Fulham Football Club is allowing fans to conduct fast and seamless mobile payments and giving charitable donations to charity Pennies, as the club hones its focus on driving an omnichannel retail success.
Using the services of the leading omnichannel payments provider Optomany, the club says it aims to improve the customer experience and sales across its bricks and mortar and online retail stores, as well as find a way to cement its corporate social responsibility (CSR) credentials.
The partnership was initiated by the club’s head of retail and licensing, Sean Davies who was looking for a payment provider with a robust, fast and secure platform to cope with busy periods on match days and provide a single view of each customer across channels. Optomany’s axept platform was the perfect fit, having already helped West Ham United increase takings to £200,000 in-store on peak days.
The payment platform is fully PCI compliant and offers P2PE v2 support to secure card data from the point of interaction, meaning no hackers can get their hands on it. Optomany offers support for Apple Pay , Android Pay and contactless, which will allow football fans to pay for food and merchandise with one tap of their smartphone.
Not only will the platform help to create a less crowded environment by ensuring queues move faster, but also – and more importantly – it will maximise takings, especially during busy match days: a win-win situation for both customer and the retailer.
“We now have a single view of the customer, enabling us to personalise and improve the shopping experience across all our channels,” Sean Davies, head of retail and licensing at Fulham FC tells InternetRetailing.net. “The result is happier shoppers and bigger profits.”
Davies continues: “Optomany’s partnership with Pennies was another key factor for Fulham FC’s Davies. Pennies is a charity which offers a digital charity box solution which integrates with axept to offer shoppers a simple opt-in of rounding up their purchase by a few pennies with a tap or click at the point of sale. There’s no pressure placed on the shopper and the message times out if ignored. No personal data is collected, and because it’s contactless-enabled, there’s no slowdown at the till. Not only was Fulham the first football club to enable the digital charity box, but it represents Pennies’ first simultaneous multichannel implementation – online, in-store and in contactless. “
Ian Rutland, a chief operating officer at Optomany believes that the perk of this platform is the speed of the payment: “Having contactless enables you to complete a purchase with just one tap, which on average takes 600 milliseconds to complete,” he says. “The fact that Fulham FC has adopted Pennies enables the charity to collect charitable donations that go to Fulham FC Foundation. These donations are used to provide meaningful education, employability, health, inclusion, environmental and sport programmes.”
Fulham FC collaboration with the digital charity box Pennies was handy in the club’s endeavour to nominate Fulham FC Foundation as the charity that its clientele can support. This means football fans can support the causes they feel most passionate about by contributing only a few pennies with their purchase.
The Pennies option to donate appears automatically either on Chip & Pin machine in-store, at checkout online or via a smartphone. 90% of a donation goes to the retailers’ nominated chairy/ies and 10% to Pennies, which is developing technology and growing the micro-donation payment.
In the past two years, Pennies has supported a more than 47 million in small change digital donations to date, and together with its partners has unlocked £11 million of extra income for more than 300 UK registered charities.
Alison Hutchinson CBE, chief executive officer at Pennies, says: “We’re delighted that Fulham FC chose to enable Pennies with Optomany and even more thrilled with the fans response which was immediate and growing. We hope many more sporting clubs and retail outlets join in as it’s a great way for fans and customers to feel good about giving a little which adds up to making a significant difference for the club or retailer’s nominated charity/ies.”
