Premiership Football club Arsenal’s Emirates stadium is to become a cashless environment to improve services to fans.

The new stadium accommodates 60,000 supporters, compared with 38,000 at Arsenal’s old Highbury stadium, and required a whole new IT infrastructure provided by management software specialist CA.

Membership cards are to double as contactless payment cards for low-value purchases such as refreshments and merchandise.

‘The cards will be enabled on all our other systems including hospitality and retail systems,’ said head of IT Paul Farmer.

‘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,’ he said.

Farmer says the cashless environment will be rolled out in a couple of seasons’ time by contactless payment specialist Fortress, provider of the club’s existing contactless turnstiles.

Cashless payments will be stored on a separate server, so when a purchase is made the transaction is checked with the back-end server to verify funds on the card and make the appropriate adjustments, says Farmer. Cards will be charged at topping-up points throughout the stadium.

The club’s commercial director Adrian Ford says that the main driver 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.

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