Essay The Business of Sports
Every Facility Is Becoming a Fintech Company, Whether It Wants To or Not
Nobody opens a sports facility to get good at reconciliation. But the moment you take a registration fee online, you're in the payments business.
Ask a sports facility owner what business they're in, and they'll tell you about their courts, their leagues, their training programs, or the families they serve.
Very few will say payments.
Then ask what they did this morning.
Chased an overdue balance. Refunded a registration. Checked whether a deposit came through. Tried to figure out which kid a payment belonged to.
A surprising amount of running a sports facility is making sure money gets where it is supposed to go.
The moment a facility takes a registration fee online, it takes on a set of responsibilities that look a lot like running a payments business. Collecting money is the beginning. Someone also has to manage what happens before it arrives, after it arrives, and when it doesn't.
Nobody opened a facility because they wanted to become good at reconciliation. But here we are.
What a facility actually sells
Think about what a facility actually sells.
A parent registers a child in February for a league that starts in April. They pay part now and the rest later. Before the season starts, they switch divisions. A sibling signs up with a discount. One session gets canceled. Part of the fee becomes a credit toward summer camp.
Every one of those changes has a financial consequence.
The registration, the roster, the payment plan, and the credit all describe different parts of the same relationship with that family. The operator has to keep them consistent.
A checkout is not a season
That is a different problem from taking a payment at a retail counter.
Facilities sell access to something that will happen later. Sometimes it happens repeatedly. Sometimes the person paying is buying for several people. Sometimes a team organizer pays a deposit and everyone else pays their share.
A successful checkout tells you that one transaction worked. It tells you almost nothing about whether the money for an entire season is taken care of.
A successful checkout tells you one transaction worked. It tells you almost nothing about whether a season's money is taken care of.
Where the work piles up
A card fails on the second installment. Does the registration still show as fully paid? Does anyone get notified? Who follows up with the parent?
A player withdraws. Does removing them from the roster stop the remaining payments, or does someone have to remember to do that somewhere else?
A coach checks a player in. Can they see that there is an outstanding balance, or does that information live with the one person who knows how to pull the report?
These are ordinary situations. A facility should be able to handle them without an employee reconstructing the story across three systems.
The coordination tax, priced in dollars
In an earlier essay, I called this the coordination tax: the work people do to keep disconnected systems moving together.
With payments, that tax shows up directly in the economics of the business.
It is the balance nobody follows up on because nobody sees it. The refund that takes several emails to resolve. The staff time spent matching deposits to registrations. The owner staying late to understand why the amount in the bank doesn't match what they thought they collected.
Some of the cost is missing revenue. Some is the time required to collect revenue that was already earned. And some is the damage to a customer relationship when a family has to explain the same billing issue to a different person.
A payment processing rate won't tell you any of that.
What embedded finance actually means here
In fintech, the term for this is embedded finance: financial services delivered inside the software a business already runs on, rather than as a separate product it has to integrate.
Most industries have already been through this. Ride-hailing, food delivery, and online marketplaces all stopped treating payments as a bolt-on and built them into the core of how the business works. Sports and recreation are arriving late, and the versions on offer are usually a processor attached to the side of a registration system.
Embedded payments in a facility should mean something more specific. A payment carries the context of what it is paying for. An installment stays connected to the registration. A refund is traceable to the original purchase. Staff can understand an outstanding balance without becoming experts in the payment processor.
When I think about the cost of payments, I think about the full path from someone deciding to register to the facility knowing the money is accounted for. How many times does a person have to intervene along that path? How many exceptions depend on someone remembering what happened?
That is the work good software should absorb.
Money moves to where the activity is
At Natty Hatty, this is why we think payments belong inside the operating system of the facility.
Our tap-to-pay capability is already in production. It is a simple example of the direction we believe this should go.
A facility's activity happens across the building. Staff are checking people in, answering questions, helping families, and keeping programs moving. Being able to take a payment where that interaction happens removes a reason to send someone back to a desk.
It is a small change in the payment experience, but it reflects a larger design principle: the financial part of an interaction should fit naturally into the work already happening.
Over time, I expect more of payments to work this way. The system will know what is owed, what it belongs to, and what needs attention. Operators will spend less time moving information between the financial side of the business and the people running the programs.
What stays with the owner
They will still make the judgment calls. Whether to offer a family more time to pay. Whether a cancellation deserves a refund. When an exception is the right thing to do.
Those decisions are part of running a community business. Software should give the owner enough context to make them well, then carry the decision through.
"Every facility is becoming a fintech company" sounds like a prediction about where the industry is going.
For the owner chasing a failed payment between games, it describes work they already do.
Every facility is already in the payments business. The only question is how much of that work the software takes on.
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