Revolut Launches Face-Pay at 12 London Coffee Shops, Eliminating Merchant Fees

Revolut is letting London customers pay for their coffee by looking at a camera. The feature, called Pay with Smile, launched at three Kiss the Hippo locations and it’s already drawing attention from the broader payments industry.

The mechanics are pretty straightforward. A customer opts in through the Revolut app — the feature is off by default, so nobody gets enrolled without knowing it. At the till, a camera on the payment terminal snaps a photo and checks it against Revolut’s records. Match confirmed, payment done. No card tap, no phone wave, no PIN. Kiss the Hippo plans to roll the system out across all 12 of its London shops, and Revolut is expected to expand the trial more broadly around the same time. No precise date has been given for either.

Revolut is also waiving processing fees on facial recognition payments, at least for now.

That fee waiver is probably the most interesting commercial detail here. Independent merchants run on tight margins, and card processing fees eat into them constantly. By zeroing out fees on face payments, Revolut gives smaller coffee shops and cafes a real financial reason to adopt the hardware and push customers toward enrollment. It’s not pure altruism — Revolut wants more merchant relationships, more transaction data, and a stickier ecosystem. But the incentive is real. Revolut had already been courting independent merchants with a point-of-sale iPad app for restaurants and cafes, so Pay with Smile fits into a pattern of building merchant-side tools that pull businesses deeper into the Revolut platform.

How the Biometric Data Actually Works

The privacy side is where things get murky, and Revolut knows people will ask. The company says merchants don’t store or see any personal data. When the terminal takes a photo, the image gets converted into a single-use code, which is then deleted once the transaction clears. So the merchant never holds a face scan. That part’s clean enough.

But Revolut itself does keep something. Copies of the original image sit in Revolut’s cloud, held under its standard retention policies, available if a fraud investigation or payment dispute comes up. Customers who want out can withdraw consent and delete their biometric data entirely. Or they can just freeze the feature without deleting the stored data — a middle-ground option for people who aren’t sure yet.

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It’s worth noting that Revolut faced a data security incident not long ago, when an impersonator managed to get access to customer information through fraudulent requests. The company blocked the offending address and told regulators. That episode didn’t involve biometric data, but it’s the kind of thing that makes people read the privacy policy more carefully before they let a camera scan their face at a checkout counter.

Where This Sits in the Biometric Payments Race

Revolut didn’t invent this category. Mastercard’s Biometric Checkout Program started in Brazil, then moved into Uruguay, letting customers link a palm scan to their payment card. JPMorgan Chase explored palm and face payments in 2023. Amazon spent years testing cashier-less store technology built on similar computer vision systems. Biometric payments have been “coming soon” for a while now, and the technology keeps getting deployed in narrow pilots that generate press releases and then quietly stall.

Whether Revolut’s version gets further than those trials probably depends on two things: how many merchants actually push customers toward it, and whether customers find it faster than tapping a phone. The speed argument is real — there’s no device to fish out of a pocket — but it only works if the camera is accurate and fast, and if the enrollment process doesn’t scare people off before they’ve tried it once.

Revolut’s user base crossed 68 million in 2025, so the potential enrollment pool is large. The company’s investment platform is also a separate operation that isn’t connected to Pay with Smile. In Poland alone, Revolut held roughly 590,000 investment accounts as of September 2025, making it second only to a local competitor in that market. UK regulators have been looking at trading app design more broadly, but Revolut hasn’t said anything about extending biometric checks to investment or trading activity. For now, Pay with Smile is strictly a checkout tool.

Three coffee shops in London. Twelve planned. Fees waived. Face scans deleted after each transaction, originals kept in the cloud. And a company with 68 million users watching to see if anyone actually prefers looking at a camera to tapping a card.