Revolut has begun piloting Revolut Pay with Smile, which it describes as the UK's first in-store facial recognition checkout, letting enrolled customers pay by looking at a terminal, the company said on 24 September 2026.
The system checks a customer's face against the selfie ID checks completed when they first signed up to Revolut. It runs on Revolut Register, a new two-screen hospitality point-of-sale system with a built-in eSIM backup, and Revolut said transactions are authenticated with end-to-end encryption managed inside its app, with personal data never stored by merchants.
The pilot ran at Kiss the Hippo cafés in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho from 24 to 26 September, and customers opt in through the Revolut app. Pay with Smile transactions carry 0% processing fees for merchants, and Revolut is offering a merchant's first Register terminal at £349.50 plus VAT until 31 December 2026.
“By combining high-performance processing with facial recognition technology, we’ll replace outdated, fragmented tills with a hyper-efficient checkout experience designed to solve consumer and merchant pain points,” said Alex Codina, General Manager of Merchant Payments at Revolut Business.
Revolut said the pilot will open a new revenue stream for the company. It did not say when or whether the service will roll out more widely.