Pay-by-Face Payments Gain Momentum As South Korea Now Smiles to Spend

Author: admin | 30 Jul 2025

Facial recognition payments, or “pay-by-face,” are becoming more popular in Korea as fintech companies bring this technology from online use into physical stores. Shinhan Card first introduced it in 2019, but many people were slow to adopt it because they had to register in person and were unsure about the technology.

South Korea had been associated with a fintech payment market characterized by technological innovations last year, which saw the entry of big players such as Naver Pay and Toss. Both are digital payment systems that have branched out into face recognition services, cultivating a technical user base by registering their faces in-app. 

Naver Pay has started to deploy its system on the campuses of universities and is considering deploying its own payment terminals by the end of the year. Toss removed a major obstacle to adoption by providing its own facial recognition device on terminals free of charge to merchants, to facilitate adoption. 

At the moment, there are more than 160,000 Toss terminals, and the number of stores exceeds 20,000. This will incorporate large chain convenience stores and petrol stations to support facial-based payment capabilities, which have already been implemented to make facial payments.

The facial biometric payment platform in South Korea is gradually gaining traction with a great number of players. The newest operator to join is Lotte Card, which has been given clearance to introduce a biometric payment system at Korea Airports Corp. arenas.

Nonetheless, there are threats to growth. The strong privacy regulations do not allow the sharing of facial recognition information between platforms, which makes it challenging to create interoperability between various payment services. It is unlikely that merchants will install several terminals that form a competitive winner-takes-all environment.

Privacy issues continue to be a big issue with facial recognition payments. Facial data can not be changed in case it is leaked, unlike passwords. A breach is thus able to expose people to identity theft or impersonation. Regulators caution that these weaknesses can lead to legal responsibility on the part of businesses, and these are forcing providers to tighten security and trustworthiness.

Experts anticipate that more individuals will use pay-by-face, as the AI used to implement this technology in stores and restaurants is advanced and makes it convenient and safe. This is also an ideal trend with Koreans as consumers because of their comfort with no-touch payments. Here are the global examples of the countries that implemented the system of pay-by-face:

• China was the first to implement facial-recognition payment in 2017 when Alipay launched Smile to Pay at fast-food restaurants in Hangzhou. Since then, it has grown to more than 1,000 cities with over a million terminals in retail settings, transit, and banking.
• In the middle of the year 2023, Sberbank released Smile to Pay in Russia. As of early 2025, it has also processed 37.5 payments in big cities across the country (such as Moscow and St. Petersburg).
• Japan has begun using facial payment in its subways, as it was first used in Kumamoto in December 2023. They also demonstrated how such payments can be implemented in stores with the help of NEC systems at the Expo 2025 in Osaka.