Revolut is piloting facial recognition at store checkouts in the UK

The goal is to reduce payment friction, but it's bound to be controversial.

Revolut is trialing a new facial recognition system in the UK that could be convenient but controversial, the company announced . The company says its Pay with Smile system is the UK's first in-store facial recognition system and has no processing fees for merchants. It's only being offered at select Kiss the Hippo coffee locations in London, to start with.

Pay with Smile will run on Revolut Register, the company's new hospitality point-of-sale (POS) hardware system. It's a two-screen system designed to combine payments, banking and floor operations for merchants.

Once customers are enrolled, it uses biometric authentication data to verify the user's identity against selfies registered when the customer signed up. "By combining high-performance processing with facial recognition technology, we'll replace outdated, fragmented tills with a hyper-efficient checkout experience designed to solve consumer and merchant pain points," said Revolut's Alex Codina in a statement.

Revolut keeps and processes all personal data "entirely within our own proprietary application environment" and doesn't share it. Facial "embeddings" used to complete transactions are immediately deleted after a sale is confirmed and not kept in-store by merchants.

Pay with Smile isn't the first facial recognition payment system, and even the name isn't quite unique. China's Alipay (a division of Alibaba) introduced a system call Smile to Pay back in 2017 at Hong Kong KFCs, though it didn't move outside of China. Another Chinese tech giant, Tencent, also unveiled a facial payment system called "Frog Pro" back in 2019.

Revolut said the new system is designed to reduce payment friction that can cause lost sales, but it's bound to be controversial given the public's general distrust of facial recognition technology. If you're a Revolut customer in the UK, you can sign up and try it between now and September 26th at Kiss the Hippo cafes in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho.