Conrad Caplin on implementing contactless ticketing technology in football

Thanks to Conrad Caplin from Pronto CX for doing an awesome job in answering all the questions in Sports Geek Nation AMA.

Full Transcript available in the Sports Geek Nation Member's Area.

Here's the highlight question from the Sports Geek Nation AMA with Conrad Caplin.

Conrad Caplin is the Co-Founder of Pronto CX based in Washington DC. He currently heads product and technical strategy department. Pronto CX transforms fan experience at sporting events, music festivals, and other mass participation events through smartphones, smart cards and wearables.

Conrad recently helped the Los Angeles Football Club roll out ticketing  on Apple Watch and iPhone devices for a contactless ticketing services.

Connect with Conrad Caplin on Twitter @conradcaplin, LinkedIn and Slack @Conrad Caplin (prontocx)

Find out more about ProntoCX at http://www.prontocx.com/

Conrad Caplin:

Hey Matt, yes you can absolutely distinguish between between different types of fans.

You can do this deliberately by creating different pass types that are then made available only to and used specifically by only those segments, or you can use a general pass and then make that distinction further downstream by inferring from a fan's behavior.

Ultimately because each Apple Wallet or Google Pay pass has a unique identifier and is associated with a unique user account, you are able to build very rich fan profiles over time… one tap at a time.

This progressive fan profiling is how you learn that I love hot dogs and you love nachos and our friend Mike drinks beer and always buys merchandise when he attends a game.

A key way one can capture this is via Apple of Google's automatic selection 1 Tap.

1 Tap is an example of Apple Pay’s Automatic Selection at its finest. This terminal’s dual mode configuration is referred to as 1 Tap, with both the Apple Pay credit card and let’s say a team /venue's loyalty or member card being conveyed in a single tap. That means fans don’t need to provide any personal/account information nor take a separate step to present a physical or digital member card (like a QR code from within an app).

All in a single tap… payment and member card conveyance:

One other thing I forgot to mention regarding season tickets is that the Apple Wallet or Google Pay contactless tickets are dynamic and can be updated real time. This also means that you can update tickets after each match with the ticket credentials, new images, and any other content necessary for the next one. This is huge, especially in sports like MLB where you have 81 home games. If architected properly, the end user should only need to add a pass to Wallet 1 time, and not for each game, and then they can just hold the top of their iPhone near a reader each game and just expect that it will work! And all of this doesn’t interfere with existing mechanisms for tickets transfers or ticket sales.

Learn more on this related story LAFC taps into contactless ticketing

• How the project with LAFC started and how the project has gone so far especially feedback from fans in the stands?
• What are your long term plans for the “modern mobile wallet”? What would be some of the challenges for expanding this tracking throughout an entire stadium?
• What role do you think content plays in getting users to transact in a native mobile experience?
• How the contactless ticketing system works with the leagues and teams specifically?
• What percentage of teams/stadiums are having issues loading E-Tickets during entry into events?

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