Cantillon: Payments systems failure at Aviva involves estimated €500,000 loss

The failure of the food and drink outlets’ digital payments system during Saturday’s US college football game at the Aviva Stadium could leave the $8 billion fintech Sumup with a large bar bill. It is estimated by industry sources at up to €500,000. It also underlined the operational risks that can arise for retailers and hospitality organisations that become overreliant on a technology.

For two hours of the game, the stadium’s caterer, Compass Group’s Levy UK + Ireland, gave away all food and drink for free after the card-reading system provided by the Bain Capital-backed Sumup failed. Levy later confirmed that 75 per cent of its food and drink stock was distributed for nothing – there were almost 43,000 hungry attendees at the stadium for four hours. Levy blamed Sumup and said it expected to recoup its losses from the technology provider.

There were about 3,000 attendees in corporate hospitality suites who had free food and drink anyway. The remaining 40,000 included 5,000 children’s tickets. Industry sources speculated that each of the remaining 35,000 adults would have been expected to spend an average of €20 over the course of the game, for total takings of €700,000. If three-quarters was foregone, that equals a huge loss.

Sumup said it was “investigating” what happened and declined to comment on the estimated losses of €500,000. But while the financial cost, if it is borne by Sumup, may be considerable, the potential damage to its image and reputation could be more of a problem.

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The notion of free beer and hotdogs for the game between Nebraska Cornhuskers and Northwestern Wildcats sparked a deluge of gleeful, facetious media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic. The story provided colour for reports by major outlets including Bloomberg, ESPN, Associated Press, the Washington Post, NBC, the Bleacher Report, USA Today and many others.

It also showed how vendors take huge risks when they outsource a critical function – in this case receipt of payments – to an outside provider. The stadium is cashless and had no fallback option. If, for example, the systems of omnipresent food delivery apps such as Just Eat or Deliveroo crashed, what would the restaurant industry do? If Stripe’s payments system went down, what would small online retailers do? Dominant aggregating technologies bring efficiencies, but also risk.