[VIDEO] Pay for Food at KFC With Your Face
The newest development for China's cashless society will allow consumers to authorize payments on their online payment accounts just by showing their faces, thereby proving that beauty isn't the only thing that is skin deep.
Ant Financial and KFC have teamed up to allow Alipay clients to pay for their meals just by having their appearances scanned, debuting Friday at KFC's flagship KPro restaurant in Hangzhou.
After using a touchscreen to place their orders, customers are given the option to authorize their online payment through the store computer's facial recognition system. Provided that the customer has a working Alipay account with this feature enabled, the entire process takes mere seconds to complete once the customer's photograph is taken and a partial phone number is keyed in for confirmation.
As seen in a promotional video below, the facial recognition system is proven to be so accurate that it can recognize users even if they change their hair color or wear makeup, and even identify them in a crowded space.
https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=j05441ajkpa&width=500&height=375&auto=0
According to Ant Financial representatives, KFC is the first retail store in the world to offer this feature to their customers.
"Face-scanning online payment" also debuted as a feature at a Jingdong.com retail store on Thursday, described as having an accuracy of "99.9 percent."
KFC China has reinforced its position as the country's leading fast food retailer by employing cutting-edge technology at its restaurants. Last year, customers could place orders at KFC restaurants through a voice-operated robot called "Dumi" while the franchise had previously used facial recognition technology to predict the menu orders of its customers. KFC was even an early adopter of online payments, offering it to its customers as far back as 2015.
Online payment systems continue to expand in surprising ways that continue to make a number of services more convenient. Just last month, a new service began allowing high-speed rail passengers to order food from a number of restaurants (including KFC) and then receive delivery upon arriving at stations further up the rail route.
KFC China has been praised for its "wisdom of reform" that has made it an industry leader, but the fast food chain has also set itself apart by offering unconventional menu items.
Not only does Colonel Sanders offer traditional Chinese food like youtiao and congee, but also such things like the meat floss-coiffed Angry Burger, the "beautiful shrimp hat," Mongolian hot pot, pink and black hamburgers, and, proving that double-breasted fashions aren't out of style, the Chizza chicken/pizza hybrid.
As popular as KFC already is, we imagine that the convenience of this new technology may mean that your face will be the one that launched a thousand trips to the local franchise. But with this new development suggesting that we will be able to rely on our faces to make cash transactions in the future, it appears that our appearances will increasingly culminate in a "money shot."
Images: Miaopai.com, Weibo.com
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