Your money won’t be good anymore at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, home to the San Francisco 49ers. That’s because the sports venue will become cashless based on a partnership with Visa and the 49ers. This isn’t the only stadium to go cashless as others include the Seattle Seahawks’ CenturyLink Field, and the Atlanta Falcons’ Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Fans with cash can convert their bills to plastic at kiosks on location. Card-only transactions will speed up grabbing a beer and a snack, lessening the possibility of missing a big play. Concessionaires will also save time by not having to deal with handling bills and coins. Most stadiums do not yet allow fans at games due to COVID-19, but cashless conversion will be worth the wait.
The following excerpt from a SportBusiness article reports more on the topic:
The National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers have announced that Levi’s Stadium will become the latest sports and entertainment venue in the United States to go fully cashless. The move coincides with a multiyear partnership extension with the 49ers’ long-time official payments partner Visa.
As such, Levi’s Stadium will only accept card or mobile payments for concessions, merchandise, and other purchases. The initiative is designed to improve the fan experience through increased speed of service, safety, and security. For fans without any payment options other than cash, the 49ers are installing four on-site cash-to-card kiosks that will enable fans to exchange cash for a Visa-branded prepaid card worth up to $500, with no transaction fee.
A transition to this process began in preparation for Super Bowl 50 in 2016 when the 49ers and Visa completed an overhaul to upgrade the venue’s concessions infrastructure to make it the first fully contactless enabled stadium in the NFL. This included close to 600 contactless terminals around the stadium. The move will be completed ahead of fans being allowed at Levi’s Stadium in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Currently, spectators are not permitted to events at the venue, but the 49ers remain hopeful that they will before the end of the 2020-21 NFL season.
Overview by Raymond Pucci, Director, Merchant Services at Mercator Advisory Group