RoyalPay wants to bring facial recognition payments into mainstream

In a small 11th floor office in Melbourne’s CBD, Locky Ge is fine-tuning a machine that lets you pay for things with your face.

The founder and chief executive of fintech company RoyalPay has spent the past three years helping Australian retailers tap into the lucrative Chinese market by setting them up with digital payment channels, including WeChat Pay and Alipay. Now, he’s aiming to introduce to Australia another technology popularised in China – facial recognition payments.

You stand in front of a tablet mounted on a fancy looking stand, look into a camera and blink for the system to recognise you.

It compares a captured image via a thousand data points to one you have pre-loaded into the system and, after determining a match, allows you to access your digital wallet stored in RoyalPay’s system.

“Imagine you go to 7/11 store and forget your wallet and your phone is out of battery. You can use your face to be the key to connect with the payment system,” he said.

RoyalPay, which acts as a middleman between Australian businesses and Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba, has invested “a few million dollars” into developing its software – while the machines are outsourced to Sunmi, the firm which makes Alipay’s facial recognition machines.

It has already started rolling out trial models with vendors and expects the technology to be available at about 100 outlets in Sydney and Melbourne within the next six months.

RoyalPay says any data it collects from customers and businesses, including the facial recognition payment system, are stored in Australia. It does not provide data to Chinese authorities.The fintech also has plans to introduce small loans of between $10,000 and $200,000.

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