The Miami Marlins minor league team (Jumbo Shrimp) is serving new technology to fans. (Photo by Mark Brown/Getty Images)
Minor League Baseball (MiLB) has extended its official partnership with technology and payment service provider FIS Global through 2022. The deal will impact both fan experience and backend operations.
The league will look to implement FIS’s payment and fan engagement technologies as the preferred payment and loyalty technology provider across MiLB’s 200-plus member teams.
In 2017, the first year of the MiLB-FIS partnership, just 20 teams experimented with FIS. This season, FIS will establish an “Innovation Dugout” exhibit at Bragan Field in Jacksonville (home of the Double-A Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp team, a minor league affiliate of the Marlins) to showcase how its technology will contribute to MiLB teams—the MiLB-FIS deal is centered around MiLB’s “Ballparks of the Future” initiative.
FIS’s technology already powers a range of experiences for fans at MiLB ballparks, from simplifying payment transactions to driving new fan loyalty programs. By doubling down on FIS, MiLB is working on establishing the league’s first-ever national fan loyalty program.
“Continuing to super-serve our fans across the consumer journey is a core area of focus as we look to the future,” said David Wright, Minor League Baseball’s chief marketing & commercial officer, in a statement. “Technology is at the root of these efforts and a key-driver in our quest to tailor to the next-generation consumer.”
In addition to the fan-facing technology, FIS helps teams better manage operations on the backend. With this partnership, FIS will help streamline accounting and management of travel expenses by offering teams a more easy-to-manage system involving real-time prepaid technology.
SportTechie Takeaway
The partnership with FIS signals an effort by Minor League Baseball to get its teams synchronized on modern payment and fan loyalty programs. With the Jumbo Shrimp ballpark exhibit, FIS and MiLB have built an innovation lab to test new payment technologies and fan experiences. Their partnership includes building a mobile ordering solution that will allow fans to order concessions from their seat via a mobile app.
As the FIS-MiLB partnership expands over the next four years, expect more teams to adopt FIS fan loyalty and payment processing technologies and the MiLB to build a centralized ecosystem around fan data. All of this is meant to modernize the league and establish a national fan loyalty program.
