Amazon now offers to pay at checkout with your hand

What if the bank card was soon over? In any case, Amazon is seeking to innovate in the payment sector and wants to prepare its customers for alternative solutions in the near future. This is evidenced by its latest innovation entitled “Amazon One”, an application aimed at simplifying the process of paying easily with your hand. The American e-commerce giant has been working on a payment system based on biometrics since 2020.

This new service is already available in the giant's stores and in more than 150 points of sale (stadiums, airports, fitness centers, etc.). It is even possible to use this payment solution in 500 stores like Wholes Foods or Panera Bread. In total, the in-store palm recognition service has been used more than 8 million times, according to Amazon. Until now, to benefit from this service, you had to physically go to the store to validate your registration for the Amazon One service. Those who wanted to pay this way had to purchase a compatible device. With the new application, available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, registration is greatly facilitated.

The technology is based on artificial intelligence. Once connected to your Amazon account, simply take a photo of the palm of your hand to validate the registration, you can then use “Amazon One” at your convenience. In order to make the experience secure, the application was developed using generative AI. The latter analyzes the photographed palm and its underlying venous structure, then creates a unique digital and vector representation. Called a palm signature, it makes it possible to establish an identity match. During checkout, the image will be compared with that captured by the Amazon One device to finalize the registration.

“Our AI system is able to compare and match the palm and vein imagery captured by the Amazon One device with the photo from one's mobile phone,” the company said in this regard. Thanks to the palm signature recorded by the application, the risk of identity theft would therefore be zero. Amazon ensures that images taken via Amazon One are encrypted and sent to a secure domain in an AWS cloud. The new app “includes additional layers of security to detect identity theft attempts.” So there's no way to download them or save them to your phone.

It should be noted that the service mainly concerns the United States at present. In France, Ingenico, a national company, aims to use biometric data to facilitate the in-store payment process. Full-scale tests in French supermarkets should begin in the fall of 2024.