Paying With Your Phone May Never Work, But How About With Your Face?

Pessimism is rampant in the mobile payments world — often with good reason. Nobody f___ cares about NFC (including Apple), and new ventures like Clinkle, which will apparently transmit payments via high-frequency sound waves, is received by the community with a shrug.

But a new startup in Finland called Uniqul will let customers make payments with their face.

Facial recognition for payments may seem like science fiction, but that’s Finland for you. Finland is something of a hotbed of financial innovation. The bank account product from Helsinki-based Holvi, called Holvi Vault, has caught the attention of the fintechnorati in the US.

Here’s how Uniqul works. The user presents his face to the camera at a special terminal at a point of sale — soon to be introduced in Helsinki, the nation’s capital and largest city — and waits for the system to bring up his information. The user then confirms that he is making a purchase, and the items are scanned and his payment information, stored in the system, funds the purchase.

This seems very convenient, but may give pause to those worried about too much personal information being required to simply buy things. Fears of this kind do not seem to affect Europeans in the same way they do Americans and to some extent, the British.

Uniqul says any payment system, from banks to credit cards to PayPal, can be used, and that the encryption is “military grade.” The system is said to be free for merchants — a good idea to speed adoption — and charge users a monthly fee to use the service ranging from €0.99 for a small radius, say within a city center, to €6.99 for unlimited use.

Could this ever catch on in the US? It seems unlikely to us, especially given the troubles payments by smartphone have encountered. There will need to be big incentives to get users to pay to use face payments on this side of the pond.