Festival tries to take digital payments to the next stage
Marquee moon: Kaleidoscope Family Festival getting underway in Co Wicklow on June 30. Picture: Alf Harvey
The EU may be actively considering the introduction of a digital euro, but it’s clear that citizens still value cash — and they are worried about the privacy and security elements of any proposed digital currency.
More than 40% of respondents to an EU consultation last year said privacy was their single biggest concern about a digital euro. Irish respondents mirrored that average.
Despite the uptick in digital payment methods that came with covid, in 2022, 42% of transactions across the EU were still being made with cash, according to the European Central Bank.
Yet the convenience of cashless has meant increasing numbers of goods and service providers in Ireland — from coffee stalls to the GAA to State services such as the driving licence service — flat-out refuse to handle cash.
A Department of Finance retail banking review published last November stressed that the Irish Central Bank, the Government, and the banking sector have a duty to facilitate cash payments for as long as they are required.
In response, Government parties have said ‘access-to-cash’ legislation is on the cards, with a bill expected before 2023 is out. A national payments strategy is recommended by 2024 to determine whether or not State services such as driving licence and passport fees are permitted to preclude cash.
In March, Cork South-West TD Michael Collins brought a motion to the Dáil urging the Government to legally require businesses to accept cash; Mr Collins was among a group of rural TDs including the Healy-Raes and Mattie McGrath who had protested against AIB’s abandoned plan to remove cash services from 70 branches.
However, despite support for his motion, Government TDs told Mr Collins that access to cash legislation is imminent and that any additional measures would be superfluous.
Family music and arts festival Kaleidoscope, held in Russborough House in Co Wicklow each summer, became the first big Irish festival to go fully cashless this year, having trialled a wireless tappable wristband in 2019 when 5,000 ‘Tappy’ wristbands containing an RFID (radio frequency identification) microchip were issued to festivalgoers.
One step further than card payments from customers’ own bank accounts, Tappy is an example of a type of bespoke, event-specific payment system that has been growing in popularity across the UK, Europe, and the US but which has yet to take off in Ireland.
Tappy requires punters to make a temporary online account for the duration of the festival: The online account can be linked to multiple wristbands, meaning a parent can allocate money to individual family members to spend at the festival.
Any unspent money left on the account is refunded on request after the event is over.
In Kaleidoscope’s case, this meant waiting until the Tuesday after the festival to claim money back. Punters also have to pay a €1 activation fee per wristband.
Last year, following the covid-19 hiatus of 2020 and 2021, the festival reverted to accepting cash and card for 2022.
But, for this year’s festival, from June 30 to July 2, Tappy microchips were back with a bang, built into the festival access wristband for all the nearly 20,000 punters who attended the child-friendly event.
Brian McDermott is co-founder and director of Fuel, a company that co-owns Kaleidoscope alongside Electric Picnic producers Festival Republic. Fuel runs the production end of Kaleidoscope and Mr McDermott has been instrumental in introducing Tappy.
He said their tappable wristband system was a big success this year and improved the experience of festivalgoers as well as profitability for onsite vendors including food stalls, bars, and funfair rides.
“When you have a captive audience in the one place at the one time but with multiple vendors and multiple ways to enjoy yourself, it made a lot of sense to us to have one method of payment on your wrist that isn’t relying on cash which can be lost and needs to be divided up,” Mr McDermott told the Irish Examiner.
Advantages to going cashless included less queuing time at stalls due to the speed of transactions, no security concerns for vendors, and the ease with which parents could allocate money to family members, he said.
However, although the festival initially intended that Tappy be the only payment method onsite in 2023, a social media backlash saw Kaleidoscope organisers announce that card transactions would still be available, and that families could top up their Tappy account with cash by visiting an onsite ‘Tappy Bank’.
“We did initially position Tappy as an exclusive element and that was on the basis that we wanted everybody to adopt this,” Mr McDermott said. “We wanted everyone to sign up to it, but we did have card machines ordered.
“When we got some negative pushback within hours, we let everyone know that card machines would be available and what had become a little bit negative ended up with no issues at all. There was never any doubt as to whether we’d have card machines but we definitely didn’t want to have cash at the festival, so it was more a communications thing than anything.”
Negative commentary on social media challenged the festival’s legal right to decline cash and raised security concerns but Mr McDermott said this commentary was driven by social media users who weren’t festival attendees, but “your usual online trolls with nothing better to do”.
“The vast majority of the negative commentary was from people who never intended to go to Kaleidoscope anyway, nor did we see them at the festival,” he said.
“The usual keyboard warriors saw an opportunity to have a pop, and that’s what happened.“
Despite the Kaleidoscope website saying that the festival had “teamed up with AIB” for its cashless experience, AIB were only sponsors and were not involved in administering the tappable payment system.
This was done by contractors Weezevent, a French-owned cashless and digital ticketing company that has partnered with many large festivals and events in Europe and the UK, including the 60,000-capacity UK music festival Boomtown.
Weezevent’s product offers event organisers the ability to track and analyse customer spending and provides statistics on when and where money is being spent, another huge advantage to vendors, Mr McDermott said.
There was no GPS capability activated in the Tappy wristbands used at Kaleidoscope, meaning the location of individual wristband wearers was not being monitored, but the stats interface provided by Weezevent does, in theory, permit an organiser to track exactly what has been purchased where by individual wristbands and accounts.
Mr McDermott says this is not the focus of Kaleidoscope’s financial analysis, which instead lets vendors know things like peak times for the sale of different products.
“They get full reports on all their sales and they’ll come away from the weekend with far better data than they’ve ever had before,” he said. “They know exactly how many hotdogs they sold at certain times, for example: they’ll have a record of that. Data like that is very, very valuable.”
In terms of security, Kaleidoscope abides by GDPR rules rules and the data collected to create Tappy accounts, including names and email addresses, is not shared with any third parties or used by the festival for any purposes such as marketing.
Although Electric Picnic, Ireland’s largest music festival, is not planning an in-house RFID system similar to Tappy at this year’s festival at the start of September, it is making all concessions cashless and warning vendors not to accept cash.
Much social media commentary revolves around cash being “legal tender” but, in terms of the law — as confirmed by Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe in a written Dáil answer in December 2022 — it is currently legal for festivals such as Kaleidoscope and Electric Picnic to go cashless if the festivalgoer is aware they are attending a cashless event at the time they purchase their tickets.
Until access to cash legislation is introduced, credit terms including accepted payment methods are covered by contract law: A customer enters into a contract with the provider of goods or services when they opt to make a purchase and they know the credit terms of the transaction when they choose to make it.
“If a business specifies payment must be in a form other than cash, the customer cannot subsequently claim a legal right to pay in cash, even if that cash is legal tender,” Mr Donohoe said.
But this could well change under the terms of the still-awaited access-to-cash bill that the Government has committed to: Festivals may find themselves no longer legally permitted to completely refuse cash.
As far as Mr McDermott is concerned, he hopes Irish events will adopt more systems similar to Tappy in future, and he thinks their convenience will continue to make them increasingly popular.
“This is not about denying anyone their civil liberties, it’s about making the festival more fun and interesting and giving everyone a good experience and embracing a new technology,” he said.
“There is always a reluctance in Ireland to step away from the old methods of payment, but I think it’s about time we move on from that.
“At Kaleidoscope we are talking to a generation that will probably view cash very differently; we have a very young audience who are growing up in a digital world and it’s up to us as event organisers to move with the times.”
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