What began as a competition for clients between two companies has turned into a ground-breaking partnership that will have its largest debut to-date at one of this summer’s premier sporting events.
This weekend, the English Premier League’s Chelsea FC will square off against La Liga’s Real Madrid as part of the International Champions Cup, hosted at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, MI. During the event, the Big House’s food, beverage and merchandise vendors will be fully supported by First Data’s award-winning Clover hardware and Bypass’ state-of-the-art operational management software.
To the customers, their point of contact will be the Clover point-of-sale (POS) units, where they can place orders and securely pay for their items. Joe Profeta, First Data’s SVP of Global, Strategic and National Clients, explained that after years of success in smaller, single POS businesses, his company sought to expand into larger venues with multiple retail locations.
When they began reaching out to different venues to see about implementing a large scale mobile sales platform, Profeta said one competitor’s name kept jumping out at them.
“We saw Bypass having a really strong presence in the marketplace. As we were calling on the same properties they were calling on, we kept seeing their name come up and getting very positive feedback from the clients they were doing business with. So we looked at a variety of different companies, and they really just came out as the best solution for us to match with Clover.”
Bypass is an industry leader in the large-scale food and beverage distribution space, hence their existing relationships with stadiums across the country. Per co-founder and CEO, Brandon Lloyd, Bypass already has installations in stadiums for teams in all of the US major sports leagues and boasts 3 out of 5 of the world’s largest food and beverage merchants as clients.
“Unlike a lot of names you’re familiar with in MPOS (mobile-POS) which served businesses with a horizontal business strategy – they served the coffee shop, the food truck, the pizza parlor – we went upmarket and focused on large multi site food and beverage merchants … and solved a very different problem,” Lloyd said of the company’s founding in 2010. “What we solved for was operational complexity.”
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Bypass can be run on it’s own Android-based platform, but Lloyd said they leapt at the opportunity to team up with First Data and their Clover line of devices. First Data’s expertise in hardware development and payment security technology made a natural pairing, said Lloyd who claimed that Bypass is “hardware agnostic.”
“The operator of the venue is now able to provide an enhanced consumer experience. They can now see and manage what is going on with the venue in real time. If they’re running out of a particular product that’s a half a mile away, they know that in advance so they can act and move that product so it can be sold,” said Lloyd.
And in teaming up with Bypass, Clover’s own platform can bring more benefits to venue managers. Profeta explained how Clover combining with Bypass can provide operators with updates on consumer trends in real-time, to help manage these large-scale sale operations.
“For the stadium, you’re gathering a lot of data analytics,” Profeta said. “Who their fans are, where do they come from, where do they go before they come to the venue, where do they go after. And obviously we don’t do that on the individual level, but on the aggregate. And it gives the team owners a real perspective on what they like, what they don’t like and be able to drive other initiatives and bring more fan loyalty to the games.”
Filling the seats with loyal fans is often the primary concern for stadium operators. Bypass and First Data are hoping that their partnership will help their clients provide the best game day experience for those fans and create return customers for their clients. And as nearly 110,000 fans will pour into Michigan Stadium to watch two of the world’s premier soccer clubs this weekend, Lloyd said that vendors can rest easy knowing they’re in good hands.
“The power of the combination of the world’s most modern hardware through the Clover platform and a first-class enterprise food and beverage software from Bypass provides the market with the first full-stack commerce solution. Where from the register to settlement, we control the entire experience so our customers can relax knowing that we have them taken care of. And we are working on their behalf to make sure that commerce is something that is seamless for them and seamless for their customers and enables them to get back to focusing on operating their business.“