If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Payments is an ever-changing landscape where incumbents are constantly required to innovate.
However, in this case, it seems like Alipay has over engineered a simple solution. The recent “innovative” product, smile-to-pay is not resonating well with consumers.
I see 3 major problems with this product:
1. It requires a dedicated facial recognition device to be installed at every merchant, an additional cost to the merchant when it can simply be done through a QR code.
2. Data privacy is a huge concern here. Facial biometrics is highly sensitive data. Users would be naive to share it even with appropriate security in place. Not only this, now with most people around the world wearing masks, it almost renders this technology impractical to use.
3. Constant security threat of someone putting make-up or silicon mask on pretending to be you. Certainly difficult, though very much probable. Besides, Alibaba Group would really have to train its ML algorithms on millions of consumers for it to be effective at minimizing false positives.
Would you be willing to use smile-to-pay option?
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