Visa and the Olympics Get Together to Improve Experience With Mobile Payments

Granted, it’s been a while since the last Summer Olympics. Even the last Winter Olympics took place about eight months ago, so the next Olympics will be a good while in the making. The International Olympic Committee, however, is not sitting on its hands waiting for 2020 and Tokyo. It’s teamed up with Visa and the International Paralympic Committee to help produce some new options for Olympics fans that will help make Olympics-related purchases that much easier to engage in.

Such a goal is tailor-made for Visa, who will be turning to its vast array of Innovation Centers, as well as its various fields of expertise in retail, conversational commerce and more, to get the job done. Fields planned for development include the ability to purchase event tickets from a mobile device, the ability to order items from a seat at the venue, and even ways to connect and purchase from a television interface. Remote digital ticket purchases, the use of biometrics to validate a purchased ticket, improvements in retail shopping and in-home commerce with augmented reality capabilities are also on tap.

International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach noted “… As we introduce innovations that help improve fan experiences both on-site and at-home, we know that no matter where in the world the Olympics take us, Visa is the right partner to help us deliver them.”

Certainly, Visa is one of the top firms to consult when developing new options in payment. Yet it’s easy to wonder how much developing it will actually have to do. Much of what the International Olympic Committee is out to do here, based on these reports, is already available in one form or another. Visa likely has a string of patents already related to every item on the list. If they didn’t, then certainly Mastercard, PayPal, or even Starbucks might have qualified given their own advances in these fields.

Still, no one said this had to be a top-down development cycle. If Visa’s already at the door, why not run with it? So we’ll likely be seeing some new developments by the time the Tokyo games fire up in earnest in just under another two years.