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Subaru Park, home of major league soccer’s Philadelphia Union, is the latest sports stadium to go entirely cashless. The team announced Thursday it was deploying more than 130 Clover point-of-sale devices from Fiserv Inc. to enable contactless purchases at concession stands and premium seating areas in the stadium.
Like many professional sports franchises, the Philadelphia Union opted to go entirely cashless in its home stadium to shorten wait times at concession stands and improve customer service. The team, which is a new client for Fiserv, did not test cashless technology before making the decision to go entirely cashless at its stadium. All Clover devices can be configured to accept cash if the venue choses to activate cash acceptance in the future, Fiserv says.
“We look forward to introducing our community to…modern payment experiences that shorten concession lines and keep Union fans in their seats enjoying the game,” Charlie Slonaker, chief revenue officer for the Philadelphia Union, says in a prepared statement.
Data gathered from the Clover terminals will be used to optimize sales and tie customer purchases back to season ticketholder accounts to create offers and rewards. For example, a season ticketholder might receive a text or email message during a game that says, “We know you always purchase crab fries at halftime. Here’s a batch on us as a surprise,” according to the Philadelphia Union.
The team will also analyze transaction data to identify peak ordering and fulfillment times, average ticket size, menu performance, and other operational insights. The San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League, for example, use data from POS terminals in Levi’s Stadium, which went fully cashless for the 2021 season, to help concession operators better manage the flow of orders and send messages to fans about pick-up times when orders during peak periods exceed the kitchen’s capacity. In the NFL, peak ordering periods are 15 minutes before kickoff and the 15 minutes during half time.
“As consumers demand faster and easier ways to pay, stadium operators have a tremendous opportunity to enhance fan interactions while streamlining in-stadium operations,” Geoff Johnson, general manager of Bypass at Fiserv, said in a prepared statement.
Bypass is a specialized POS application for sports and entertainment arenas, food-service providers, and restaurant chains. Fiserv added the software to its offerings as part of its acquisition of Bypass Mobile in 2020.
One notable difference in the Union’s decision to go cashless at its stadium is that, unlike the case with other cashless sports venues, reverse ATMs will not be deployed to enable fans that still carry only cash to the game to purchase a prepaid debit card for in-stadium purchases. For example, the Lafayette, Ind., Aviators, one of three amateur baseball teams operated by National Sports Services, has installed reverse ATMs at its home stadium, which went entirely cashless for the 2021 season.
In addition, the Union has no plans to make available to fans a mobile app that enables online ordering and payment and provides estimated pick-up times for orders.
