Alibaba Developing Facial Recognition Payment Tech
- Tuesday, March 17th, 2015
- Share this article:
Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba is developing a mobile payment system that uses facial recognition technology to authenticate
The technology was demonstrated by Alibaba founder Jack Ma at the CeBit conference, who used it on-stage to buy a gift for the mayor of Hannover, the conferences host city.Pressing buy activates a selfie-style feed from the devices front-facing camera, and payment is automatically completed once the account holders face has been detected. You can watch the presentation below (skip to the 1:20 mark for the demo).
The technology is intended to be publicly available by 2017, as part of the companys Alipay service, which is well-established in China but has recently expanded to more Western merchants, including H&M and Airbnb. 
Alibaba isnt the only company working on this kind of technology. At last months Mobile World Congress, we interviewed Swiss company OneVisage, which is working on a similar concept.
