Revolut Pay with Smile: UK’s First Facial Recognition Checkout Launches with 0% Merchant Fees

The barista taps the screen, the camera wakes, and I stand there intently staring at the screen for between 5-6 seconds, before a drink is delivered into my hand. No phone, no card, no wallet. It is quick, slick and more streamlined than I expected, and the strangest thing about it is how fluid it feels.

This is Revolut Pay with Smile, which the company describes as the UK's first in-store facial recognition checkout. It is in initial rollout at three Kiss the Hippo cafés, in Bloomsbury, Soho and Chelsea, until 26 September, with a £1 speciality coffee menu and triple RevPoints for anyone who is willing to give it a go. Merchants can sign up from today, with a full rollout expected later this year and Kiss the Hippo planning to extend it across all 12 of its sites.

The system runs on Revolut Register, a new two-screen point-of-sale terminal, and carries 0% processing fees on every Pay with Smile transaction. The terminal sells at £349.50 plus VAT until the end of 2026, half its £699 recommended price.

Customers opt in through the Revolut app. There is no fresh enrolment to complete, because the system matches the face at the till against the selfie ID check the customer completed when they first signed up to Revolut, the same image checked against their ID. That reference template is held on Revolut's side for as long as the customer has the app, and using it to pay requires separate consent when opting in to Pay with Smile.

Jesús Romo-Morales, Revolut's head of in-person payments, said face recognition was chosen over fingerprint for a number of reasons, including security grounds. Hats, sunglasses and heavy facial hair will defeat it, at which point the terminal reverts back to verification via pin or the Revolut App.

The obvious objection to paying with your face is that faces are not unique to the degree cards and PINs are. Revolut's answer is that a near match is not a match. Where the face at the till does not line up completely with the stored template, or where spending behaviour looks unusual, the customer is asked to confirm via their phone, limiting the potential damage that a nefarious identical twin could inflict. 

The same logic governs size and frequency. Transactions are capped at around £200, applied with some nuance across repeat purchases rather than as a flat ceiling, which limits what anyone could take before the system asks for something only the account holder has. Masks are handled in hardware, with infrared in the camera used to distinguish a face from a facsimile of one. The effect is a system that is deliberately quick to doubt itself: the convenience holds for a flat white, and the friction returns the moment the money or the pattern stops looking ordinary.

The face-scanning is a neat trick, and it works well. The pricing is the really transformational bit-and Revolut has a straightforward answer for how it can charge nothing. Pay with Smile transactions run bank to bank on Revolut's own rails, with no intermediaries in the chain, so there is no interchange to pass on. Romo-Morales said the 0% rate has no planned change for at least a year.

Beyond that, the revenue story is a little unclear. Revolut charges for the hardware, though not much, and may charge for the software running on it at some point. The more telling idea is discoverability: Romo-Morales pointed to the app steering users in an unfamiliar city towards affiliated venues, which describes a merchant directory with a payments layer rather than a payments processor.

Kiss the Hippo's pitch is the mirror image. Cutting-edge checkout technology usually reaches chains first, because chains can absorb contracts, licensing and percentage fees. Here there are none of the three, which Kiss The Hippo argued puts it within reach of independents. 

Revolut's own research, conducted by Censuswide, puts independent venue spending on processing and infrastructure at an average of £875 a month, rising above £950 for pubs and bars, with terminal outages costing £2,495 a year in lost revenue. Register answers the second of those with an eSIM backup that keeps the till online when the connection drops, which may prove the more useful of the two features on a wet Tuesday morning.

Three days, three cafés and a £1 coffee is a pilot with a marketing budget behind it. What makes it worth watching is not the face scanning, which several firms have tried, but the rails underneath. If Revolut can genuinely take the intermediaries out of an in-person transaction, the fee it charges becomes a choice rather than a constraint. For now the choice is zero, and Revolut has committed to that for at least a year.