Gillette Stadium, home of the NFL’s New England Patriots, will soon install a range of biometric systems for fans, including ticketless entry and hands-free concessions stands for payments.
The stadium’s facial recognition system will be provided by NWN, which already supports credentialing and access control at the venue. The Kraft Group, which owns both the Patriots and Gillette Stadium—as well as the New England Revolution soccer team—announced a five-year deal with NWN to upgrade the IT infrastructure across all its businesses.
Live events and sports venues are embracing facial recognition to eliminate lines, enable biometric payments, and improve the fan experience. The arena space is ripe for building out biometric-enhanced loyalty offerings.
“A few teams are starting to have a better digital experience, including a loyalty program and a stored value wallet,” said Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid at Javelin Strategy & Research. “To spend your money, you have to load it in advance, and maybe you get rewarded for that.”
Chase Center in San Francisco, the home of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, recently ran a demo of a facial recognition payment system. In the test, fans were able to simply walk up to a concession stand and place an order. The system recognized the purchaser’s face and processed the payment without the customer having to do anything.
A Different Fan Experience
The promise for sports arenas is that biometrics could make payments seamless in ways that haven’t been technologically feasible before.
“The fact that biometric is a digital recognition means that it enables customized loyalty in a way that a previous generation of programs simply didn’t,” said Christopher Miller, Lead Analyst of Emerging Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “It is not that much different than handing everybody a little plastic card that you would scan when you checked out, but you identified them with the card at the end of their experience, not at the beginning of their experience.”
Questions to Be Answered
The practical ability of biometrics to provide a consistent experience for customers has not really been demonstrated yet.
“If you switch to a system that is primarily facial recognition based, what happens when the power goes out?” Miller said. “What happens when the reader in a particular area stops working? What happens when the sun shines in such a way that the glare renders one of the cameras useless? It’s the difference between ‘This works’ and ‘This works at scale.’”
