• Let's Talk Payments, Tuesday, March 17, 2015 9:29 AM

The e-commerce giant Alibaba is adding an exciting feature to its mobile payment system. Alipay will soon allow users to enable payments by scanning their face with a smartphone. Alibaba’s CEO announced the technology at the recently held CeBit tech trade fair, as reported by CNBC. The new service, called “Smile To Pay”, is currently in its beta phase. Alibaba’s subsidiary firm and financial arm “Ant Financial” is developing the face recognition technology for use with the Alipay online payment service and Alipay Wallet as well. The annual transaction value of both online and mobile payments is expected to reach $4.7 trillion by 2019, according to research by Juniper. Alibaba is certainly trying hard to gain a substantial share of this opportunity. For companies like Alibaba, authentication techniques are always on their minds in order to make mobile payments safer. Mobile wallets like Apple Pay use fingerprint technology, while a company called Delta ID showcased iris recognition technology for payments at the Mobile World Congress this year. Now Alibaba is coming up with another innovative idea of its own.

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