Russian banks unveil "pay with your palm"
Not to be confused with "pay with a smile"
Last week, Russian government officials and representatives from fintech firms gathered for the annual Finopolis forum to discuss the future of Russian finance and banking.
The conference was held in the Sirius Federal Territory, located outside of Sochi, which operates under an “experimental legal regime”, allowing the municipality to implement “projects that serve as models for Russian regions”. Thanks to its special status, Sirius has plans to fast-track the use of robots, artificial intelligence, biometric technologies, and the digital ruble in shops and restaurants.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that Russia’s fintech leaders met in Sirius—described as “the future of the country”—to announce their latest breakthrough:
Commenting on the introduction of a biometric palm-payment system, Yulia Kopytova, a senior vice president at VTB Bank, said:
The technology of human identification using a person’s palm is already operating in other countries, for example, in China. Modern payment solutions are increasingly making the need to constantly carry not only cash or a card, but also a smartphone or other device, obsolete.
Authentication by biometric data allows you to make payments literally on the go: in public transport or in a coffee shop. The new option of accepting payment by palm is the next phase in the development of the payment market and bio-acquisition, another step towards improving the convenience and speed of service in various areas of trade and services.
Kommersant provided further details about this new payment method:
It is planned that in the future the palm will be added to the list of approved [biometric] options, which can be registered centrally together with the image of one’s face or a voice sample. The consumer will be able to choose the method of authentication or identification when making a payment or verifying his or her age. When adopting changes in a number of regulations, the original samples of the [palm] vein pattern will be stored in the Unified Biometric System (UBS) … This will ensure the safe use of the palm in biometric services.
Not to be outdone, Russia’s largest bank, Sber, announced its own roadmap for implementing palm-payments:
Sber began experimenting with this technology a decade ago. In 2015, the bank launched a pilot program, Ladoshki (“Little Palms”), that allowed schoolchildren to use biometrics to purchase meals: “To pay for lunch, the student puts his hand to the scanner on a special machine, selects a dish from the menu, and the money is automatically debited from the account attached to the biometrics.”
In the summer of 2023, Sber introduced “Pay with a Smile,” a biometric payment system that uses facial recognition to debit a user’s bank account.
Since then, the technology has been slowly but steadily integrated into Russian commerce.
Sber celebrated World Smile Day, held on the first Friday of October, with the goal of “devoting a day to smiles and spreading random acts of kindness”, by releasing new figures on Pay with a Smile’s adoption:
On World Smile Day, which is celebrated in 2025 on October 3, Sber calculated the number of purchases using the “Pay with a Smile” service in the Northwestern Federal District [a federal district with a combined population of 13.6 million, with St. Petersburg as its administrative center]. In the first nine months of this year, residents of the District made 17.7 million payments using biometrics. This is 8 times more than in the same period last year.
The leader of Pay with a Smile transactions is St. Petersburg (almost 6 million payments worth more than 5.2 billion rubles) and the Leningrad region (almost 2 million transactions totaling 1.5 billion rubles).
The District currently has 93,000 terminals that support “Pay with a Smile” technology.
Although users of the technology remain in the minority, the infrastructure for transitioning to biometric payment is already in place. The bank announced at the end of 2024 that it had already installed 1 million terminals across Russia.
“Several years ago the smartphone became the key to many services. And thanks to our technologies payments have transformed into a natural and instant gesture without the need to use a phone. Paying with a smile is part of a larger journey toward comfortable adoption of digital services, where they simplify rather than complicate life,” Sber said in an October 3 press release.
Heart breaking photo of the young one putting her hand to the machine for food.
Microchipping pets was the 1st step towards normalizing this travesty …