Revolut Lets UK Shoppers "Pay with Smile." Will Its Trading App Be Next?

Revolut started a trial today (Thursday) that lets UK customers pay in stores by looking into a camera. The first merchant is London coffee chain Kiss the Hippo, and the service, called Pay with Smile, runs on the company's Revolut Register checkout terminal.

Merchants pay no processing fee on face payments, a waiver Revolut said is meant to help independent venues. When the company launched a point-of-sale iPad app for restaurants and cafes in March 2024, its card fees started at 0.8% plus 2 pence per transaction.

London's trading industry is coming home!

The company, whose customer base topped 68 million in 2025, is trying to sign up more business clients. Its app also sells stock and crypto trading.

Trial Runs in Three London Cafes Through Saturday

Customers have to switch the feature on in the Revolut app. It is off by default, and consent is confirmed again at the till.

At checkout, the terminal photographs the customer's face and matches it against the identity checks completed when the account was opened, the company said. The first sites are Kiss the Hippo cafes in Bloomsbury, Chelsea and Soho, open to the service until Saturday.

Alex Codina, general manager of merchant payments Payments One of the bases of mediums of exchange in the modern world, a payment constitutes the transfer of a legal currency or equivalent from one party in exchange for goods or services to another entity. The payments industry has become a fixture of modern commerce, though the players involved and means of exchange have dramatically shifted over time.In particular, a party making a payment is referred to as a payer, with the payee reflecting the individual or entity receiving the payment. Most commonl One of the bases of mediums of exchange in the modern world, a payment constitutes the transfer of a legal currency or equivalent from one party in exchange for goods or services to another entity. The payments industry has become a fixture of modern commerce, though the players involved and means of exchange have dramatically shifted over time.In particular, a party making a payment is referred to as a payer, with the payee reflecting the individual or entity receiving the payment. Most commonl Read this Term at Revolut Business, said the company is "replacing outdated, fragmented tills with a hyper-efficient checkout experience."

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The chain plans to offer Pay with Smile at all 12 of its locations later this year, when Revolut expects a full launch.

Palms, Faces and Earlier Pilots

Mastercard started its Biometric Checkout Program in Brazil in 2022 and took it to a Uruguayan supermarket chain in June 2024. Shoppers there register a palm scan and a payment card in the store, then pay by holding a hand over a sensor.

JPMorgan Chase tested palm and face payments in 2023, according to Bloomberg. Amazon let shoppers skip cashier lines in some of its stores and later scaled that offering back.

The pilot follows a data incident Revolut disclosed this month, in which an impersonator using a government agency email domain obtained customer information through fraudulent data requests. Revolut said it blocked the address and alerted regulators.

Merchants will not store or see customers' personal data, Revolut said. The privacy notice for the service, dated June 15, names Revolut Bank UK as the entity responsible for it.

The face scan taken at the till becomes single-use codes, deleted once the check is done, according to the notice. A copy of each original checkout photo goes to Revolut's internal cloud systems for fraud investigations and payment disputes.

That copy is held under the company's general retention policies. The notice names Revolut's cloud Cloud The cloud or cloud computing helps provides data and applications that can be accessed from nearly any location in the world so long as a stable Internet connection exists. Categorized into three cloud services, cloud computing is segmented into Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In terms of trading, the versatility of the cloud service allows retail traders the ability to test out new trading strategies, backtest pre-existing conc The cloud or cloud computing helps provides data and applications that can be accessed from nearly any location in the world so long as a stable Internet connection exists. Categorized into three cloud services, cloud computing is segmented into Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In terms of trading, the versatility of the cloud service allows retail traders the ability to test out new trading strategies, backtest pre-existing conc Read this Term provider as the only third party that receives the data.

Withdrawing consent deletes a customer's biometric template, while freezing the feature keeps it stored. A failed match sends the shopper to a card, phone or in-app payment, and a rejected customer can ask for a human review.

The Same App Also Sells Trading

Pay with Smile covers in-store payments on the Register terminal. Revolut has not said whether the face check will reach other products in its app, including investing.

Revolut's investing arm now competes with local brokers. The company said in September 2025 that it had about 590,000 investment accounts in Poland, second only to XTB.

Brokers have tried moving trading onto new devices before. IG offered trading from the Apple Watch in 2015 and withdrew it around 2017, and most broker watch apps today show alerts and quotes but cannot place orders.

UK regulators have studied how app design changes trading behavior. In a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) experiment with more than 9,000 people, push notifications raised the number of trades 11%, a finding FM Intelligence examined in its analysis of wrist-worn market alerts.