In what could be a world’s first, Azbuka Vkusa, a major grocery chain with more than 170 outlets across Russia, and its partner Sberbank, the state-owned banking giant, have launched what they call a “perfect fingerprint payment service.”
The service is not entirely new: so far, the chain’s customers could use fingerprints to pay from their bank card account – but only in the outlet where they had their registered biometric details.
Since early January, the system has been extended to 20 supermarkets: in any of them, customers can settle their purchases by placing a finger on biometric POS terminals. The service will soon be made available in additional Azbuka Vkusa outlets, according to the company.
To sign up for the service, consumers must tie two fingerprints to a Visa or MasterCard bank card. A password is also required for security purposes.
According to the bank’s press service, Sberbank is the first and currently only bank in Russia to have introduced such a payment method, “be it from a customer experience or a technical point of view,” the press service told East-West Digital News.
In other countries, he added, some systems do allow people to make purchases using fingerprint biometrics, but their use is limited to a specific outlet – a store, a café or a restaurant.
“To our knowledge, there is no case yet in the world where such service has been widely deployed using a centralized database,” Sberbank told us.
This initiative comes as part of a broader Sberbank strategy to deploy biometric identification instruments in banking and payment processes.
“Not only does using biometrics in merchant acquiring let people make payments without physical carriers, such as cards, smartphones and other gadgets, it also paves the way for new innovative customer service scenarios in retail chains,” stated Svetlana Kirsanova, Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board of Sberbank and head of the Retail Business division.
Featured image inspired from Freepik
