Paying with your finger

Pretty much everyone reading this will have attended a sporting event or concert at some point. We can all agree that concession stand lines can be pretty long. This is caused by several factors, from the speed of the concession workers, waiting for the items to be retrieved and the amount of time it takes to make the payment. This latter is something that many merchants have grappled with for years, especially when the EMV cards were released. Things may be changing though.

CLEAR, a service that allows customers to scan their fingerprints at airports or security checkpoints and bypass them with a separate line. For many air travelers this has been a godsend as lines for security can take hours to go through at busy airports and Delta has even implemented it to replace the boarding pass. That has been expanded into a new service to help bypass concession lines.

Safeco Field in Seattle, the home of the Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners, will be the first to implement the CLEAR system. There were many regulatory hurdles to jump through, most prominently to prevent minors from purchasing alcohol. A user has to enroll in the service and obviously provide their fingerprint and set up a payment account. The company has also partnered with the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and MLS’ Seattle Sounders as well. The Sounders are the fourth MLS team to partner with CLEAR.

A guest will arrive and will be able to bypass the security lines by using the CLEAR system. If they head to the concession stand they will have their own dedicated lane and will be able to not only provide age verification if buying alcohol but will be able to pay by scanning their fingerprints. It will allow fans to get what they want and back to their seats so that they miss as little of the action as possible. CLEAR is also trying to work on facial recognition software, so imagine just being able to walk up to a concession stand and not even have to do anything.

To start the system will be available at select stands only. Some patrons have grumbled that this is nothing more than people being too lazy to take out their wallet but then people probably said the same thing about credit cards when they became mainstream. There are of course privacy concerns that will come inevitably when any personal information is accessible via the Internet but the service seems to be taking off (pun intended).