Revolut Turned On Face-Scan Payments in Three London Cafes…

Revolut began a public trial of facial-recognition payments on Thursday at three Kiss the Hippo coffee shops in London, running from September 24 to September 26. The Pay with Smile pilot is available in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho, and requires an existing Revolut account plus explicit opt-in.

The feature runs through Revolut Register, the company's new point-of-sale system for hospitality businesses. Revolut describes it as the UK's first in-store facial-recognition checkout, a company characterization rather than independently verified. At checkout, enrolled customers select Pay with Smile; the terminal captures a photo and compares it with the identity verification completed when the customer opened their Revolut account. A successful check authorizes an account-to-account payment without a phone, physical card or wallet. Customers can freeze the feature or revoke consent through the app.

Revolut's privacy notice says the checkout camera converts a customer's face into encrypted, single-use facial embeddings. Those embeddings are used once for the identity check and deleted immediately after. Revolut also performs a liveness check intended to detect attempts using photographs, videos or masks. A separate copy of the original checkout photograph is uploaded to Revolut's internal cloud systems for possible fraud investigations and payment disputes, and retained under its applicable data-retention policies. Merchants themselves do not store customers' personal data. Withdrawing consent deletes the biometric template and requires the customer to enroll again later.

On merchant economics, Revolut says Pay with Smile transactions carry 0% processing fees. It contrasts that with its estimate that independent UK venues spend an average of £875 a month on payment processing and infrastructure, rising above £950 for pubs and bars. The transactions run through Revolut Register, a modular two-screen till that combines payments, banking and hospitality operations, and includes an eSIM backup to keep terminals connected if a venue's main internet connection fails. The first Register terminal is offered to new and existing merchant customers for £349.50 plus VAT until December 31, 2026, half the stated retail price of £699 plus VAT. Revolut says Pay with Smile transactions will continue to carry 0% processing fees. Kiss the Hippo plans to extend the technology across all 12 of its cafes later this year after the three-location trial, while broader Register sales are due to roll out in due course.

The pilot also links several parts of Revolut's business: identity, banking, merchant hardware and payments are now joined at the physical checkout. Revolut has not announced plans to let customers authorize stock or crypto trades with facial recognition, and the London trial should not be read as evidence that such a feature is coming. The same customer account can also provide access to Revolut's investing and digital-asset products. Reports in July said Revolut X began allowing customers to interact with crypto trading through natural-language AI assistants such as Claude and Gemini, including market analysis, portfolio monitoring and order placement. On September 22, reports said Revolut plans to deploy 1,000 ATMs in Colombia and aims to rank among the country's three or four largest banks after securing its latest banking licence. The unanswered question is whether facial authorization remains confined to payments or eventually becomes another security layer for higher-risk actions inside the Revolut ecosystem.