Festival coins: Shaping Africa's event industry with wristbands and cashless payments.
An informal memo on Festival Coins, an event technology startup in Africa.
You’ve bought a ticket to an event that requires a wristband to enter. To get said wristband, you've been given the option to get it upon your arrival or pick it up at a dedicated pickup centre. All in a bid to help speed up attendee entrance into the event. This wristband also allows you to easily pay for products or services during the event without having to use cash. Reducing wait times at vendor stalls as well as allowing you to focus on enjoying the event rather than having to be on guard against loss or theft of your cash.
Event organisers can also track foot traffic flows during the event that helps in making real-time adjustments to accommodate the demands of the attendees. This is the kind of experience Festival Coins wants to help organisers achieve at their events.
Image credit: EatDrink Festival
In Nigeria, event attendee satisfaction can be said to be averagely low due to poor event planning. Stemming from the fact that there are little to no tools that event planners can leverage to successfully plan and execute events. Which leads to overcrowded events atimes, and long queues among a host of other issues.
Festival Coins uses RFID wristbands for admitting attendees into an event. Attendees can top up money on their wristbands prior to and during the event to enable them to pay for services and products without having to use cash.
RFID (Radio-frequency identification) is a technology that uses radio waves to uniquely identify objects or people, collect data anonymously about them and input the data directly into computer systems with minimal human intervention.
RFID wristbands have become a core part of some of the biggest events in the world. Events like Coachella and Tomorrowland. However, in Nigeria, they were almost non-existent until Festival Coins came along. Using RFID technology to glean data from attendees, in an effort to make events as seamless and personalized as possible for event-goers. A phenomenon referred to as crowd shaping.
Backstory
The history of Festival Coins starts with EatDrinkLagos. A food blog that curates dining spots in Lagos. EatDrinkLagos went on to start its own event; EatDrink festival. The issues the founders faced trying to organise EatDrink festival spurred the creation of Festival Coins. An end to end event management platform, that helps event planners create attendee-centric events that are profitable and at the same time collect data on these events.
Microtraction, an early-stage VC firm in Nigeria recently funded Festival Coins. The VC firm usually invests up to US$65,000 in startups. [Source]
Product
Festival Coins enables event organizers to improve event efficiency, increase onsite revenue, create greater ROI for sponsors, and implement richer experiences for attendees. Through a frictionless online ticketing service called Tix and RFID wristbands alongside an access control system that helps reduce queues, ticket fraud and track admissions and capacity in real-time.
Another prime feature of Festival Coins is its offline cashless payment solution named Cashless coin. Used by attendees to make payments and by event organisers to track vendor sales and product performance of an event.
Event organisers can also leverage Festival Coins Access control solution with any ticketing provider in the market. They can also choose to only use its ticket buying and selling solution if they are only interested in selling tickets.
Market
The Global Events Industry is Projected to reach $2,330 billion by 2026 by AMR [Source]. While the global online event ticketing market size is expected to reach USD 67.99 billion by 2025, according to a report by Grand View Research [Source]. According to Statista, Nigeria, South Africa & Morocco alone have combined advertising spend of $3.95B per year with a decent percentage going towards offline activation & event sponsorship [Source].
Festival Coins suite of solutions provides local event planners with the opportunity to unlock the event industry market potential by increasing revenue, enabling streamlined data capturing and improving attendee satisfaction by fostering a crowd shaping trend.
Differentiation: Festivalcoins uniqueness is its ability to create a seamless experience for the event attendee and allow event organisers to gain insights into their events.
Team
The people behind Festival Coins are Folayemi Agusto and Nosakhare Oyegun. Folayemi is the CEO & Co-founder of Festival Coins. She has experience with coordinating events and guests (Andela), and with investment management (ValuAlliance). Nosa is Chief Product Officer & Co-founder of Festival Coins. He has experience working with digital products; Innovation Manager (Stanbic IBTC) and is currently a product manager with Kuda Bank, Nigeria’s first fully licensed digital bank. Both Nosa and Folayemi both cofounded EatDrink Media which publishes EatDrinkLagos.com and produces EatDrinkFestival.
Execution
Festival Coins have processed around $10k transactions in sales value on Tix. Also, over 1000 users have used their access control and cashless systems, processing close to 4000 transactions and generating over $15k in revenue. They had a little over a hundred event organizer accounts as at when they applied to Microtraction [Source].
Risk factors/questions
Technology: Consider the broader implications of RFID tech. Will Festival Coins onboard more Crowd shaping tech like VR, Beacon and geolocation?
Execution: Festival Coins will need to develop significant partnerships with local event organizers and companies.
Location: Does Festival Coins intend to branch out into other African cities. IF so, the timing will have to be right.
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