Danish Office Workers Will Soon Buy Lunch with Their Faces

“… a simple face scan will allow the system to retrieve the necessary billing information for a given transaction, and to process it, bypassing the need for the customer to present a physical payment card or any other hardware.”

Denmark is once again the site of a pioneering trial of a biometric payments system, this time thanks to Nets, a European digital payments services provider.

The companies’ new pilot program will see participants making payments at a cafeteria via facial recognition. The trial will be undertaken at the Vibenshuset office complex in Copenhagen, and is open to up to a thousand participants who wish to make biometric payments at the Kokkenes Køkken’s cafeteria.

As with other so-called “naked payments” systems, the idea is to link customers’ payment accounts directly to their biometric identifiers. In this case, that means that a simple face scan will allow the system to retrieve the necessary billing information for a given transaction, and to process it, bypassing the need for the customer to present a physical payment card or any other hardware.

In a statement announcing the pilot program, Nets Head of Creation Labs Jesper Kildegaard Poulsen explained that its main aim is to gauge consumer sentiment about biometric payments. “Today, we have the technology to use faces as identification and validation when making a payment,” he said. “However, 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.”

The trial will follow in the footsteps of a different naked payments program recently conducted by Nets in collaboration with Sthaler, whose Fingopay system was implemented at the Copenhagen Business School. That system, which is based on the scanning of finger vein patterns, saw an enthusiastic response from participants, prompting Nets and Sthaler to expand the deployment about a year ago.

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December 9, 2019 – by Alex Perala