Nets pilots pay by face

With the tagline ‘Hungry? Face it’, Nets has launched a pilot programme testing facial recognition at a cafeteria in Denamrk.

Around 1,000 people - all working at Vibenshuset, an office community of 25 companies in Copenhagen - can sign up to participate in the pilot, which links their face with their employee ID card to pay for lunch by staring into a screen.

Jesper Kildegaard Poulsen, head of Creation Lab, Nets, comments: “We are used to bringing something with us each time we need to make a payment - cash, card or a device. But maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. What if you could pay by just showing up?

"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.”

He says merchants offering self-service solutions would be the most obvious adopters of facial recognition technology: "Imagine the solution at a burger bar where you are recognised at the self-service counter and asked: ‘Do you want the same meal as last time, Jesper?’ This is where we see the largest potential.”

The trial follows an earlier experiment at Copenhagen Business School with biometric vein pattern recognition, which has so far successfully passed 22,000 transactions.