The company behind ۳۰۰,۰۰۰ Eftpos terminals across Australia is hoping shoppers will want to make payments by simply glancing at a screen, as biometric technology pushes further into retailing.
Verifone is selling the innovation as “pay for your coffee with a smile”, promising faster checkouts for people who opt in to having their face or palm-vein – the veins in people’s hands – biometrics used for Eftpos transactions in Australia.
It may take a long time before the technology is widely available, however, with cafes, restaurants and retailers required to upgrade their existing equipment.
The head of product for Asia Pacific at Verifone, Ben Hughes, said the biometric payments will ease the “friction” of slow transactions.
“If you go to a grocery store and you have to tap a loyalty card, plus tap a payment card, that’s the kind of thing that now we’d be able to speed up,” he said.
He said the company was expecting retailers to deploy the Verifone Victa devices, which launched last month, incrementally as their current terminals reached their end of life.
Hughes said the technology will need buy-in from banks and other organisations that want to allow their customers to pay using biometrics.
Biometrics are converted into tokens on the device, he said, meaning images are not stored by Verifone, but biometric profiles are managed by merchants, banks or digital wallet providers.
Customers will be able to continue to use contactless payments on their card or phone.
Hughes said the company had measures in place to avoid users “spoofing” other people’s hands or faces, as has been seen in the rollout of facial verification technology, similar to that used in age assurance technology for Australia’s social media ban.
The company is expecting some pushback on the shift to biometrics, but compared it to initial wariness over contactless payments.
“This is continuous evolution, if you remember when contactless first came out, the amount of negative press we actually got from that initiative,” Verifone’s Asia Pacific president, Paris Tsounias, said.
“If you look at today, the stats, it’s over ۹۰% of transactions are all contactless.
“Now, no one even thinks of the risk around it. And we’ve covered the risk through the multitude of different type of certifications and compliance.”
Card-related fraud losses were $۲.۲bn in the ۲۰۲۴-۲۰۲۵ financial year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which did not break down the number of incidents related to contactless payment fraud, when people unknowingly have their cards tapped for payment.
Part of the acceptance of contactless may have been that, according to the ABS, nearly ۷۸% of people who reported card-related fraud did not lose any money after reimbursements.
There has also been a shift away from using physical cards.
In March, the Reserve Bank of Australia reported that, in ۲۰۲۵, the number of people paying by tapping a card had declined from a peak in ۲۰۲۲ of nearly ۸۰% to under ۶۰%, with payment by devices such as phones or smartwatches increasing to nearly ۴۰%.
