ID R&D face biometrics and passive liveness support ambitious Latin American payments startup

Payface is bringing payment with face biometrics to retailers in Latin America through the integration of any Android device with the point-of-sale system, and preventing payment fraud with passive liveness detection provided by ID R&D’s IDLive Face.

As explained in a new case study from ID R&D, the biometric software was chosen by Payface to meet its rigorous demands for speed, user convenience, and the security of both payment information and end-users’ biometric data.

Payface has ambitions to become a dominant player in payments with its facial recognition-based system that does not require the customer to use a physical payment card, their smartphone, a wearable or anything else, aside from a biometric associated with a payment account. The system also uses contactless gesture recognition for the non-authentication steps in the process, as shown in a promotional video which asks “How do you see yourself paying in 2025?”

ID R&D notes that a recent Mastercard survey shows 51 percent of people are already using some sort of contactless payment, and that to tap into that market, Payface determined that its biometrics capabilities needed to include initial enrollment without any extra steps, and should work for self-service purchases unattended by a store employee. It also needed to prevent spoof attacks to block fraud, but without introducing false rejections, which would frustrate customers and lengthen, rather than reduce, lineups for payment.

The case study reviews Payface’s reasons for selecting ID R&D’s biometric technology, the importance of passive facial liveness to the solution, and its appeal for merchants, the latter including reduced chargeback and fraud costs.

ID R&D says Payface partner Cielo is Brazil’s largest payments company, so its rollout of selfie biometric payments in drugstores and supermarkets could ramp up quickly, particularly with initial returns indicating that enrolled Payface customers use it twice per week, on average.

The IDLive Face SDK was launched by ID R&D in February, and enables passive biometric liveness detection to be carried out on the device, with a smaller footprint than the server-side version.

The company has also officially taken first place in the Short-Duration Speaker Verification Challenge (SdSV) 2021.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometric payments  |  biometric software  |  biometrics  |  case studies  |  facial recognition  |  ID R&D  |  passive facial liveness  |  Payface  |  POS