Former French rugby international Sébastien Chabal has teamed up with CurrencyFair, the Dublin peer-to-peer foreign exchange marketplace, in a new television and social media campaign.

In bizarre scenes, the fearsome French number eight dons wings and dresses up as a “CurrencyFairy” to help expats find cheap foreign exchange rates.

Brett Meyers, the chief executive of CurrencyFair, said he hoped the campaign would help his company "expand our existing presence in Europe and Australia, as well as enter new markets across Asia and the Americas".

“Chabal was used conceptually by the agency to illustrate the fairy concept,” Mr Meyers said.

“However, it turned out, by chance, that he was actually available, and we leapt at the chance to have such a high-profile representative who embodied the strength and power that we wanted in our fairy champion.”