Hockey article pay cashless

Europe’s First Cashless Ice Hockey Arena

simply-X and SumUp provide modern card acceptance for a sports and events venue in Switzerland

  • Serving up to 7200 visitors per event

  • Improved check-out time at the PoS

  • 100 % contactless card acceptance

With the BOSSARD Arena, the town of Zug has one of the best ice hockey stadiums in Switzerland for their team EV Zug. In addition to the season, the EVZ’s BOSSARD Arena is also ideal for events of all kinds.

The Goal: Provide Better Service

BOSSARD Arena, home of the local ice hockey club EV Zug, has capacity for over 7,200 fans and constantly needs to manage high volumes of customer traffic. 50 league fixtures per season and other events throughout the year require the organizers to use high-performance payment systems at all point of sale (PoS) stations throughout the arena.

Robust and easy-to-use, enterprise-level PoS technology is a must in this high-intensity environment to ultimately offer a great customer experience. There was one piece of the puzzle missing with the PoS provider simply-X – integrated card acceptance.

The Solution: Going Contactless with SumUp and simply-x

simply-X supports stadiums, arenas and festivals across Europe with a wide variety of in-house proprietary solutions. Since partnering in summer 2017, simply-X has successfully provided EV Zug’s arena with its modern PoS solution. However, contactless card acceptance had not yet been included as a feature. simply-X had been looking for a new, innovative, easy-to-integrate payments player to reliably support its leading Windows PoS software. SumUp ticked all the boxes: a market-leading company with award-winning proprietary, EMV certified hardware and drop-in SDKs for developers. Thanks to the comprehensive SDK, the developer team at simply-x could easily integrate SumUp into their system. Now the reader connects quickly and reliably to SumUp’s Air Card Reader.

The Result: Lightning-Fast Payments

Together, simply-X and SumUp were able to offer a state-of-the art payments solution which is faster than fumbling with cash due to seamless integration and NFC compatibility. EVZ significantly improved waiting times for customers and sales reconciliation at their 35 kiosks and mobile registers in the arena, which ultimately resulted in a great customer experience during every event. As of next season, all events are planned to run cashless.

Timon Renfer, Managing Director at simply-X CH said: “Thanks to the seamless SumUp integration, EVZ can take rapid contactless payments using SumUp's smart, all-in-one EMV terminal. SumUp’s dedicated technical support, quick-reacting and native customer support have been priceless.”

Giedo Veenstra, Managing Director at EV Zug said: “Our partnership with simply-X has grown from strength to strength, a PoS software business that truly delivers. Working with SumUp has given us a simple, low cost, out-of-the box solution to accept payments all across the arena, which saves us hours of manual reconciliation work!"

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Thomas Adamski