Denmark is once again the site of a pioneering trial of a biometric payments system, this time thanks to Nets, a European digital payments services provider.
The companies’ new pilot program will see participants making
payments at a cafeteria via facial recognition. The trial will be
undertaken at the Vibenshuset office complex in Copenhagen, and is open
to up to a thousand participants who wish to make biometric payments at
the Kokkenes Køkken’s cafeteria.
As with other so-called “naked payments” systems, the idea is to link
customers’ payment accounts directly to their biometric identifiers. In
this case, that means that a simple face scan will allow the system to
retrieve the necessary billing information for a given transaction, and
to process it, bypassing the need for the customer to present a physical
payment card or any other hardware.
In a statement announcing the pilot program, Nets Head of Creation
Labs Jesper Kildegaard Poulsen explained that its main aim is to gauge
consumer sentiment about biometric payments. “Today, we have the
technology to use faces as identification and validation when making a
payment,” he said. “However, how people feel about having their faces
scanned is still under question. This trial will help us to learn more
about consumer attitudes to facial recognition payments.”
The trial will follow in the footsteps of a different naked payments program
recently conducted by Nets in collaboration with Sthaler, whose
Fingopay system was implemented at the Copenhagen Business School. That
system, which is based on the scanning of finger vein patterns, saw an
enthusiastic response from participants, prompting Nets and Sthaler to expand the deployment about a year ago.
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