult to obtain one from the resistive regular banks. The company claims itself as India’s best credit card challenger which can be witnessed by its growth as it raised $220 million last month in a Series B round and have started issuing 2,00,000 cards every month, trailing only HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.
The cricketing world has experienced a great number of fintech companies acquiring sponsorships such as CRED, Phonepay, Paytm etc, thus this move by the emerging startup would expand its outreach and gives fierce competition to the company’s immediate business rival Uni Cards which raised $18.5 million in a seed round without a product in hand offering the similar product. It claims to have achieved disbursal of 120 crores in November. Another brand in this category known as Unicard claims to disburse around 175 crores per month and aims to take it up to 1500 cr per month by September next year.
Before the sealing this multi crore, multi year deal, Mumbai Indians recently have bought another team in Emirates Cricket Board’s UAE T20 League to strengthen their portfolio of sports teams while promoting and facilitating ISL and UTT via their sports marketing company RISE. These initiatives will strengthen MI leadership position and thereby offering more value to their sponsors.