Your Face Will Be Your Wallet

Most of us tap a card or phone at the supermarket checkout without giving it much thought. Verifone believes that even that small effort can be removed. Its new Australian terminals are built to recognise a customer's face or palm, which means the weekly groceries could soon be paid for with a glance at a screen. The loyalty points could be added at the same time.

The company is selling the idea under the cheery slogan "pay with a smile". Customers who enrol through a participating bank, merchant or digital wallet will be able to look at the terminal, or hold up their palm, and have their identity verified on the spot. It sounds simple, which is obviously the point.

The new Victa is being promoted as Australia's first payment device with built-in biometric capabilities. Verifone already sits behind roughly 300,000 EFTPOS terminals around the country. The new machines will not appear at every checkout overnight, but Verifone has a ready-made path into shops, cafes and restaurants as old terminals reach the end of their working lives.

For now, the biometric feature remains optional. A bank, merchant, or wallet provider has to participate, the customer has to enrol, and card, phone, and PIN payments will still be available. Verifone says it will not store facial images. The terminal turns the scan into a token, while the enrolled biometric profile remains with the organisation through which the customer signed up.

The arrangement begins with payment, though Verifone sees plenty of other uses for the technology. Its Victa terminals can link biometric identification to loyalty programs, ordering, and third-party applications. The company says the devices may be useful in businesses "where identity or age verification matters". A screen installed to speed up the morning coffee could therefore end up identifying a customer for several purposes during the same visit.

The industry likes to call this the removal of "friction". Anyone who has stood behind somebody searching three pockets for a loyalty card can understand the appeal. It really is convenient, and that is why most people will accept it without much fuss. Few will stop at a busy checkout to wonder how much information is being linked behind the screen or how the equipment might be used later.

The risk is known as function creep, and the pattern is familiar. A tool is introduced for a limited and sensible purpose. Once the equipment is installed and people are accustomed to it, somebody finds another use for it. The loyalty program joins the payment system, age checking joins the store account, and an option gradually becomes the expected way of doing things.

Paying with your face is voluntary today, just as cashless shopping once arrived as a convenient choice. Australians now regularly encounter businesses that will not accept cash at all. Shops, banks, and service providers can make the alternatives harder to use until the optional method feels compulsory in practice.

Australia needs proper biometric safeguards before these systems are embedded everywhere. Shops must continue to offer practical non-biometric ways to pay. Refusing a face or palm scan should not mean higher prices, worse service, or exclusion from loyalty benefits. Information collected for one purpose must not be reused for another because a customer clicked through a slab of fine print. Australians should still be able to shop and go about their everyday lives without submitting to biometric checks at every turn.

Saving a few seconds at the checkout is handy, but convenience has a limit. A card can be cancelled, while a face or palm cannot be replaced. Australians should retain the right to refuse a biometric scan and still buy their groceries.

“The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.”
– Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting in Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak (1952).