Since the 90s, one of the biggest Brazilian football clubs, Palmeiras, has had issues with fake paper tickets. The situation even got worse after the stadium was modernized 10 years ago to seat 43,000 spectators as thousands more of eager fans kept trying to get into the venue.
Several measures were then put into place such as membership programs, card-based ticketing, or using QR codes to little effect. While the club devised ways to stop the rampant sale of fraudulent tickets and scalping, they also wanted to provide seamless entry to their fans before every match. The audit in 2022 showed that although priority tickets are now sold only online, there are still problems for fans to get the actual tickets. What’s worse, they were resold at inflated prices. Both hurt the club brand, fanbase and the bottom line. The club therefore looked for biometric-based solutions that would reliably identify every ticket holder to prevent scalping and fraud.
and scalping
to accurately identify ticket holders
to sports fans
Supported by Bepass, the club built a facial recognition-based access control at entry points to the stadium. To reliably connect each visitor with their ticket, the integrator Bepass has opted for Innovatrics Digital Onboarding Toolkit (DOT) to register the ticket holder’s face in the system when purchasing the ticket.
After logging in the Palmeiras’ loyalty app, each ticket holder goes through a quick face capture process combined with liveness detection. This ensures they are physically present at the time of purchase, thus preventing possible spoofs. As a result, entry to the stadium is fully paperless. At each entry point, facial recognition turnstiles search through registered faces to find a match and confirm the validity of the tickets. Once a match is found, access is granted, and the ticket holder is allowed to enter.
through facial biometrics at entry points
to ascertain the physical presence of the person when the ticket was purchased
With the implementation of facial recognition-based access control to the stadium, Palmeiras has become the world’s pioneer in providing seamless entry to sports fans based 100% on face recognition. Since going live in January 2023, almost a hundred thousand unique enrollments have been made using Innovatrics DOT.
Utilizing data gathered with Innovatrics DOT, the club’s access control system is fully automated, with less than 1% of ticket holders requiring manual check mostly due to low-quality onboarding pictures. More importantly, the club got completely rid of scalping, resale, and fraudulent tickets that had greatly affected its bottom line.
scalping, reselling and fraudulent tickets
to genuine ticket holders
“We fully eliminated ticket frauds, such as reselling and fake tickets. It’s also very fast, the entrance times have almost tripled – from the average of 7 people a minute to 18 a minute. Palmeiras is also the first stadium in the world that is 100% controlled by facial recognition access.”Founder and CEORicardo CadarBepass
Innovatrics facial recognition and liveness detection technology eliminates the risks associated with fraudulent identities and activities during the ticket purchasing in real time.
Congestion is alleviated at entry points by only letting legitimate ticket holders into the stadium in an orderly fashion through facial recognition-based access control.
Facial recognition technology, combined with liveness detection, can be used to link a digital ticket to the facial identity of a genuine buyer, ensuring the ticket cannot be transferred or resold.
Our passion for technology brings biometric benefits to millions of people.
