Customers at Kio Kukhnya fast food outlets in the Russian city of St Petersburg can now pay for their food and beverages at payment terminals equipped with biometric pay-with-a-glance technology.

Once they have registered for the service via an app, users save their facial biometrics to the system and link their account to their payment card.

They can then make contactless payments without needing a smartphone or a physical bank card by looking into the camera on a payment terminal at a Kio Kukhya outlet.

The system has been developed by Russia’s VTB bank and Visa and uses Russian technology provider O.Vision’s O.Pay biometric payments solution.

“The O.Vision identification algorithm analyses about 100m unique parameters and has been tested on a database of biometric registrations of more than 1 million persons, which ensures the correct operation of the service,” Visa says. 

“In less than a second, the system goes through several stages — from identifying the client’s face to checking for ‘authenticity’ and making a decision on payment.”

Izvestia reported that VTB bank was preparing a biometric payment project in October 2020.

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