Russia’s VTB is collaborating with Visa and a local fintech to enable restaurant customers to make payments simply by looking at a camera.
The bank is partnering with O.Vision, a participant in its corporate accelerator, to test this innovative payment system at the KiO Kitech network of outlets in St. Petersburg.
To use the facial recognition payment method, customers are required to install the O.Vision mobile app, register their phone number, save their facial biometrics, and link a payment card. When ready to pay, they simply look into the camera at the restaurant’s payment terminal.
VTB states that the O.Vision identification algorithm has been tested on a biometric registration database of over a million individuals, allowing it to recognize a customer’s face and process payments in under one second.
To incentivize adoption, customers who use this payment method with a Visa card within the first four months of the service launch will receive a 20% discount.
Yulia Kopytova from VTB remarked, “New solutions allow trade and service enterprises not only to improve the user experience but also to offer additional opportunities for the development of their own ecosystem in the future.”