UK Fintech Company Revolut Trials Facial Recognition Payment System in London Café
UK fintech company Revolut is trialing facial recognition payments at the London café chain Kiss the Hippo, with a feature called "Pay with Smile" running on Revolut's newly launched restaurant cash register system, Revolut Register. Revolut claims this is the UK's first facial recognition checkout system used in physical stores, with plans for a full rollout within the year.
The payment process is simple. Customers click "Pay with Smile" on the cash register terminal screen, and the system performs an identity verification similar to unlocking a phone with facial recognition, comparing the customer's face with the identity information submitted when opening their account. Once matched, the transfer is completed directly from account to account, without needing to use a card or phone.
The trial is limited in scope. From September 24 to 26, the trial is conducted at three Kiss the Hippo locations in Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and Soho, with plans to expand to all 12 locations within the year. Users need to actively enable this feature in the Revolut app settings, as it is not enabled by default and can be revoked at any time. Revolut states that facial recognition data is end-to-end encrypted, and merchants do not store any personal data.
The pricing for merchants is aggressive. Revolut charges 0% fees for facial recognition transactions, and the cash register terminal, Revolut Register, is sold at half price until December 31, 2026, priced at £349.5 plus VAT, down from £699. During the trial period, users earn triple points on each transaction. According to research cited by Revolut, independent restaurants in the UK spend an average of £875 per month on payment processing, while pubs spend over £950; terminal failures cause about £2,495 in revenue loss per year for stores; and more than half of UK residents have experienced checkout delays or failures.
Revolut's bet on offline payment acceptance is backed by its large scale. On March 11, 2026, it received a full banking license from the UK's Prudential Regulation Authority; it has approximately 65 million global users across 100 countries. Revenue is projected to be around £4.5 billion in 2025, a 46% year-on-year increase; loan volume is expected to reach £2.2 billion, a 120% increase. In November 2025, Revolut completed a transaction valuing the company at $75 billion through a secondary share transfer, with participation from Nvidia's venture capital arm. CEO Nik Storonsky stated that the company is "most likely" to go public within 2 to 3 years, with a preference for NASDAQ.
In terms of market mechanisms, Revolut's 0% fee effectively buys entry into offline payments. The facial recognition payment facilitates account-to-account transfers, bypassing the card networks of Visa and Mastercard, allowing merchants to save on card fees, while Revolut simultaneously controls both consumer accounts and merchant terminals, creating a closed loop. Funds flow from the traditional acquiring institutions and card networks' fee pools into Revolut's own account system. The beneficiaries are the profit-squeezed independent cafés and restaurants; the pressured parties are the acquiring chains of Visa and Mastercard, as well as cash register service providers like Square, SumUp, and Dojo that focus on the UK restaurant industry.
Additional data: The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has released specific guidelines regarding biometric technology. According to UK data protection law, facial data is classified as special category personal data, requiring explicit consent and a higher level of protection during processing.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Revolut has consistently followed an expansion strategy of "scale first, license later." Founded in 2015 by former Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse trader Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut started with free currency exchange and prepaid cards; it raised $800 million in 2021, achieving a valuation of $33 billion, with investors including SoftBank and Tiger Global. It has faced regulatory and audit crises: the accounting firm BDO issued a qualified opinion on its 2021 accounts, leading to a delay in its annual report; the application for a UK banking license took from 2021 to 2024 to obtain a transitional license with restrictions, and it wasn't until March 2026 that it fully materialized, taking about 5 years. The $75 billion valuation transaction in November 2025 also involved Nvidia's venture capital arm.
Capital and resources are shifting from "digital banking" to "offline payment infrastructure." Revolut has launched card readers, mobile payment options, and now the Register cash register system, and is piloting its own ATMs in Spain, gradually integrating the merchant side into its system. The motivation lies in revenue structure: the growth of currency exchange, subscriptions, and transaction fees has limits; only by controlling both the payer and payee can it escape the rules of card organizations, transforming payments into a proprietary closed-loop network, and further adding merchant loans, settlements, and data services. The 0% fee is essentially a subsidy to increase merchant installation volume.
Facial recognition payments are not new. In 2017, Alipay launched "Smile to Pay" at KFC stores in Hangzhou, followed by the rollout of facial recognition payment devices "Dragonfly" to supermarkets and convenience stores. In 2022, Mastercard piloted biometric checkout at the Brazilian supermarket chain St Marche; in 2024, JPMorgan announced a partnership with PopID to promote facial and palm payments among US retailers; Amazon has been promoting palm payment Amazon One in its stores since 2020. In Europe and the US, biometric payments are still in the pilot stage, with the biggest resistance being privacy regulations: Illinois' biometric privacy law has previously led Facebook to pay $650 million in a settlement; in 2024, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office ordered Serco Leisure to stop using facial recognition and fingerprints for employee attendance.
At its core, this represents a transfer of pricing power. The pricing power of offline payments is shifting from card organizations to platforms that simultaneously control user identity and merchant terminals. The mechanism is that credit and debit cards are essentially a combination of "identity credential + clearing channel," with Visa and Mastercard charging fees by controlling both; when a user's face becomes the identity credential and funds are transferred directly between Revolut's internal accounts, card organizations are bypassed in both identity and clearing stages. The UK's open banking framework legally enables account-to-account payments, and Revolut's banking license allows it to hold and transfer funds itself; these two conditions combined make the 0% fee commercially viable.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Whoever controls identity controls payment
A free cash register is most expensive at the entry point
Cards are substitutes for identity; faces are the essence of identity
Notes:
Trial period: Originally stated as "full rollout within the year," but UK media disclosed that the trial is from "September 24 to 26, with expansion to 12 stores within the year," so the newsflash specifies the latter.
Unverified background: The content in the AI interpretation comes from publicly available English information I have, and this round has not been verified online point by point; it is recommended to confirm again before release:
Revolut's audit and licensing history
JPMorgan's collaboration with PopID
Facebook's settlement amount
The Serco Leisure case