This was published 5 years ago
RoyalPay wants to bring facial recognition payments into mainstream
By Yan Zhuang
In a small 11th floor office in Melbourne’s CBD, Locky Ge is fine-tuning a machine that lets you pay for things with your face.
The founder and chief executive of fintech company RoyalPay has spent the past three years helping Australian retailers tap into the lucrative Chinese market by setting them up with digital payment channels, including WeChat Pay and Alipay. Now, he's aiming to introduce to Australia another technology popularised in China – facial recognition payments.
Locky Ge with RoyalPay's facial recognition payment machine. Credit: Simon Schluter
You stand in front of a tablet mounted on a fancy looking stand, look into a camera and blink for the system to recognise you.
It compares a captured image via a thousand data points to one you have pre-loaded into the system and, after determining a match, allows you to access your digital wallet stored in RoyalPay's system.
“Imagine you go to 7/11 store and forget your wallet and your phone is out of battery. You can use your face to be the key to connect with the payment system," he said.
RoyalPay, which acts as a middleman between Australian businesses and Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba, has invested "a few million dollars" into developing its software – while the machines are outsourced to Sunmi, the firm which makes Alipay's facial recognition machines.
It has already started rolling out trial models with vendors and expects the technology to be available at about 100 outlets in Sydney and Melbourne within the next six months.
RoyalPay says any data it collects from customers and businesses, including the facial recognition payment system, are stored in Australia. It does not provide data to Chinese authorities.
The fintech also has plans to introduce small loans of between $10,000 and $200,000.
Ge hopes that by using the three years' worth of data RoyalPay has collected from its 5 million users and 16,000 businesses, it will be able to provide high-quality credit assessments at low costs.
The company will launch subsidiary company R Finance Service by year-end and is in the process of applying for a restricted banking license, which it expects to be approved early next year.