Venues see higher value transactions processed faster with biometric payments: webinar

A webinar on how biometrics can help sports arenas and other large events resume operation featuring Blink Identity Co-founder and CTO Dr. Alex Kilpatrick was recently held by Venuetize, and hosted by its Co-founder and COO Karri Zaremba.

The “Pay with Your Face: Making Venues Cashless with Biometric Payments” panel also included Wayne Scarsella of enterprise POS and management company Appetize, Joe Rembold of hospitality management firm Delaware North, and Patrick Abts of AMALIE Arena and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The first topic of the webinar is a review of why industries were already moving towards replacing cash payments and other transactions with biometrics, followed by discussion of the benefits and risks associated with the technology, how face-based payments work, and a demo. A question and answer period followed the presentation.

Projections about growth in transaction processing with biometrics, facial recognition and consumer preference are followed by a review of the motivations for businesses adopting face biometric payments, such as transaction speed, increased spending, acquiring more data, and increased security and fraud protection.

The increase in spending is delved into with an examination of the psychology of spending, which indicates the average order amount for transactions conducted with biometrics is $34.71, well ahead of mobile ($26.50), credit cards ($25.88) and cash ($14.14). The inverse is seen in how long transactions take, with biometrics averaging only ten seconds, compared to 25 for mobile, and significantly more for cards and cash.

AMALIE Arena has accepted mobile payments for about three years, according to Abts, which he thinks will also make integration of biometrics easier. He identifies guest education on and adoption of the technology as a risk, along with the need to store and secure the privacy of massive amounts of data. Post-COVID, the Lightning plan to roll out a number of kiosks for biometric payments with facial recognition throughout the arena.

The role of facial recognition in Delaware North’s GuestPast program is discussed, including age estimation for alcohol sales.

Kilpatrick explains how face matching works, and provides an interesting anecdote that people do not tend to ask about how fingerprint or iris matching works, but many people ask about face matching. This is because, he believes, people can conceive of the latter, since it is how they typically recognize people, whereas the other two are naturally opaque.

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometric payments  |  biometrics  |  Blink Identity  |  consumer adoption  |  facial recognition  |  secure transactions  |  Venuetize