[Money20/20] Beer and Football Partners Applaud CLEAR’s Biometric Screening, Naked Payments Tech

The enormous potential of CLEAR‘s biometric screening technology beyond airport security is becoming perfectly clear, if the enthusiasm of the company’s partners in Seattle is any indication.

In a panel discussion moderated by FindBiometrics President Peter O’Neill on the opening day of Money20/20 Las Vegas, CLEAR CEO Caryn Seidman Becker explained the origins and trajectory of her organization’s platform, which started nine years ago as an expedited airport screening system based on registrants’ biometrics and has now expanded to other kinds of deployments and applications. CLEAR’s evolution is illustrated perfectly in the example of Seattle’s Safeco Field and CenturyLink Field sports stadiums, where it arrived earlier this year. The program has been spreading to a growing number of sports venues, allowing registrants to quickly and easily enter the facilities with a simple fingerprint scan; but Seattle became a special case this summer when CLEAR delivered a naked payments system allowing CLEAR members to also make purchases at concessions stands with a fingerprint scan, and no need for a payment card or any other kind of physical token.

And this is something that Becker’s co-panelists were clearly very excited about. She was joined on the stage by Seattle Seahawks Operations VP David Young, and Anheuser-Busch Global Director of Innovation Andrew Green, and both were effusive in their praise of the CLEAR program.

Young said that the Seahawks-CLEAR collaboration has been a “perfect partnership,” adding later that it has helped to make lines move faster and that customers using the biometric payments feature are actually placing bigger orders; “we’ve seen some great results,” he said. Green echoed that sentiment, asserting, “The consumer sentiment that we’ve seen has been awesome.” Asked later if CLEAR’s technology could be used to make buying beer a fully automated process, Green replied, “We certainly hope so”.

Understandably, everyone involved in this project is looking forward to growth. Young said that the Seahawks are already “taking a look at how else we can expand this on the concessions side,” while Green pointed to the potential to use CLEAR’s biometric technology to enable self-checkout for beer sales in stores.

Given that this is one of CLEAR’s earliest experiments in broadening its biometric identification program beyond airport screening, the high praise of its partners points to strong potential for more organizations to come onboard, and for CLEAR’s biometric screening and payments technology to really take off.

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October 23, 2018 – by Alex Perala