Revolut has begun a limited pilot that lets customers pay by face at three Kiss the Hippo cafés in London, integrating the system into its Revolut Register point-of-sale platform and waiving processing fees for participating merchants.
Revolut launched a small-scale pilot called Pay with Smile at three Kiss the Hippo cafés in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho, running on Revolut Register with no merchant fees.
The pilot aims to speed up checkout in busy retail locations but follows a slow, incremental path for in-store biometric adoption outside specific high-traffic venues.
Adoption obstacles include the need for in-store infrastructure upgrades, consumer privacy and consent concerns, and limited perceived advantage where contactless payments are already common.
Revolut is testing an in-store facial-recognition payment option named Pay with Smile. The trial runs at three Kiss the Hippo coffee shops in central London and uses Revolut Register, the company's point-of-sale system. Revolut says participating merchants pay no processing fees for these transactions.
The stated goal is to speed up the checkout experience in busy locations. Revolut describes Pay with Smile as the UK's first in-store facial-recognition payment system. The move aligns Revolut with other firms experimenting with biometric payments at point of sale, particularly in environments where quick, hands-free payments matter.
How the pilot compares to other efforts
Biometric payments have gained traction in some markets and use cases but have advanced cautiously overall. The PaymentsJournal story references Toss in South Korea as an example with broader consumer uptake: Toss began piloting FacePay in convenience stores and reports eight million enrolled users and availability at over 370,000 merchants. Separately, biometric systems have seen adoption in stadiums and other high-traffic venues where speed materially improves throughput.
Infrastructure: Merchants may need new hardware or upgrades to accept face payments, even when the service runs on an existing POS platform.
Value proposition: In markets like the UK, contactless cards and mobile tap payments are already widespread. Consumers must see a clear benefit over these established options for facial recognition to gain momentum.
Privacy and consent: Biometric systems typically require customers to opt in and share biometric data. The story warns that data-privacy pushback—citing license-plate reader controversies in the U.S.—could extend to payment use cases and influence public acceptance differently across cultures.
Scale and uptake: Whether Revolut expands the trial beyond three cafés or rolls it out more broadly will indicate merchant and customer receptiveness.
Regulatory and consumer reaction: Responses on privacy, consent, and data handling will shape rollout decisions and potential limits to geographic expansion.
Revolut's Pay with Smile pilot is a limited, practical test of facial-recognition payments at the point of sale. The trial joins other experiments worldwide that show clear wins in specific scenarios but also highlight infrastructure, privacy, and consumer-value hurdles that must be addressed before broad adoption.
Revolut customers can now pay for coffee with their face at three Kiss the Hippo cafés in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho.
Charlie Wells / Bloomberg : Revolut is piloting a new POS system that uses facial recognition for payments at the UK coffee chain Kiss the Hippo, ahead of a full launch later this year — Revolut Ltd. is piloting a new point-of-sale system in the UK that will let customers make in-store payments using their faces, as it
Revolut has started piloting Revolut Pay with Smile, a checkout system that lets customers pay in store using facial recognition. The pilot runs at three Kiss the Hippo cafés in London’s Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho from 24 to 26 September. Merchants pay 0% processing fees on Pay with Smile transactions. Customers who
Revolut started a trial today (Thursday) that lets UK customers pay in stores by looking into a camera. The first merchant is London coffee chain Kiss the Hippo, and the service, called Pay with Smile, runs on the company's Revolut Register checkout terminal. Merchants pay no processing fee on face payments, a waiver R
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