EFTPOS Rolls Out Face Payment Tech

Paying for groceries with your face is coming to New Zealand — and it is closer than you might think.

EFTPOS New Zealand is rolling out Verifone Victa biometric payment terminals that let shoppers pay using their face or palm, no card required. The terminals can also verify a customer's age at the point of sale and automatically load loyalty programmes — all in a single interaction.

Retail NZ chief executive Carolyn Young admitted the concept took a moment to land. "I can use my face. How's my face going to know my bank account?" she told Morning Report.

The answer, she said, is that this kind of thing is already happening in quieter ways. "I often read books on my iPad. I bought a book last night after I'd finished another book and my confirmation of payment was my fingerprint because my card is already loaded into my iPad and it says 'confirm, press your fingerprint here' and I press my fingerprint, that's a biometric payment. So the details are already there."

For retailers dealing with restricted products — alcohol, vapes — the appeal is obvious. Staff currently have to eyeball ID, make a judgment call, and hope for the best. EFTPOS NZ says the technology will "reduce the burden on frontline staff and the risk of human error". Young said transactions could move faster, particularly where age checks or loyalty schemes are involved.

She described how the loyalty programme piece might work in practice. "Say you belong to the Farmers loyalty programme, and you're at the counter at the moment and they ask you if you belong to the loyalty programme and you give them your email address or phone number. If your data that's already on your phone — that includes your email — is hooked in appropriately, you don't have to publicly give that, or the intention is that you won't have to publicly give that to someone else in the line… it would pass through seamlessly."

Proof-of-concept trials have been carried out. The terminals run on Android and can support third-party applications. Retailers choose whether to enable biometric features, on their own timeline, through their preferred supplier.

On privacy, Kristy Gregory, head of merchant sales and strategic partners, told the New Zealand Herald that the data "sits with their chosen consumer platform, governed by the same privacy regulations that apply to any other digital service".

Young was candid that public trust will need work. There is, she said, "quite a lot of education and language that needs to be used so that everybody understands what it means".

Which is a polite way of saying: New Zealand is not quite ready to hand its face to a payment terminal. But ready or not, the terminals are coming.