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— By Ankit Gohil
Since the time the word “selfie” was listed as one of the top ten
buzzwords of 2010, the selfie mania has been growing by leaps and
bounds. The highest priest of the English language - the Oxford Dictionary
- declared “selfie” as the word of the year in 2013. Scrabble followed
soon, allowing its usage in 2014, much to the glee of millions of fans.
Remember how we used to get amazed by
the use of biometrics in science fiction
movies like Mission Impossible. Directors
have been able to wow moviegoers with the
use of cutting edge biometric technologies
such as iris scanners, facial recognition
devices for many decades. These movies
have played a part in educating the public
about biometric technology which has led
to its wider acceptance. Today biometrics
is an important part of the payments industry
due to its reliable, fast and convenient
nature. With the launch of Apple Pay,
Android Pay and Samsung Pay the use of
biometric recognition has become even
more popular. Although the use of voice
recognition and acoustics for biometric
authentication has been around us for some
time now, it is “Selfie Payments” or Facial
Recognition that is garnering the maximum
amount of attention.
With a number of companies around the
world innovating around selfie technology, it
has become impossible to ignore. Today
many financial and technology companies
are developing payment authentication
solutions based on facial-recognition
technology. This will allow the customers to
make payments using their smartphones by
clicking a selfie instead of entering a PIN or a
password. Users just need to store their
sample image in the smartphone application
which is converted into a unique code. Selfie
taken at the time of payment is then
encrypted and compared with this saved
code to establish the user's identity. The
primary aim of the selfie in payments is to
authenticate the identity and reduce the
friction in payments thus, enhancing
customer experience.
Last year in March founder of Alibaba,
Jack Ma Yun, showcased “Smile to Pay”
technology that will allow users to pay for
goods and services by taking a selfie from
their smart phones. The technology is
developed by Ant Financial which also
operates AliPay. The company has already
made the feature available to its employees
and is planning to make it available to public
in the next few months. As per Jack Ma,
“Smile to Pay” will be first rolled out in China
and later to other countries. Apart from this,
Ant Financial is touted to be working on new
technologies which would allow users to pay
by speaking a word or a phrase or by taking a
photo of a tattoo or even a pet.