An Alipay employee tests the Dragonfly, formerly known as 'Smile to Pay', at a convenience store in Hangzhou
Mobile payment giant Alipay announced a major upgrade to its 'Smile to Pay' service, aiming to make its facial recognition process more accessible to merchants and customers.
The new version, dubbed Dragonfly, is essentially a plug and play device that Alipay claims to be just one-tenth the size of a traditional self-service POS machine and can be placed in a backpack.
Compared with its previous generation, Dragonfly is adaptable to a wide array of terminals and does not require merchants to overhaul their existing Enterprise Resource Planning system. This lowers the threshold for adopting facial-scanning facilities, said Zhong Yao, general manager of Alipay's internet of things business.
The new gadget includes a 3D structured light camera to improve accuracy, and an upgraded processor to speed up payment times.
Tens of thousands of merchants across 300 cities in China offer Alipay's facial recognition payment. Zhong said the updated functions will be introduced to all Alipay self-service POS machines-including the KFC canteen in Hangzhou where the solution debuted a year ago.
A customer tries Alipay's facial recognition payment solution "Smile to Pay" at KFC's new KPRO restaurant in Hangzhou
When combined with certain hardware and software innovations, the solution can also effectively prevent forgery and ensure account safety, even if a user attempts to use still photos or recorded videos to abuse the system.
While preventing biometric spoofing, the system extracts the minimum amount of facial feature data necessary to verify the payment, the company said. The data is algorithmically encrypted to ensure user privacy and cannot be accessed by merchants.