Why sports is big business for Global Payments

Bloomberg

One of Global Payments' partners enables consumers to pay with a gaze, part of a trend in payment technology away from physical checkout, even for firms that rely on the point of sale for revenue.

"You can walk right up and pay with your face," Chris Siefken, president of Genius Restaurant at Global Payments, told American Banker while describing technology from stadium technology firm Wicket that Global Payments plans to deploy at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.

The Atlanta Falcons' home facility is one of about 160 sports venues that Global Payments counts as clients. Global Payments in recent days signed deals to provide payments technology for the Minnesota Twins at Target Field and expanded its partnership with the Dallas Cowboys.

Other recent signings include providing payment technology for the Tampa Bay Lightning. Global Payments' expansion in sports payments comes as it deploys its retooled Genius point of sale system. Sports venues and festivals, which have a captive audience and gated entry, play a major role in showcasing new payment options.

"Stadiums and arenas are proving ground for a lot of technology," Siefken said. "They run the gamut in terms of complexity of what we install." 

Goal line

Global Payments' sports relationships vary, and can include ticketing, concessions, parking and inventory management. The Twins and Cowboys deals include ticketing and concessions. For facilities that support facial recognition for ticketing, the technology can be transferable to other areas of the stadium. In Atlanta, for example, facial recognition can pay for items, with human staff performing ID checks for alcohol purchases and managing security. 

The digital ticket enrolls the consumer in the team's app, which supports the functions the team chooses to enable. "Once you're enrolled, you're in the building and there are a lot of ways a team can engage with consumers," Siefken said.

That includes checkout-free retail. Also called autonomous checkout, the technology enables people to make payments without engaging with a point of sale, with the transaction instead being automatically billed to the consumer's e-commerce account. The sports strategy is part of Global Payments Genius, a mix of hardware and software that can be updated to add new content or merchant services. Genius combines more than a dozen existing payment products along with new products and upgrades, and is an attempt to simplify the lines between the different merchant categories in Global Payments' network.

"The more seamless we can make that the quicker we can serve people," Siefken said, noting that line management is a major part of the pitch to sports teams. Genius' introduction follows Global Payments' April agreement to sell its issuer business to FIS for $13.5 billion while acquiring Worldpay from investment firm GTCR and FIS for $22.7 billion. The acquisition and divestiture is expected to close in early 2026 and is part of a Global Payments' strategy to sharpen its focus on payments technology that can be used across different business lines.

Agent AI at the ballpark

Autonomous checkout in stadiums is gaining traction "because check-in is the new checkout," Richard Crone, a payments consultant, told American Banker. "Venues with gated entry already control ticket access, enabling seamless post-entry payments once fans are enrolled."

Firms pursuing checkout-free retail include AiFi, Zippin, Standard Cognition, and others, which have refocused on stadiums and arenas, where pre-authorized electronic ticketing serves as the check-in and the same tokenized credential enables autonomous checkout at concession stands inside the venue, Crone said.

Read more about artificial intelligence. (Artificial intelligence | American Banker)

Checkout-free retail can combine with agentic payments, which have been developed by Visa, Mastercard, Google, PayPal, Amazon, and Stripe to expand its utility. Agentic AI refers to technology that can perform tasks with little or no human supervision, making it possible to quickly process transactions or handle orders and checkout at stadium facilities. "This allows one check-in to unlock entry, concessions, and merchandise with autonomous checkout," Crone said. 

As entertainment offerings, such as sports, music and arts create distinctive experiences for their subscribers (season ticket holders), the venue has become a great way to test new technology that has some friction threshold for entry, Christopher Miller, lead analyst of emerging payments for Javelin Strategy & Research. "For repeat, loyal customers, a small amount of friction can pay off over time with repeat, improved experiences, which is exactly the situation a season ticket holder faces in their relationship with a team or a performing arts organization," Miller said. 

Additionally, broader macroeconomic factors are at play, such as increased ownership of multiple franchises across leagues; increased concentration of arena operating companies, and substantial concentration in ticket sales and distribution, according to Miller. "These factors create an opportunity for large investments in cutting edge technology targeted at highly desirable consumers," Miller said. "There aren't that many other large-scale environments that are like this.  And the massive opportunity here is to integrate all aspects of the experience."