Face-scanning payment is well received but not popular. Why are consumers and merchants unwilling to use advanced technology?

I believe most people are familiar with mobile payment. The popularity of mobile payment in China is called the "New Four Great Inventions". With the rapid development of mobile payment products in China, face-scanning payment has become a new fashion. However, this fashionable payment method seems to be popular but not popular. What is the problem with face-scanning payment? Why do ordinary people dislike this high-tech product?

1. Facial recognition payment is popular but not popular

According to a report by Voice of China on October 9, a convenience store in Beijing installed a facial recognition payment device in the first half of this year, but few people have used it. The owner said: "The device was installed in April and May of the first half of the year, but customers rarely use it. The usage rate is not high, because facial recognition payment also requires opening the phone to receive the verification code, so it is more direct and convenient to scan the QR code directly." The reporter randomly interviewed several consumers, and most of them said that they rarely use facial recognition payment devices and expressed concerns about the security of facial recognition payment.

After the National Day, the topic #Facial payment risks# suddenly became a hot search on Weibo, attracting widespread attention from the market. According to Beijing Daily, since the commercialization of facial payment in 2018, Alipay and WeChat Pay have successively launched facial payment devices "Dragonfly" and "Frog". On September 24, Alipay announced that it would change the 3 billion yuan market facial payment subsidy released in April this year to "unlimited investment". This policy was widely interpreted by the industry as a response to the online rumor of WeChat's 10 billion yuan subsidy for facial payment. The reporter noticed that on major social platforms, many service providers have used the 10 billion yuan subsidy for facial payment by the two giants Alipay and WeChat as a promotional gimmick.

Currently, Alipay explains its latest announced “unlimited investment” policy for face-scanning payment as more than just subsidies. “Subsidies are part of it, but it also includes marketing expenses, research and development expenses, and investment plans for companies with technological capabilities.” WeChat Pay said that subsidies for face-scanning payment service providers will mainly be based on rewards for hardware equipment combined with the number of face-scanning payments.

On the one hand, Alipay and WeChat are pushing facial recognition payment at all costs, but on the other hand, most people are reluctant to use it. What is the reason?

2. Why is facial recognition payment not popular?

In fact, it is not surprising that facial recognition payment is not welcomed. We might as well look at this from multiple angles:

First of all, the development of the payment industry must be getting cheaper and cheaper. From the perspective of the development of the payment industry, we can see that the currency used by humans has evolved from the earliest gold, silver and square-holed copper coins to the current cash banknotes, then from cash banknotes to checks and bank cards, and finally from bank cards to the current mobile payments. In fact, a careful study of the laws behind this development process will reveal that payment will definitely develop in the direction of lower and lower costs. Compared with gold, silver and copper coins, the convenience of use represented by paper money far exceeds that of metal money, thus driving the circulation of commodity economy around the world, and the world market began to emerge. After the evolution of paper money into electronic money represented by bank cards, the electronicization of money driven by bank cards directly reduced the transaction cost of paper money by two-thirds, thereby driving the rapid development of economic globalization.

Mobile payment, on the other hand, uses the payment network built by bank cards to further virtualize accounts, realizing the transformation of accounts from tangible physical cards to intangible mobile payment accounts. The cost of mobile payment has been further reduced, and a QR code printed on an A4 paper can realize mobile payment. This almost zero cost has made mobile payment popular quickly. At the same time, mobile payment has further simplified the previous professional POS machine into a barcode scanning gun that is essential for almost all cash registers, thus turning the machine from specialized to universal. Either you pick up a mobile phone or a barcode scanning gun to complete the entire payment process. Under such circumstances, this sufficiently low-cost payment method can achieve a comprehensive cross-era evolution of payment.

But if we apply this logic to face-scanning payment, we will find that the problem is that face-scanning payment has become a completely opposite thing. The cost of face-scanning payment can be lower, because our body organs are not only innate, but also do not require mobile phones, or even A4 paper. But in fact, face-scanning payment not only abandons the originally simplified mobile phones and barcode scanners, but also installs expensive special machines. The existence of such machines will inevitably make the cost of face-scanning higher and higher. Such a counter-logical approach will inevitably lead to difficulties in promotion. No one is willing to make a simplified payment method more complicated.

Secondly, the user experience of face-scanning payment is not good. Face-scanning payment is actually a very strange payment method. The original purpose of face-scanning payment was to reduce the use of mobile phones, so that I could pay when I went out alone without bringing anything. However, the actual operation process is: when you go to a face-scanning terminal, you not only need to scan your face but also enter your mobile phone number, and sometimes even need to cross-send SMS verification. Although this cross-authentication and multiple authentication mode guarantees a certain degree of security, it actually loses the advantages of face-scanning payment, and ultimately leads to a poor user experience. User experience can be said to be the foundation of mobile payment. A mobile payment product with poor user experience will inevitably find it difficult to gain user recognition.

Third, the risks of face-scanning payment are hard to trust. In fact, the biggest problem with face-scanning payment is the risk-reassurance problem. Here it is a risk-reassurance problem rather than a risk problem. Why is it a risk-reassurance problem? The core reason is that compared with biometric payment methods such as face-scanning payment, the risk of QR code payment may be greater. However, after long-term use, the final result shows that although static QR codes have certain risks, the risks of dynamic QR codes are basically controllable. That is why most of the time we recommend that everyone open their own QR codes and let others scan them, rather than scanning the QR codes posted by others.

In terms of biometrics, especially face-scanning payment, the risks are smaller than those of QR codes, but the problem is that face-scanning payment requires the submission of a large amount of biometric information such as the face. Once this information is used by criminals, it is not only an account security issue, but also a privacy protection issue. If a large amount of personal user privacy is uploaded to the server of a private institution, most people will actually find it difficult to feel at ease. Therefore, the risk assurance issue has become the main source of the face-scanning payment problem.

Overall, although face-scanning payment looks good, it is still some distance away from being truly fully implemented. If the cost issues, user experience issues, and user peace of mind issues of face-scanning payment are not fundamentally resolved, it will be very difficult to popularize face-scanning payment.