The company behind 300,000 Eftpos terminals across Australia is hoping shoppers will want to make payments by simply glancing at a screen, as biometric technology pushes further into retailing.<\/p>\n
Verifone is selling the innovation as \u201cpay for your coffee with a smile\u201d, promising faster checkouts for people who opt in to having their face or palm-vein \u2013 the veins in people\u2019s hands \u2013 biometrics used for Eftpos transactions in Australia.<\/p>\n
It may take a long time before the technology is widely available, however, with cafes, restaurants and retailers required to upgrade their existing equipment.<\/p>\n
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n The head of product for Asia Pacific at Verifone, Ben Hughes, said the biometric payments will ease the \u201cfriction\u201d of slow transactions.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you go to a grocery store and you have to tap a loyalty card, plus tap a payment card, that\u2019s the kind of thing that now we\u2019d be able to speed up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He said the company was expecting retailers to deploy the Verifone Victa devices, which launched last month, incrementally as their current terminals reached their end of life.<\/p>\n Hughes said the technology will need buy-in from banks and other organisations that want to allow their customers to pay using biometrics.<\/p>\n Biometrics are converted into tokens on the device, he said, meaning images are not stored by Verifone, but biometric profiles are managed by merchants, banks or digital wallet providers.<\/p>\n Customers will be able to continue to use contactless payments on their card or phone.<\/p>\n Hughes said the company had measures in place to avoid users \u201cspoofing\u201d other people\u2019s hands or faces, as has been seen in the rollout of facial verification technology, similar to that used in age assurance technology for Australia\u2019s social media ban.<\/p>\n The company is expecting some pushback on the shift to biometrics, but compared it to initial wariness over contactless payments.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is continuous evolution, if you remember when contactless first came out, the amount of negative press we actually got from that initiative,\u201d Verifone\u2019s Asia Pacific president, Paris Tsounias, said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at today, the stats, it\u2019s over 90% of transactions are all contactless.<\/p>\n \u201cNow, no one even thinks of the risk around it. And we\u2019ve covered the risk through the multitude of different type of certifications and compliance.\u201d<\/p>\n Card-related fraud losses were $2.2bn in the 2024-2025 financial year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics<\/a>, which did not break down the number of incidents related to contactless payment fraud, when people unknowingly have their cards tapped for payment.<\/p>\n Part of the acceptance of contactless may have been that, according to the ABS, nearly 78% of people who reported card-related fraud did not lose any money after reimbursements.<\/p>\n There has also been a shift away from using physical cards.<\/p>\n