Cashless sports events are allowing fintechs like Stripe to make their way onto sports’ biggest stages.
Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America have handed Stripe a new title, locking the fintech in as an official partner for the 2027 and 2029 matches.
Under the agreement, Stripe will become a worldwide partner and the official payment solutions partner for both events, adding to its existing work on ticketing and hospitality payments across the event.
The Ryder Cup has grown into one of golf’s most attended competitions, with the 45th edition at Bethpage Black in New York attracting 244,858 fans across the week – an average of around 50,000 spectators each day.
This set the record for a US-hosted Ryder Cup, although the all-time highest attendance is still 271,000, set in Rome in 2023.
During the matches, Stripe Terminal will handle payments for both food and beverages, merchandise and retail, as well as supporting financial reporting.
“Some of the world’s most complex businesses rely on Stripe for their financial infrastructure – from payments to managing billing, revenue, and money movement,” said Conor McNamara, Chief Revenue Officer EMEA at Stripe.
“An event like the Ryder Cup – hundreds of thousands of fans with payments running across ticketing, food and beverage, and merchandise – is exactly the kind of scale Stripe operates at every day.”
Cashless operations at the Ryder Cup
The Ryder Cup, like a lot of sporting events across the world, now runs entirely cashless. Guy Kinnings, Chief Executive Officer at the European Tour Group, said Stripe’s technology will help deliver “a cashless experience in Ireland with increased speed and convenience for our fans around the world.”
Faster transactions can help reduce queues for fans, and also tend to increase spend per head by removing friction from the payments process. Cashless systems also give organisers better insight into fan flow around a venue, informing decisions on staffing and layout.
Unified reporting is another benefit, allowing organisers to track ticketing, merchandise and hospitality revenue through one system that doesn’t need to reconcile data from multiple providers.
It is also a major benefit for companies such as Stripe, as it creates opportunities for partnerships with large sporting events like the Ryder Cup.
Stripe’s reported move into Formula 1
According to SportBusiness, Stripe is also close to agreeing a multi-year deal with Mercedes-AMG Petronas, with the partnership understood to begin at the start of the 2027 season. Neither side has officially confirmed the agreement as of yet.
Financial firms such as American Express and Crypto.com have been involved in Formula 1 in recent years, but Stripe would be slightly different. The company covers the infrastructure behind online commerce, serving businesses rather than consumers.
However, Stripe and Advent International made a $53bn+ offer to acquire PayPal last week, a deal that would nudge Stripe closer to the consumer-facing side of payments it has stayed out of.
