Paytm working on payments through facial recognition

No card swiping or QR code scanning, you can soon make payments for your purchases through your smile! Paytm, which pioneered quick response (QR) code payments in India, is working on a new technology to enable payments through facial recognition, the company’s founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma has revealed.

“I want to share this fact that at a check-in time, no swiping, no card punching, no phone QR scanning, nothing. Just walk in...putting the product and getting an invoice, yes, we have done this at the checkout,” Sharma said at an industry event.

Read | Shriram Finance, Paytm come together to augment digital financial services

The new payment system will be driven by facial recognition technology. Sharma said the company has already launched a pilot of the new technology but did not give further details about this possibly disruptive innovation.

“Sometime some technology is like so overwhelmingly shocking and miracle, you say should I be the one to launch it or if someone else does then I do,” he added.

PayTm was the first to pioneer QR codes in India, though it had been in use elsewhere. The success of its QR code-based payment system led to many including Google, Meta and PhonePe to make it the focus point of their payment systems.

On the possibility of the next disruption in the payments system, Sharma said it would be through artificial intelligence (AI). “This AGI, I call it advanced general intelligence, will be the age when computing will have compounding more information and ability than human mind,” he said.

On the impact of AI on business, Sharma said, “I think this will be the biggest compounding technology wave that I am going to see in my life cycle.”

Sharma, who is under pressure from shareholders to improve the company’s balance sheet after its disastrous listing on the stock exchanges in November 2021, said, “profit is not a milestone.”