South Korean bank rolls out ATM withdrawals with Alchera facial recognition

South Korean startup Alchera will help the country’s longest-operating bank introduce access to banking services through facial recognition at a total of 900 ATMs.

Shinhan Bank customers will be able to withdraw funds even without identifying themselves with a bank card or passbook thanks to the country’s first biometric facial recognition payment service Shinhan Face Pay. The service is expected to be launched in September.

Aside from equipping Shinhan Bank’s ATMs, Alchera will help customers registering through the bank’s smartphone app withdraw foreign currency by using their faces in Shinhan Bank branches and some ATMs at Incheon Airport and Samseong subway station in Seoul starting in July.

The artificial intelligence and image recognition company based in Seoul, South Korea first rolled out the Shinhan Face Pay pilot in 2020. A case study reveals that the 3D facial feature mapping solution was built on Alchera’s deep learning facial recognition technology AIIR, which uses a lightweight software development kit (SDK) and can be deployed in an app or kiosk using any operating system.

Aside from expanding the bank’s biometrics-based authentication service, Face Pay has been piloted as a frictionless payment solution in Hanyang University’s Seoul campus. Alchera has been working with other financial companies including South Korea’s Toss Bank and Busan Bank (BNK) which signed a deal for the company’s remote ID verification system in May, according to a Google translation of its press release.

Government agencies have also been using its technology as part of an access control solution. Alchera’s facial recognition system is part of a larger government project to digitally transform government buildings in Korea overseen by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, the company said in a statement at the beginning of June.

Article Topics

Alchera  |  ATMs  |  banking  |  biometrics  |  contactless biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  South Korea