Payment by facial recognition about to roll out in Vietnam soon
Instead of using cash, swiping cards, and scanning QR codes, the face would also become a payment method at convenience stores in early 2021.
The Wee Digital Company had just developed an application called facepay.
Accordingly, users only needed to download this application on their mobile phone, register personal information, scan their face and link to a bank card. They could then use their face to pay without swiping the card, scanning QR, and using electronic wallets or cash.
The face was the ‘password’ for payment at partner stores of Wee Digital without using anything else. The purchase would become compact when customers just had to choose the goods, ‘laughed’ in front of the store’s screen to complete payment.
According to Wee Digital, there would be three forms of payment by facial recognition. Customers who bought products online through major e-commerce sites could pay through their computers with facial recognition. Large retailers such as convenience stores and coffee chains would be equipped with screens that allowed face recognition at checkout. Small fashion shop owners, online sales, restaurants, coffee, and toad would also use personal telephone workers to receive payments.
Unlike electronic wallet applications, facepay only required the role of technology processing. Transaction completion would be done by the National Payment Company of Vietnam (NAPAS). Moreover, in the short term, the GS25 convenience store chain would be the first retail system to accept facial recognition payment in Vietnam in early 2021 and then deploy it in many convenience stores, restaurants and other coffee stores in the country.
In fact, facial recognition technology had been applied in the financial industry for about a year but focused on customer identification or automated transactions.
For example, Tien Phong Commercial Joint Stock Bank (TPBank) was the first bank to allow withdrawals by facial recognition in the LiveBank system. An Binh Commercial Joint Stock Bank (ABBank) had Wee@ABBank technology used to identify customers at transaction offices. Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Industry and Trade (Vietinbank) had successfully implemented a Biometric System for Face Recognition. However, there was currently no retail system that accepted payment by face recognition.
Wee Digital was a domestic fintech business and not a strange name in the startup world. This company was the winner of the Fintech Challenge Vietnam contest held for the first time by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) and had received two investments from VinaCapital Ventures and InterVest (Korea).
Face recognition technology was still new in Vietnam, but Wee Digital was not the only unit developing it. Big-name enterprises, such as VNPT with VNPT eKYC, VNG with TrueID solution, or FPT with FPT.AI eKYC, were aiming to conquer the face recognition market in Vietnam and on a global scale.
According to Christian Nguyen, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Wee Digital, biometric payments would prevail in the next five years to 10 years. The value of transactions via QR was still minimal compared to the total transaction, so the market still had many opportunities for other non-cash payment solutions.
According to statistics, nearly 40 percent of the Vietnamese population had a bank account, but 80 percent of their daily expenses used cash, 98 percent used cash when paying for under 100,000 dong, and nearly 85 percent of ATM transactions were withdrawals.
Therefore, the development of new payment methods, using biometric applications to create convenience and increase user experience, was seen as a measure to encourage people to use cashless payments.
Intellasian.net