Azerbaijan-headquartered SmilePay has reportedly entered agreements with two large food retailers in the nation in order to allow consumers to purchase their groceries using their faces.
SmilePay has acquired an investment from the largest acquirer bank in Azerbaijan, Pasha, and entered deals with the Bravo and Araz supermarket chains.
Currently installed at Bravo, in its first month the tech has been used for around 3000 transactions from 418 users.
Seymur Rasulov, CEO at SmilePay, stated:
“Our facial recognition payment system has nearly absolute precision in ideal conditions, reaching a 99.99% accuracy and less than 0.5 seconds detection speed.”
The firm, which this year was selected as one of eight Mastercard Start Path Accelerator program participants, now intends to expand business operations across Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
As noted by the firm’s management, we still “depend on cards, cash and devices when it comes to day-to-day payments.”
They added that when we take into account the current requirements, it led the firm to adopt this motto for themselves: “you can forget your card, cash, phone, but you will never forget your face anywhere.”
So if you want to optimize your payment process, the Fintech firm invites you “to get acquainted with the payment of the future – SmilePay.”
Yes, payments can “literally be made with a smile today,” the firm noted in a blog post.
Biometric techniques are “focused on convenience, enabling increased consumer and retail sales.” Biometrics are used today “in various fields: retail, banks, industrial and transport enterprises.”
It is “no longer surprising to pay the bill using biometric data in some cafes in European countries.”
Next-generation payments “require changing these settings and even our habits – so biometrics offers solutions and is gaining momentum as a result.”
Biometric payments are “no longer part of a futuristic scenario, but a reality.”
The company added that “one of the biggest testing grounds for experiments in the field of technology has become the retail sector – according to Google AI experts, 2.6 billion people around the world are expected to use biometric payments by 2023.”
Undoubtedly, innovations in technology “excite our minds so much that a simple smile can easily become a payment method.” It’s contactless – “you don’t need any cards, smartphones or cash.” And the process “is quite fast and you can never fake the payment method. Even if everything stays at home, you still manage to pay.”
Today, pilot projects of biometric payments “are being successfully implemented in the retail sector around the world.”
The firm added that the Asian retail market is “being conquered with a smile.”
China maintains “its first place here by developing the Dragonfly system, where you can pay in supermarkets and restaurants.”
In this regard, the Asia-Pacific region “is growing rapidly and accounts for approximately 36% of the growth in the global biometrics market.”
In Western countries, Amazon has “launched Amazon Go, a chain of stores that is testing several biometric methods for payments.”
As noted in the update, SmilePay uses “the most advanced facial recognition technology and we have created a deviceless cashless payment solution with extremely low transaction rates in local markets.”
With the SmilePay program, you can now “make payments easily, and new technologies ensure fast and secure payments.”
For more details, check here.
