Here’s the Ticket
I am a big fan of noticing new technologies and how they can be used in our industry and more importantly how they can affect our industry, both positively and negatively. Here is a brief summary of those that caught my eye over the past two months.
Mobile Wallet Update
The concept of mobile wallet (cell phone or wearable) contactless payment is moving forward in several directions from order ahead at coffee cafes to avoid lines to fast food restaurants to vending machine purchases and rewards programs, and even to bus transit systems. There have been some setbacks along the way but acceptance is slowly and steadily growing each month.
The Isis Wallet is one that we should pay attention to. The base is being set up for success. Isis Wallet ‘SmartTap’ is supported by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless (combined customer base of 200 million) on 68 mobile device types and now comes preloaded on 14 different models of smartphones. It is accepted nationwide at more than 200,000 locations where contactless payments are available. USA Technologies currently has 62,000 locations supporting the Isis Wallet along with 12,000 vending machines. TRR #22 reported that there are already more than 1 billion chip enabled credit and debit cards worldwide (higher security than magstripe cards) and over the next few years the US will be only using contactless payment. The Isis Wallet has an app that is free.
What This Could Mean
Isis is just getting started with 20,000 activations a day reported last month and the road is wide open. Another mobile wallet company, Square Wallet, is supported by Star Bucks but has halted its original concept as people did not readily abandon their credit cards when it came time for payment. Instead Square found traction in its ‘order ahead’ app Square Order where users can order ahead and pay using their mobile device and just ‘pick up’ their coffee and other food items, for example, and avoid waiting in line.
Technology is changing so fast but our industry needs to be aware of the fact that every business out there is continually trying to capture the attention of our already small customer base. FEC’s strive to capture less than one third of the available population within 5 minutes travel time to attend once per year. Only a few percentage points of the walk-by traffic stop to play an amusement game in what we refer to as a street location.
Imagine a time in the near future when merchants, vending machines, and hopefully amusement games will be able to recognize when a mobile device it recognizes gets into range and can reach out and interact with that device (person) and offer an incentive to induce that person to claim the reward? Imagine that the game knows who every player is and can make the experience more exciting to increase repeat play on that game and other games within the location. In addition the game can know each player and send them a text at any time no matter where the player is located. This is known as ‘social vending’ and the vending industry is already hard at work at it. According to an Apriva executive, ‘A smart device might help you find a vending machine—and it might enable a vending machine to find you.”
For the past ten years my company and its clients have worked very hard to establish VIP loyalty programs in our debit card facilities. This has been very productive and still is but I see a trend that further supports that mobile wallets will be the future. The trend is that the percentage of VIP’s that forget to bring their VIP cards when they visit or say that they lost them has been slowly increasing. Even if we charge them for replacing their VIP card, the trend does not reverse. How many times do we forget our shopping loyalty cards and are permitted to just punch in our phone number (or someone else’s phone number-no one has yet checked) to get the discounts? What this tells me is that the trend is to carry less loyalty cards. Eventually all we will carry is our mobile device (or wearable device for certain conditions) and perhaps have one credit card as a backup in case the mobile device needs charging.
The amusement industry may be sitting back and assuming that the bill changer and debit card kiosk manufacturers are in charge of making sure that people will always have a way to pay to play our games. This is not an incorrect assumption but if other businesses are steering our customers away from our games, the future bleak outcome just may motivate more in our industry to play an active role in its future.
