How Worldpay Is Helping Transform Twickenham’s Selling Experience

Rugby fans looking to toast England’s 6 Nations victory over Ireland over the weekend were able to do so without needing to wait in lengthy queues thanks to a new app launched by the Rugby Football Union and payment provider Worldpay.

The organisation has been working with Worldpay to improve the processing of payments at Twickenham Stadium, the home of English rugby, over the course of the Six Nations tournament.

Worldpay’s Total Mobile service forms a large part of the backhaul of processing payments, providing a platform that third parties such as the RFU can build on top of to create immersive app experiences for their customers.

This includes equipping its Beerhawker mobile drinks sellers with arm-mounted readers connected to the app (pictured below) to process contactless card payments, as well as merchandise sellers and even charity collectors, all able to do their jobs faster than ever, and all aimed at making the Twickenham experience more enjoyable for fans.

Charging forward

Worldpay’s services were first rolled out at Twickenham over the course of the Rugby World Cup last autumn, and saw huge initial success, with 32 percent of all payments during the tournament were made using contactless.

In fact, the opening game of the tournament on September 18 was in fact the biggest event in terms of card spend, with over 18,500 transactions taking place at in the stadium, with sales in corporate hospitality boxes rising by 45 percent during the tournament.

Overall, contactless payments sped up service by approximately seven seconds compared to chip & pin payments – which over the course of a month-long tournament adds up to some serious savings.

Worldpay has been working with the RFU for several years already, Shaun Puckrin, the company’s chief product officer, told TechWeekEurope, helping to lower costs and reduce complexity at matches and other Twickenham functions.

“The RFU came to us saying that they wanted to simplify their world,” he says, “they had so many existing services…and Worldpay Total was a great way to rationalise that down to the core elements”.

The initial benefits of using Worldpay’s service were clear from the results seen during the Rugby World Cup, Puckrin says, and the company’s work has also been sounded out for other sports such as football and cricket.

Worldpay can even collect up the overall data from the devices running Total Mobile to perform analysis on trends in customer behaviour, spotting patterns such as buying more merchandise following a home victory, or which beer brands are the most popular.

“In the whole buying process, payments should just be a seamless part of the buying experience, not the experience itself,” Puckrin says.

“Fundamentally, it’s about taking payments out of (the customer’s) problems – so they can enjoy their day!”

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