Financial technology platform Revolut has launched a trial program in the United Kingdom for “Pay with Smile,” an in-store biometric payment system that enables consumers to complete transactions using facial recognition. Positioned as the UK’s first merchant-facing facial payment platform, the service waives processing fees for participating retailers and is initially undergoing live testing across select Kiss the Hippo coffee shops in London.
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Pay with Smile operates through Revolut Register, the company’s proprietary dual-screen hospitality point-of-sale (POS) terminal designed to consolidate payments, business banking, and restaurant floor management into a unified system.
The transaction workflow relies on pre-enrolled user data to verify identity at checkout:
- User Enrolment: Customers opt in through the Revolut mobile application, registering personal biometric data using account verification photos.
- Verification Workflow: At checkout, the POS terminal scans the user’s face and matches the live facial structure against the registered selfie stored on file.
- Transaction Processing: Once verified, payment is authorized instantly without requiring physical credit cards, smartphones, or manual PIN entry.
Revolut states that combining high-performance computing with facial verification eliminates fragmented checkout hardware, targeting common merchant operational bottlenecks and reducing customer queuing times.
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In response to consumer concerns surrounding public biometric tracking, Revolut emphasized that all personal identifiers and biometric data are managed strictly within its proprietary software infrastructure. The company confirmed that temporary facial “embeddings” created during scanning are purged immediately after a transaction is confirmed. Furthermore, no biometric data is stored locally on merchant POS hardware or shared with retail partners.
Biometric point-of-sale technology has seen broader adoption in international markets, spearheaded by platforms in China such as Alipay’s 2017 “Smile to Pay” system and Tencent’s 2019 “Frog Pro” hardware. Revolut’s deployment represents an early attempt to bring the model to Western retail environments, balancing transaction speed against lingering public scepticism regarding biometric data collection.
The UK trial runs through September 26 at Kiss the Hippo cafe locations in Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and Soho.
