Revolut's smile-to-pay till only recognises customers who already sent it a selfie

The customer at the front of the queue in Bloomsbury has either already done the paperwork or cannot use this at all. Pay with Smile works only for existing Revolut customers, and the till compares the face in front of it with the selfie ID check that customer submitted at signup ^[12].

So the pilot tests whether people who already gave Revolut a selfie for identity purposes will use it to buy a flat white. Revolut said the system is meant to cut the payment friction that causes lost sales ^[11]. TechRadar, invited to try it in central London, said the scan verified the payment in seconds and was quicker than many contactless payments ^[14].

The merchant's cost is the hardware, since Revolut charges nothing in processing fees on these transactions ^[1]. The discount takes £349.50 off the £699 list price ^[18]. At the £1 launch price on the special Revolut menu, roughly 350 cups cover the discounted terminal before VAT, and fewer at normal coffee prices ^[19].

"By combining high-performance processing with facial recognition technology, we'll replace outdated, fragmented tills with a hyper-efficient checkout experience designed to solve consumer and merchant pain points," said Revolut's Alex Codina ^[6]. The data handling is the part a customer has to take on trust. Revolut says all personal data is kept and processed "entirely within our own proprietary application environment" and is not shared ^[7], and that transactions are authenticated with end-to-end encryption managed inside its app ^[16].

Engadget wrote that the system is bound to be controversial given the public's general distrust of facial recognition ^[11]. The prior art points somewhere narrower. Alipay put Smile to Pay into Hong Kong KFCs in 2017 and it never moved outside China ^[9]; Tencent showed a system called Frog Pro in 2019 ^[10].

Before any biometric checkout gets counter space, the identity record has to exist for some other reason, and Revolut's does, because onboarding required it, so enrolment costs nothing for the people it can serve and is impossible for everyone else ^[5]. The saving goes to the merchant, who gets the fee line ^[1], while the customer gets to leave the phone at home ^[16]. When the saving lands on the merchant and the consent decision lands on the customer, uptake depends on the customer having a reason of their own, and for the moment that reason is a £1 coffee ^[15].

The measure of this pilot is repeat use: how many enrolled customers at the three cafes pay this way more than once before 26 September ^[3]. Neither Engadget nor TechRadar reports how many people have signed up ^[20].