Revolut is testing a new way to pay for your coffee in the UK, using your face instead of a card or phone. The company has launched a trial of Pay with Smile, which it describes as the UK’s first in-store facial recognition payment system.
For now, it’s a limited test at selected Kiss the Hippo coffee shops in London’s Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho. UK Revolut customers can sign up and try the system until September 26.
Pay with Smile runs through Revolut Register, the company’s two-screen point-of-sale system designed to bring payments, banking and other shop-floor operations together. Once enrolled, customers can pay using biometric authentication, with their face matched against the selfie registered when they signed up.
The idea is pretty straightforward: look at the checkout, get verified and pay without reaching for your phone or wallet. Revolut says the system is designed to reduce the friction around payments that can sometimes lead to lost sales for merchants.
There’s an obvious privacy question here, though, particularly when facial recognition is being used to authorise something as routine as buying a coffee.
Revolut says personal data is processed and stored entirely within its own proprietary application environment and isn’t shared. The facial “embeddings” used to authenticate a transaction are also immediately deleted once the payment has been confirmed, rather than being stored by the participating merchant.
Facial recognition payments aren’t entirely new. Alipay introduced its Smile to Pay system at KFC locations in Hong Kong in 2017, while Tencent demonstrated its Frog Pro facial payment system in 2019. Neither example became a widespread alternative to conventional payments outside China.
Revolut is now trying a similar idea in the UK, although this initial rollout is deliberately small. The company hasn’t said when, or whether, Pay with Smile will expand beyond the participating Kiss the Hippo locations.
For now, it’s an interesting test of whether people actually want to swap tapping a card or phone for simply showing their face at the checkout.
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