When Meta turned off its Face Recognition System in 2021 primarily over information security and data privacy concerns, and to head off inquisitive regulators, the biometrics world held its breath.
The pandemic saw a boom of biometrics — temperature scans before entering buildings, use of thermal cameras and more — but facial recognition either wasn’t trusted or didn’t work well.
Wearing a different expression in 2022, the technology is getting another shot at digital identity with new approaches and ambitious plans for the face to become the ultimate digital ID.
As PopID CEO John Miller told PYMNTS, “We don’t use the [term] ‘facial recognition’ to describe our platform. We use ‘face verification.’ Recognition refers to technologies that are actively surveying people, watching people. Our technology requires you to first enroll in the platform. You opt in on your phone and say, ‘I want to have the ability to pay with my face.’”
Smartphones are where biometrics find their most popular consumer use cases today, but Miller said, “Our goal is to be like Apple Pay, except without the phone.”
Less focused on eCommerce for the moment, PopID and its two solutions — PopPay and PopEntry — have been tested for months on tens of thousands of college students, and the company is getting set to take the system to the big leagues.
On Thursday (March 3), PopID announced that venue and event management company ASM, which manages over 300 stadiums, convention centers and venues worldwide, together with Levy Restaurants, a provider of food and beverage for sports and entertainment venues, are teaming up to create a seamless “face pay” experience at San Diego’s Pachanga Arena.
With about 85,000 users currently enrolled with the platform, Miller said, “We’ve shown the value of the platform in allowing the consumer to use their face to check into a brick-and-mortar location, see their past orders, repeat their order and pay with their face.
“The first implementation with a big enterprise partner is with ASM at Pechanga Arena. The goal is to show the value of face identity as a full experience that’s superior to the phone.”
Related: Apple Pay At Seven
Face Pay, At Scale
As for the big show starting at Pechanga Arena and scaling from there, there’s no questioning that it’s an innovative approach to several issues, from proof to payments.
“The way it’ll work is that the [consumer] will show up at the arena, and instead of having to pull up a QR code on their phone and scan that QR code at the entry point for the stadium, they can just have their face scanned,” Miller said. “No phone necessary — they don’t have to worry about the phone dying, they don’t have to worry about pulling up the app on their phone.
“Once they get inside of the stadium, they can walk up to the point of sale, check in with their face, get a personalized order recommendation and then pay with their face.”
He explained that face is not only the most obvious way to identify, but it also has the ability to scale to tens of millions of users and match “one in tens of millions in a perfect way,” without creating false positives or false negatives.
“Face is the [simplest],” he said. “You walk up, the picture can be taken and you have sub-second authentication. We’ve studied the biometrics market, and we think face is the most effective way to do it.”
Global Field Testing
Miller pointed to Alipay’s success with face pay in China as further proof of concept. Combined with the comfort level of younger demographics that have grown up taking selfies, PopID’s verification system is both familiar and trustworthy.
“These college students have grown up taking pictures of themselves and putting them all over the internet with TikTok and Snapchat,” he said. “The idea that you can take a picture of yourself to get your loyalty and pay is a natural extension of what they’ve been doing their whole life.”
Read more: PopID, JCV Bring Face Pay to Japan
Smile if You’re a Physical Store
Focused on brick-and-mortar integrations for now, Miller feels that PopID is well positioned to make friends among physical retailers.
“On the merchant side of the equation, we’re offering a few things,” he said. “One is lower payment processing fees relative to cards and Apple Pay. We are a significant discount to, for example, what Square and Toast charge in the market. The second thing is the operational benefits, tying face to loyalty and ordering history so that lines can move faster, and you can get consumers more engaged in loyalty programs.”
“We’ve shown that when people check in with their face to pay, the ticket size actually goes up. So, face is a way to increase your revenue in your brick-and-mortar establishment,” he added.
While consumers can enroll using their smartphone cameras, PopID uses a binocular camera system at the physical point of sale (POS) terminal to ensure the images match.
Miller said the integration is “as simple as a cheap Android device that goes on the counter that sits next to the card terminal where the POS is located. It takes 10 seconds to install it and set it up, and you’re getting lower payment processing fees and all these operational benefits.
“The most important thing is that it’s unacceptable for anyone to ever be able to hold up a picture of you to get your loyalty or your pay,” Miller said.
As for where the concept goes from here, PopID has some high-visibility plans for its face pay solution.
“With respect to consumers and merchants, we’re going to move very rapidly into allowing people to link cryptocurrencies and digital currencies to their PopPay accounts. At the point of sale, the consumer can have their face scanned and choose, ‘do I want to use a debit card, do I want to use a credit card, do I want to use bitcoin or a stablecoin to transact?’”
He added, “Over time we want this to be universal, like Apple Pay. You enroll once, you use it everywhere you go in the brick-and-mortar world and in the online world. Our focus currently in building the platform is brick-and-mortar stores. So, while we can deploy it for eCommerce, we see that as a longer-term opportunity.”
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