Kansas City Chiefs Partner With Tappit, Enabling Mobile Payments At Arrowhead Stadium

Tappit technology will be used to enable mobile payments throughout Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, as part of a long-term deal, the company announced Thursday.

Tappit is now the Chiefs’ official mobile payment solution for the team’s app. Its technology will spearhead the app’s new scan-and-go cashless payment function throughout Arrowhead via what the team is branding ChiefsPay.

“So if you go to the pro shop or to food and beverage as a fan,” said Jason Thomas, Tappit’s CEO, “you’ll literally be able to press a button, and since you’ll have already connected either your credit card, bank card, Google
GOOGL
Pay or Apple
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Pay to the app, you could press a button and be able to pay through a QR code.”

Tappit has plenty of high profile international clients, including soccer giants Manchester City, Formula 1’s Australian Grand Prix and Dubai’s rugby stadium, but are looking to quickly expand its U.S. partnerships. If both the Chiefs and Tappit exercise their mutual options, the partnership could extend to a 10-year pact, Thomas said.

Tappit has a software development kit that will go into the Chiefs’ mobile app, and it’s able to integrate with any point of sale system or any customer management system. So for any team that wants to partner with Tappit, it won’t affect that team’s existing infrastructure, which Thomas said put partners’ internal tech teams at ease.

“One of the reasons why the Chiefs were such a good partner for us is they’ve done a great job in the last couple of years of moving a lot of their fans from physical tickets into using the mobile app to get into Arrowhead,” he said, “So they have a really high adoption rate of fans who use the app.”

The Chiefs declined to comment whether Arrowhead Stadium was going completely cashless or if there will still be old fashioned registers at its concession stands. In early July, Kansas City posted on its team website that there could be a chance that Arrowhead will have fans at Chiefs games in a limited capacity, with season ticket members getting first dibs on seats. The Chiefs did not comment further when asked whether fans will attend games in 2020.

“Fans’ and staffs’ health comes first, and if there’s no fans this year then there’s no fans this year,” Thomas said. “We’re looking at this agreement from a long game perspective.”

The ability for fans to use a QR code to pay for food and souvenirs at Chiefs game is obviously huge whenever fans are able to show up to games, but especially so if they’re in attendance during the pandemic before there’s a cure for coronavirus.

“It’s given a lot of the organizations’ staff and fans a little bit more comfort,” Thomas said.

Thomas and Tappit are speaking to teams from all five major American pro sports, MLB, NBA, MLS, NHL, NFL and will have more three or four more partnership announcements will to make over the next couple of months.

“We’re trying to really choose partners who we feel as though are really gonna drive the adoption, and fan bases where a lot of fans are already using their team’s app,” Thomas said. “I’m really looking forward to going over to Kansas City and seeing fans use our solution which will definitely improve the fan experience.”