Revolut tests paying by face at the till — and offers merchants a zero per cent fee
From 24 to 26 September 2026 Revolut is trialling “Pay with Smile” in three London cafés of the Kiss the Hippo chain: customers pay by facial recognition on the new Revolut Register point-of-sale system, with no per-transaction fee for the merchant according to Revolut. The Register normally costs £699 plus VAT, half that until the end of the year.
What happened
From 24 to 26 September 2026 Revolut is testing a payment method based on facial recognition. “Pay with Smile” is running in three London branches of the café chain Kiss the Hippo (Bloomsbury, Chelsea, Soho), as The Caterer, Business Matters and Finextra reported on 24 September. Customers activate the feature in the Revolut app; at the till their face is matched against the selfie they submitted when opening their account. The technical basis is Revolut Register, a two-screen point-of-sale system with a built-in eSIM as a connectivity backup. For merchants Revolut quotes a 0 per cent per-transaction fee; the reports leave open whether this applies beyond the pilot. The Register costs £699 plus VAT, half that until 31 December 2026.
Who is affected
Nobody in Germany for now: the pilot and the offer concern the United Kingdom. It is worth watching for hospitality and fast-service counters whose bottleneck is the queue — and for anyone whose terminal contract bills per transaction.
Analysis
The face is not the real news. The news is that a neobank group bundles till, terminal, business account and consumer app into one device and sets the per-transaction fee to zero. That only works if both sides are Revolut customers: the guest pays from their Revolut account, the merchant takes the money on Revolut hardware. The margin then sits not in the merchant discount rate but in the account, the device and the customer relationship. For a merchant the numbers may well add up — they just need to know what they are paying with.
In Germany there is a second hurdle. Under the GDPR, facial data are specially protected biometric data, and the guest must have actively consented. Revolut stresses that merchants store no personal data; that relieves the business, but it does not change the fact that the question “What happens to my face?” gets asked at its counter. As long as only a small share of guests take part, revenue keeps running over the card. The fastest till today is the contactless card the guest is already holding.
What to do now
- Check your own terminal contract to see which share of the costs is per-transaction fees and which is rental, purchase or add-on services — only then can a zero per cent offer be compared at all.
- With any bundled offer of till, account and terminal, clarify how switching works and who owns the customer data.
- Only look seriously at biometrics once there is an offer for your own market with a data protection concept.