MasterCard Will Kick off New NFL Season with Stadium PayPass Deals

MasterCard International's PayPass contactless payment technology will be deployed at 900 points of sale for concessions inside two stadiums starting with the 2005 National Football League preseason, the card company announced today. Interest among sports stadiums in PayPass, which replaces conventional card swipes with radio signals that carry card-account data to payment terminals, is such that MasterCard expects a number of deals with other arenas this year, says Robert Cramer, vice president of partner and content integration at the card association, without being specific. “We will add more NFL teams for '05, and have received interest from (major-league) baseball relationships,” he says. These new deployments?at M&T Bank Field, where the Baltimore Ravens play, and at Qwest Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks–follow a similar one for PayPass that MasterCard ran during the 2004 NFL season at some 400 points of sale inside the Phildelphia Eagles' Lincoln Financial Field. That program will be repeated for the 2005 season, MasterCard says. The PayPass stadium programs will begin with the preseason in August and will run throughout the NFL season, which ends in January. The programs will accept cards issued by MBNA Corp., which has team co-branding arrangements with both the NFL and Major League Baseball. The concessionaire is Aramark Corp., Philadelphia. Terminals for M&T Bank Field are being supplied by Columbia, Md.-based Micros Systems Inc.; for Qwest Field, by Tangent POS Inc., Davie, Fla. Stadium deployments, says Cramer, serve as a visible demonstration of PayPass's contactless payment technology to a diverse audience. “It's a high-profile people center,” he says. “It will have high talk value, so people will want to get [the card] and will want to know where else they can use it.” PayPass relies on chips and antennae embedded in either cards or cell phones to communicate via radio waves with readers attached to conventional card terminals. Once the terminal receives account data, transactions proceed as if a card had been swiped. Replacing swipes results in faster transactions, according to the experience so far of MasterCard and American Express Co., which has been testing a similar technology, which it calls ExpressPay, on keyfobs as well as cards. Transaction speed has been important to high-throughput outlets seeking to replace cash transactions with electronic payment. McDonald's Corp. last year became the first major merchant to commit to rolling out PayPass (Digital Transactions News, Aug. 18, 2004). AmEx, meanwhile, has recruited drugstore chain CVS Corp. to roll out ExpressPay (Digital Transactions News, Dec. 15, 2004).