Finance News
By Julie Binoche
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How the Biometric Data Actually Works. The privacy side is where things get murky, and Revolut knows people will ask.
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Where This Sits in the Biometric Payments Race. Revolut didn't invent this category. Mastercard's Biometric Checkout Program started in Brazil,…
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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…
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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.
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Revolut is also waiving processing fees on facial recognition payments, at least for now.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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More context: MeshWallet Secures $10M to Eliminate TRX Gas Fees for 75 Million TRON Users
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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Three coffee shops in London. Twelve planned. Fees waived. Face scans deleted after each transaction, originals kept in the cloud.
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