Moscow Metro’s Face Pay biometric contactless fare payment system has achieved “high satisfaction rates” with nearly nine in ten users saying they “appreciate the advantages of the technology and prefer this system to other payment methods” (88%), a survey reveals.

Users cited the key benefits of Face Pay as not needing to carry a bank card (44%), innovativeness (42%), time saving (38%) and speed (37%).

Announcing the survey results, Moscow’s deputy mayor for transport Maksim Liksutov revealed plans to expand Face Pay to other public transport networks, including the Moscow Central Circle and Aeroexpress railway lines and regular river transport services.

Plans are also in place to add a further 200 Face Pay-enabled turnstiles at Moscow Metro stations and explore the possibility of linking Face Pay to student cards and corporate season travel passes, Liksutov said.

To date, more than 170,000 Moscow Metro users have registered with Face Pay and over 26m journeys have been made using the biometric contactless payment system.

 “Using Face Pay is completely voluntary. It is an additional way of paying [a] fare. It is also the most technologically advanced and up to date,” Liksutov said.

“Biometric payment is a reliable and convenient alternative to Apple Pay and Google Pay. To speed up the operation of the turnstiles with Face Pay, we are improving the software and have already upgraded the hardware — the turnstiles now open twice as fast.”

Liksutov added that the Aeroexpress rail service linking the city’s airports and railway terminals has already begun testing Face Pay and that the technology will roll out on the Moscow Central Circle “in September” and on river transport services “this year”.

Moscow Metro began publicly testing the Face Pay biometric contactless payment system in August 2021 before launching a network-wide rollout in September 2021 which it completed the following month.

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