Yahoo! Finance
Super Bowl 55 will be fully mobile-ticketed for the 22,000 fans in attendance, and fully cashless inside the stadium for all concessions. All attendees will need their smartphones for entry and for concession payments.
It’s not merely the first paperless Super Bowl, but the first paperless NFL game.
What might sound like a change caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has actually been in the works for years. When Visa (V) re-upped its sponsorship as the “official payment services partner” of the NFL in 2019, its stated goal was for a cashless Super Bowl by 2025. But the pandemic hastened the timeline.
The use of cashless payments and mobile ticketing has grown steadily at the last few Super Bowls, and the pandemic “accelerated the shift to digitizing these operations,” according to a spokesperson for Extreme Networks (EXTR), the NFL’s official wi-fi services provider.
No cash whatsoever will be accepted at vendors inside Raymond James Stadium, and Visa will have kiosks outside the stadium to convert cash into gift cards for use at concession and souvenir stands.
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