Verifone, the company lurking behind 300,000 Eftpos terminals across Australia, is betting that shoppers will leap at the chance to pay for their flat white by simply staring at a screen. The company is pushing biometric payments, marketing the innovation as 'pay for your coffee with a smile,' and offering the option to use your face or palm veins - yes, the veins in your hands - to complete Eftpos transactions.

Before you start practicing your best smile for the checkout, note that this won't hit your local café anytime soon. The technology requires cafes, restaurants, and retailers to upgrade their existing equipment, which, as anyone who's waited for a POS system update knows, could take a while.

Ben Hughes, Verifone's head of product for Asia Pacific, assures us that biometric payments will ease the 'friction' of slow transactions. 'If you go to a grocery store and you have to tap a loyalty card, plus tap a payment card, that's the kind of thing that now we'd be able to speed up,' he said. Because nothing says quick and easy like scanning your face and palm veins.

The company expects retailers to adopt the Verifone Victa devices - which launched last month - incrementally, as their current terminals reach their end of life. But Hughes noted that the technology needs buy-in from banks and other organizations that want to let customers pay with their biometrics. Biometrics are converted into tokens on the device, meaning Verifone doesn't store images, but merchants, banks, or digital wallet providers manage biometric profiles. Good news for the privacy-conscious: you can still use your card or phone if you're not keen on the whole 'glance at a screen' thing.

Hughes also said they've got measures to prevent 'spoofing' - because we've all seen how well facial verification has gone in other contexts. The company anticipates some pushback, but Paris Tsounias, Verifone's Asia Pacific president, compared it to the initial wariness over contactless payments. 'This is continuous evolution, if you remember when contactless first came out, the amount of negative press we actually got from that initiative,' Tsounias said. 'If you look at today, the stats, it's over 90% of transactions are all contactless. Now, no one even thinks of the risk around it.'

And the risk? Card-related fraud losses were $2.2bn in the 2024-2025 financial year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which didn't break down how much was contactless fraud. But hey, nearly 78% of people who reported card-related fraud didn't lose any money after reimbursements - so maybe we've just gotten used to it.

There's also been a shift away from physical cards. In March, the Reserve Bank of Australia reported that in 2025, tapping a card had declined from a peak of nearly 80% in 2022 to under 60%, with payments via phones or smartwatches rising to nearly 40%. So, waving your face at a terminal might just be the next logical - or entirely illogical - step.