Korea’s Shinhan Card has begun testing Shinhan Face Pay, a face recognition payments system that it is developing with CU convenience stores operator BGF Retail “to identify customers who visit unmanned convenience stores in the future”.

For the pilot, “employees are able to make payments with the system at the cafeteria, coffee shop and CU convenience store inside the company’s headquarters building,” The Korea Times reports.

“Employees can use the system after registering their credit card information and taking photos of their faces by using facial recognition kiosks at the headquarters.

“If they register their information, they can make purchases without credit cards or mobile phones, just using their faces, at every store equipped with the payment system.”

“After running the system at its headquarters building on a trial run, Shinhan Card will allow its customers to use the system at universities and CU convenience stores nationwide,” the report adds.

U.S. survey shows lack of comfort with in-store facial recognition Shinhan Card 

The comfort level most American consumers have with face biometrics in retail settings, however, suggests similar systems might not prove popular in the U.S.

One in ten American adults say they ‘strongly agree’ that they are comfortable interacting with face biometrics in retail stores, and another 7 percent ‘agree,’ according to a survey from AI software developer Myplanet. More than half (52 percent) of respondents to the company’s ‘Robots Among Us’ survey say they ‘strongly disagree,’ and another 19 percent ‘disagree.’

The response numbers had only minor differences between age groups, genders, and regions.

The survey looks at consumer attitudes towards technologies for retail, advanced driver assistance, contact tracing and emerging interfaces.