Samsung's facial recognition tech not yet ready for mobile payments

Samsung facial recognition technology is not yet ready to make mobile payment and would take another four years to solely begin the service, according to a report by The Korea Herald.

“In order for facial recognition to be solely used for financial transactions, it would take more than four years considering the current camera and deep learning technology levels,” a source from Samsung told The Korea Herald.
Samsung introduced the technology in its latest flagship Galaxy S8 as a new biometric feature along with the iris scanner.

Samsung has been using fingerprint sensor for its mobile payment service Samsung Pay for Galaxy S6 and iris scanner for the Galaxy S8. But the facial recognition technology is yet to be considered for financial transactions.

The Galaxy S8 adopts three biometric technologies – iris scanner, facial recognition and fingerprint sensor– to unlock the smartphone. However, among all the three technologies, facial recognition is noted to be the most convenient. Unlike, iris scanner and fingerprint sensor, a user need not require positioning his/her eyes in a small section of a screen or moving finger to locate the sensor.

However, how much convenient the facial recognition technology would be Samsung admitted it is less secure in comparison to iris scanner and fingerprint sensor and that’s why Samsung termed the use of facial recognition technology for financial transaction as “meaningless.”

A spokesperson from the company told Korea Herald, “We do not need to use facial recognition for mobile financial transactions because there are already high-level biometric technologies such as iris and fingerprint recognition. The question that when it will be used is meaningless.”