Decorative illustration of a stadium

Going cashless in stadiums

Lee Hill
23 Sep 2024

Key points

  • Stadiums and arenas of all sizes are going cashless around the world, from Wembley and Leyton Orient in the football world, to “Smart Arenas” where they host multi-events such as sports events, music concerts and much, much more
  • Going cashless offers huge benefits in efficiency, admin and volume as well as security for clubs and grounds and improving CX
  • Epos Now Enterprise can offer a seamless transition to going cashless

Like businesses everywhere, the world’s stadiums and arenas have been gradually going cashless over the past few years, and we haven’t seen a downside as large venues move toward mobile and contactless-only payments. If anything this move to cashless is gathering momentum across our global territories.

In a high-volume, high-speed, high-demand environment like a stadium, going cashless allows you to serve more customers, faster, with fewer staff, fewer errors, less admin, less security risk and lower operational overheads. 

Here at Epos Now Enterprise, our stadium customers tell us that fans love the speed and convenience as queues are reduced, and there are reports of spend-per-head increasing dramatically when cash isn’t involved, in some cases by 25% or more. 

Making the jump to cashless means placing your trust in a point-of-sale system that offers a hassle-free transition and simple user experience, alongside world-class support when you need it. That’s something our experts in the Enterprise Team at Epos Now are here to help with. 

As soon as you’re set up, many cash-related tasks disappear straight away.

  • Paying for cash deliveries by security truck?
  • Double-staffing the walk to the safe?
  • Refilling cash drawers?
  • Checking in floats?
  • Counting and reconciling cash?
  • Checking for forgeries?
  • Arguing with customers over change?

All gone.

That’s before you reduce your transaction time to a few seconds as customers simply tap and go, which gives a huge uplift to your efficiency by reducing wait times across all areas of the stadium.

You’re now able to serve all those fans who would have given up on the drinks queue because the half-time whistle’s about to blow or the main act’s about to start. What impact does that have on your sales volume? What impact does that have on their experience? What impact does that have on their feedback to you?

And how about adding roving merchandise sales with handheld payment devices? The term “queue-busting” is becoming more widespread and is one of the biggest efficiency improvements we have seen in our stadium customers across the world. The ability to reduce wait times, drive increased revenue and get supporters “back to the action” is absolutely key to adding to the wider experience.

When Brisbane’s Ballymore Stadium joined Epos Now, our implementation experts were on hand when needed but, according to Operations Manager Jacob Fullwood, it was a seamless experience. He told us: “I love the fact that I didn't have to call up a support unit every three minutes during our implementation of the new system, we just pretty much click the Help, and there's a complete and thorough guide on pretty much exactly what I needed to do.”

If you’ve been holding back while other stadiums go cashless, or you’re interested in seeing your project come to life with real-life data and examples, get in touch with our Enterprise Team today.