Arsenal eliminating cash use in Emirates stadium

To improve service to its fans, English Arsenal's Emirates arena will become cashless.

The new arena, which holds 60,000 fans, required an entirely new IT infrastructure.

Membership cards will be used as payment cards for low-value purchases such as refreshments and merchandise, eliminating the use of cash.

"The cards will be enabled on all our other systems including hospitality and retail systems," said Paul Farmer, head of IT. "Our intention was to be entirely cashless from day one, but building the new stadium was such a big job it was felt we should defer the cashless component."

Farmer said contactless payment company Fortress would implement the cashless environment over several seasons. Fortress also supplies the club's existing contactless turnstiles.

Cashless payments will be stored on a separate server, so when a purchase is made the transaction will be checked with the back-end server to verify funds are available on the card and it will then make any adjustments.

Cards will be charged at topping-up points throughout the stadium.

The club's commercial director, Adrian Ford, said that the main purpose for a cashless environment is customer service, especially at peak times such as at half-time.

"If you can improve the speed of transactions, you can improve your customer service, which is also a revenue benefit because more transactions means more revenue," said Ford.

Cashless environments are easy to implement in controlled locations such as university campuses and sports grounds, according to Forrester analyst Benjamin Ensor.

"The only challenge is that customers must buy credit for the cards and may not want to tie up their money," he said.

Source: euFootball.BIZ © Copyright 2006 - All rights reserved.