Dutch online and mobile transactions specialist Adyen has unveiled a revolutionary application that lets people make payments using only their faces.
Tapping smartphone and tablet cameras, the Face-ID app requires customers to show their faces and then uses recognition technology to make a match. To confirm they have been correctly identified, the customers just give a thumbs up sign.
Pieter van der Does, CEO, Adyen, boasts: "This has revolutionised existing payment ecosystems and sent initiatives like NFC, QR codes, e-wallets, EMV-Chip and contactless payments back to the stone age."
You can test the technology here, although the app doesn't launch until Sunday. (Hang on...Sunday you say? Ed.)
Cool technology, but people want ways to pay that replace cash or cheque, rather than saving retailers from having to use debit card machines. Plumbers aren't going to be carrying face-recognition apps on an iPad, and that's the guy you want to pay quickly and conveniently.
*cough* twins *cough*
Most car drivers - or chauffeurs as they're called in some places - in the housing complex where I live in India migrated to smartphones well before the respective car owners did (many of whom still haven't). A couple of days ago, I saw a janitor at an Indian airport using a tablet. Maybe my experience is one-off but I've begun to wonder if we've got the smartphone / tablet demographics entirely wrong, so I won't be so sure about the plumber...
Excellent salary with uncapped commissionMilton Keynes
© Finextra Research 2013