SmilePay introduces face recognition for payment in Azerbaijan

Biometric payments through face, powered by SmilePay, are available now at Bravo Supermarket, one of the two largest food retailers in the country. Araz Supermarket, another major food retailer, is planning to roll out face recognition payment later this year.

Traditional payments have long been “knocked out” of the game. Undoubtedly, the financial markets today are undergoing a process of structural change and the importance of biometric technologies is growing rapidly.
Considering these dynamics in the payment space, SmilePay introduced a Facial Recognition Payment for Retail & eCommerce. With the SmilePay app, which uses the most advanced facial recognition technology, everyday grocery store goers will enjoy a device-free and cashless payments. The seamless checkout experience using end-to-end encryption is fast and secure. SmilePay has taken this road to reduce dependence on credit cards, cash and devices.
SmilePay received an investment from the biggest acquirer bank in Azerbaijan, PASHA Bank and got partnership from the two largest grocery store chains in the country, Bravo and Araz Supermarkets. In a month since the project launch, more than 3,000 transactions have been completed from 418 users. Total number of users that downloaded and registered in the app is more than 2,000.
“Our facial recognition payment system has nearly absolute precision in ideal conditions, reaching a 99.99% accuracy and less than 0.5 seconds detection speed,” said Seymur Rasulov, CEO at SmilePay.
Retail and eCommerce companies will be able to cooperate with SmilePay using its services/software as a solution (SaaS) or acquire the complete platform (PaaS) depending on the preference of the store. This flexibility brings new opportunities for store managements to use the seamless payment solution at regular POS as well as on the self-checkout stations.

Recently, the team behind SmilePay implemented MasterPass from Mastercard for secure card storage and tokenization, and became the first fintech startup from Azerbaijan and one of 8 innovative projects globally to join the Mastercard Start Path Accelerator program.
SmilePay has ambitious expansion plans to expand to Europe, Southeast Asia and Middle East till 2023.

“We are currently exploring partnerships and other options to expand to Thailand, UAE, Spain, France, Germany and Lithuania,” said Seymur Rasulov.
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Founded in 2021 in Baku, Azerbaijan, SmilePay attracted $300K investment from PASHA Bank as the largest acquirer bank and has been one of top 8 startups to be selected by Mastercard globally for the Start Path accelerator program.

SmilePay has been ranked among the top 100 innovative startups in the CEE Startup Challenge, the largest online competition for regional startups in Central and Eastern Europe.

https://smilepay.az/