Ant Financial, an affiliate company of Alibaba Group, announced a new facial recognition payment system in a KFC restaurant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, on September 1st. Customers in the KPRO restaurant, a sub-brand of KFC mainly offering salads, paninis and fresh fruit juices, only need to look at a screen which scan their faces to pay.

Here comes the era of Facial Recognition Payment

A typical dining scene in the KFC KPRO restaurant in Hangzhou's Vientiane City is as follows: order your food on a self-service screen, click payment and then select Facial Recognition Payment. It takes 1-2 seconds for the system to recognise your face, and after that, you just need to input your mobile phone number which you used to register your Alipay account and then confirm. The whole process takes about 10 seconds, and you don’t need to take out your phone, open up an app or type in your password. 

How to use Alipay Facial Recognition Payment Service

Step 1 Log into your Alipay account Step 2 Go to the Search Bar and Search Facial Recognition Payment, then select the application Step 3 Choose to enable the service, done

Facial Recognition Payment now has become a new payment service that follows cash, bank card and mobile payment. This means consumers will have more choices. When they forget to take their wallets, or their smart phones have run out of battery, they are still able to pay. In addition, it also means that Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has reached a new level: it can be done without using any devices such as computers, mobile phones or others but only by people themselves.

Is Facial Recognition Payment reliable? 

What people care most about payments is that they are reliable and secure. According to Alipay, an additional phone number verification option after face recognition is available to confirm the payment for added security.

What about using photos? Ant Financial explained that the self-service screens at the KPRO restaurant are equipped with 3D infrared cameras which can differentiate between real people and photos by using a technology of combining software and hardware. The only challenge would be the identification of identical twins as there might be a possibility that the machine would make a mistake. But Alipay will compensate any account fraud through insurance companies. 

What else can Facial Recognition do? 

Although Facial Recognition Payment is not yet widely used in due course everyone will be able to enjoy the changes brought by this technology. It will affect other areas as well such as money transfers, online loans, tax declarations, provident fund deposits, social security certifications, pension collections, industry qualification examinations and so on. In short, the rapid development of the Face Recognition Technology will allow us to gradually dispense with the necessity of using our wallet and keys, and quickly enter the cashless era. Are you prepared?