FacePOS has joined the Central Bank of Ireland’s Innovation Sandbox Programme with a point-of-sale payment system that uses facial recognition and pay-by-account settlement, giving the Irish company a regulated testing setting as it pitches its product as an alternative to card-network checkout flows. Business Plus and TechCentral reported the company is one of the latest entrants to the sandbox, which is intended to support solutions aimed at safer and faster payments.
According to the reports, FacePOS is designed to move money directly from a consumer bank account to a merchant account at the point of sale rather than routing a purchase across conventional card rails. The company says its stack uses AI-enabled facial recognition with liveness detection, and that users are asked to blink and smile during verification. The outlets also said the system includes proximity verification and confirmation-of-payee checks as added controls around each transaction.
Biometric payment concepts have often struggled to move beyond closed pilots and headline demos. A sandbox run by the Irish central bank gives FacePOS a more concrete path to test operational, fraud and compliance assumptions than a standalone proof of concept, with banks, merchants and regulators able to assess whether the account-to-account model can work at retail scale.
The company’s timing places it inside a busier payments conversation. Earlier this week, SUNMI partnered with Wink and Qualcomm on biometric identity-driven payments, and earlier this year Clover and Wink moved multimodal biometric payments to the point of sale. In Ireland, financial institutions have already explored selfie biometrics for high-value mobile transactions in adjacent payment and authentication use cases.
Sources: Business Plus, TechCentral
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By Ali Nassar-Smith
